A Toast to Gorby

Barely four years ago, a time which now seems ever distant, I wrote a column upholding - or perhaps condemning - the Soviet Union's first leader Vladimir Lenin as one of the greats of the 20th century. It is an era now come to a peculiarly end, almost a century later, with the death of the man whose tutelage marked the final years of the Soviet empire.  

On Martyrdom and Beards

 

There are, amongst the names frequently mentioned as influencing Putin's drive, or bid, for control of Eastern Europe and the (re)establishment of a sphere guaranteeing this independence, one which is names quantitatively often but also with a special zeal. His name, as you will know, is Dugin, and his brain is - according to the proverbial statement - Putin's own. I cannot but shrink in disbelief, or at least frown, and move to a distance away from the proverbial speaker, not so much because Dugin's lack of enthusiasm as his laudable idealism and tendency towards the abstract. While hard-fact pragmatic can-do men can also be idealogical, such as Bannon, and the Rasputins of the world change its course from time to time, Dugin has that diabolical quality of being a man who actually believes in what he is saying, is thinking.