a leader who reacts to his citizens uniting in the streets by making it illegal to unite in the streets is in for a bad time and should know it.

I'll agree, but it makes me curious as to why, if there are such clear examples of why this is a bad idea, does this choice continue to be made? That strikes me as something that might have a psychological mechanism. As for the other things you've written about Venezuela and Ukraine, I didn't see much of that and was really responding to the comment in question. I suppose that I could have (should have?) looked further. That's perhaps a fault of how people interact though; when we interact with each other, we can't know all the other things that lead up to the interaction. So again, I don't mean to devalue anything else you've done and if it seemed that way, then I apologize.

Leadership (much less governance) is a strange thing. For many roles in society and especially for very important roles, there is extensive training and vetting of qualifications. I suppose in the US that there are things in place that act as a vetting process, like the ability to fund raise or finance a campaign and to marshal popular support, but where are prospective governmental leaders to go to learn how to govern, except in the real world? A student government or mock-government necessarily falls short, because the stakes aren't real.

The psychology of leadership and governance is something I'm very interested to learn more about. As for Putin, it makes me wonder who is waiting in the wings for when Putin is finally out of the political picture. I doubt that running any country is "easy" but a leading a vast country with such a remarkable political past (not to mention leading it well) has to at the very least, be daunting. I'd love to be able to get a look at the inner workings of various governments and be able to contrast that view with how they look from where I sit now.