The mysterious novelist who foresaw Putin’s Russia – and then came to symbolise its moral decay

into the postmodern vacuum new ideas began to creep, with the intention of providing explanations and meanings of their own. It was inevitable that some pitch would be made for the deserted ground.

of two Russian figures—Vladimir Lenin and the much lesser known Vladislav Surkov, a former postmodernist theater director who’s been described as “Putin’s Rasputin” and the Kremlin’s propaganda puppet master—informs many of the troubling political and social dynamics at work in the post-truth era.

in his final death-driven surge towards ‘the big picture’.

The goal of politics is to make us children. The more heinous the system the more this is true.