The tape is rumored to have been delivered personally to the head of RTR by “a man who looked like the head of the FSB,” who at the time was none other than Vladimir Putin.

Soon afterward, on April 7, 1999, Putin went on TV himself to claim the tape authentic—that the “man who looked like” Skuratov was indeed Skuratov—and called not only for Skuratov’s resignation, but for a more robust criminal investigation.

All this is noteworthy not only because this was one of Putin’s key steps toward the presidential throne, but because this dark and convoluted chapter of contemporary Russian history is also, however amazingly, now relevant reading for understanding contemporary American history. Now that Buzzfeed has released a dossier compiled by a private intelligence company, with unverified allegations that the FSB has a video of Donald Trump with prostitutes in the Moscow Ritz Carlton in 2013, America has entered uniquely Russian territory. (I should add that I, like many other journalists, was approached over the summer with the story of the prostitutes and could not verify it.)

In any case, welcome to the world of kompromat, America.

After years of covering and reporting from Russia, it is bizarre to me that this term has surfaced in U.S. domestic politics, but here we are. Kompromat is a Russian squishing together of two words: “compromising material,” which Americans refer to as “blackmail.” But kompromat is different in that it is often coupled with what is called “black PR”—for example, Dorenko showing the video on his popular television show, artfully stringing it out, and bashing his viewers over the head with questions like, “Is lying something inherent to prosecutors or is it something unusual?” Or using Wikileaks and Kremlin-owned news sites to pound Hillary Clinton using the hacked contents of the DNC servers or John Podesta’s emails.

In Skuratov’s case, the kompromat-black PR combination proved a killer one-two punch, one that helped change the political trajectory of post-Soviet Russia and helped make Putin president in 2000. In April 1999, Skuratov was fired by Yeltsin’s presidential fiat, and Skuratov’s political patron, Yevgeni Primakov—who had pushed for the Swiss bribery investigation, but was also often and openly referred to by Yeltsin as his successor—was knocked out of the running by Putin and his political patrons. It also allowed Putin to show loyalty to the deeply corrupt Yeltsin family, and eventually resulted in the agreement at the foundation of the transfer of power to Putin: don’t investigate The Family, as Yeltsin and his daughter and son-in-law were known.

Between then and whatever tape the FSB may or may not have of a man who may or may not look like Donald Trump, Putin and the FSB have perfected the art of kompromat. And they haven’t hesitated to use it.