The Russian word ‘derzhavnost’ is usually translated as ‘great power status’, but the real meaning is closer to the gangland concept of ‘respect’. The word was beyond the reach of my feeble Russian vocabulary until I heard it about twenty times in twenty minutes while interviewing an ultranationalist ideologue called Aleksandr Dugin about twenty years ago.
He was then popularly known as ‘Putin’s brain’, although his role was always to
