On the Idea Generation issue– hard for me to say exactly where these came from. I avidly drew on every aspect of intelligence I could; overall roots are more 20th century than they are 19th, though, and WWII/Cold War intelligence operations were probably the most influential. One really good book you might check out is Alan Furst’s DARK STAR, set in the late 1930s/early 1940s. Another one that was hugely influential is James Ellroy’s AMERICAN TABLOID (I could never get into his crime fiction, but his political noir is nothing short of staggering).

Been reading up on Russian history lately; and your long term projections don’t seem so off; although there are questions about the feasibillity of said regime. The US suppported Czarist Russia back during the struggle with France and Britain over the Crimea; but were more circumspect on the more authoritarian Czar Alexander 111, whose advisors Pobustdenev (the real version of what people imagined Ashcroft to be) & Count Tolstoy; both satirized by Leo Tolstoy, turned the country into a real police state, They created the Okhrana , and waged war against the narodniki and later the SR. Both have more than some similarity with both the Jaguars and the Autumn Rain ; in their nihilism That agency even employed double agents like Azef who assasinated Phehve and Bogrov against Stolypin ; did you get any ideas about the Manlishi and the Praetorians from there? We are clearly more in a Nicholas 1/Alexander 111/Nicholas 11 phase under Putin/ Medyevev/
Shamanov? ; than the more reformist Alexander 11, the atypical ‘good czar; which was the Gorbachev and first part of Yeltsin. The writings of the late Anna Politskovskaya and the still living Steve Levine and Andrew Meier illustrate the point.