More than a month after NSA leaker Edward Snowden landed in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, Russia has finally granted him yearlong asylum, and it seems these kinds of cold-war-era swipes are back -- but in a subtler way.

There are a few likely reasons Putin chose to shelter Snowden in the end, even after going out of his way to seem reluctant. First, the Snowden saga offers an irresistible chance to poke Obama in the eye and make it seem as though Russia would never yield to U.S. pleas or threats. ("It's an easy way to look like a world leader and to prove that the U.S. doesn't always get its way," Cory Welt, a professor of Eurasian studies at George Washington University, told me.) Second, it means Russian authorities can probe Snowden for even further disclosures about the National Security Agency -- something many suspect they began doing as soon as Snowden landed at Sheremetyevo. And last but not least, it allows the Kremlin a moment of whataboutism, a favorite, Soviet-era appeal to hypocrisy: Russia is not that bad, you see, because other countries have also committed various misdeeds, and what about those?

To be clear: It's not that the other party in this situation is beyond reproach -- Russia obviously was right to denounce American racism -- just that the attempt to deflect blame consists of blaming the opponent for something unrelated.

As the Monitor article notes, the tactic got its start in Soviet times, when Western cracks about the USSR would be met with retorts from Moscow along the lines of, "What about America, where they lynch black people?!"

The strategy had countless uses, like in foreign affairs:

"You'd challenge a Kremlin official with the abuses carried out by the Red Army in Afghanistan, for example, and he'd pause for a moment, shuffle uncomfortably, and then say... 'what about what the Americans are doing in Nicaragua?'" Russia-watcher Mark Chapman once wrote.

Like many other Soviet traditions, whataboutism has resurfaced in the Putin era.

When Guardian correspondent Miriam Elder wrote a column about the Kafkaesque Russian dry-cleaning process, a Putin spokesman responded:

"I am sorry to hear about Miriam Elder's experience at the dry cleaners, in which she lost her receipt and so had an hour of her time 'stolen' in providing the necessary personal details to retrieve her woollies," Peskov wrote in a letter to this newspaper. "But I am also amazed that this anecdote can be passed off as any sort of insight into the state of Russia today." ... "Let me remind British readers of the thousands of hours that are 'stolen' from Russian citizens when they complete the UK's visa application forms, which are a whopping 10 pages. The time, money, effort and inconvenience that Russians face in obtaining UK visas put Ms. Elder's ordeal into perspective."

In 2008, the Economist's Edward Lucas captured the practice perfectly when he described his appearance on a Russian TV show:

How could the West criticize Russia for saber-rattling, asked the eloquent Aleksei Pushkov, when America and its allies had not just rattled sabers, but actually used them in Iraq. And so on and so forth.

More recently, when other Western nations condemned Putin's crackdown on protesters, Kremlin officials were ready with: "What about the United Kingdom? Breaking the law during public gatherings there could lead to fine of 5,800 pounds sterling or even prison."