A decade ago, many of the most influential thinkers in today’s Russia were in the intellectual wilderness. While some sat in pamphlet-littered basements churning out copies of underground ultra-rightwing newspapers with names such as Lightning and Russian Order, others were in jail following failed coups in 1991 and 1993 against the pro-western “occupation regimes” of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.

Russia’s intellectual journey since then has been dizzying, as the radical has become mainstream and the hardline position increasingly moderate-sounding, with what were the margins emerging as the political centre.