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In a meeting with the ambassador Georgiy Zinoviev, South Korea's vice-foreign minister Kim Hong-kyun denounced the move and warned that Seoul will "respond with all measures available".

Mr Zinoviev said he would relay the concerns, but stressed that the cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang is "within the framework of international law".

The autocrat takes sadistic pleasure in the torment and humiliation of his enemies, as Trump did when he watched the mob storm the capital on Jan. 6, or, in a more extreme form, as Joseph Stalin did when he doubled over in laughter as his underlings acted out the desperate pleading for his life by the condemned Grigori Zinoviev, once one of the most influential figures in the Soviet leadership and the chairman of the Communist International, on the way to his execution in 1926.

There’s the rise, which is usually assisted by self-deluding opportunists who believe that they can restrain the ascendant authoritarian figure; old Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, countering Trotsky, played just as significant a role in Stalin’s ascent, largely through abstention, as the respectable conservative Franz von Papen did in Hitler’s.

At the conclusion of the trial of two veteran Party leaders, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, the state prosecutor general, Andrey Vyshinsky, denounced the defendants with florid Stalinist rhetoric: “These mad dogs of capitalism tried to tear limb from limb the best of the best of our Soviet land. . . . I demand that these dogs gone mad should be shot—every one of them!”