When I was in graduate school I read all of the literature on how European revolutionary doctrine had destabilized Russia in the late 19th century. This process culminated with the Bolsheviks—animated by the crude doctrine of Marxism-Leninism—unleashing hell on the country. The bibliography is vast, and I suspect that few Americans or Englishmen alive today have read many of these books.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin was a young man, he participated in this corrupt system as an intelligence agent stationed in Dresden between 1985 and 1990, where he apparently worked with the Stasi—the German Democratic Republic's horrible secret police.

However, there are many indications that, at some point after 1991—or perhaps even during his KGB service—he had something akin to a Damascene Moment in which he saw that the secular state religion he served was corrupt.