I said that it's not a communist ideology anymore. There is a kind of theory to it, though. Putinism is an odd blend of nationalism. Putin himself has sought, for example, to bring back some old Soviet symbols, not necessarily communist symbols, but he tries to remind the Russians of great moments in Russian and Soviet history. So he speaks of the great triumph of the Second World War. He talks about the invasion of the Baltic States as something that was militarily necessary and we needed to do at the time. He brings up moments of the past as a way of reminding everybody that Russia was once a great imperial power, and at the same time, increasingly, he and the rest of the Russian political leadership have become very clearly - and I don't want to use the word "bitterly," because they are enjoying it - but very anti-American and anti-Western. They're setting themselves up as a kind of alternative to the West and an alternative power centre to the United States.

One of the interesting things about Putinism is that it's becoming a model for other countries. I mean, it's actually a form of government, this kind of managed democracy - the use of democratic rhetoric and fake parties and fake institutions has been adopted by Venezuela. The Iranians are very interested in it. [Consider] the recent Holocaust conference in Iran. The Iranian leader called, from all over the world, all kinds of Holocaust deniers and gave them a platform in Iran. And what he said afterwards was, "Look, here in Iran we have freedom. Here we have academic freedom. We can denounce the Holocaust and say that it didn't exist because this is our way of freedom."

The other reason to pay attention to Russia is that Russia is also interested in exporting this system to the countries that surround it. We saw that initially, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the immediate inner circle of Soviet Ukraine and Belarussia and Central Asia. Immediately after the fall of communism, many of those countries were simply taken over by former communists, and the same people stayed in charge. And that suited the Russians very well, because those people were well connected in Moscow and they were controllable.