Throughout his presidency, Putin repeatedly invoked Russia as an ancient, powerful, and divinely ordained state going back a thousand years, a civilization separate from the West, neither Communist nor a western liberal democracy. That message echoes Solzhenitsyn’s famous commencement address at Harvard in 1978: “Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking.