FOR much of post-Soviet history Russia was seen as an outlier whose politics would inevitably move towards those of the West. After the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in America, it appears the opposite is taking place: the style of politics practised by Vladimir Putin’s regime is working its way westward.

From the Mediterranean to the Pacific, Mr Putin is hailed as an example by nationalists, populists and dictators. “My favourite hero is Putin,” said Rodrigo Duterte, the brutal president of the Philippines. Mr Trump called Mr Putin “a leader far more than our president.” In Italy Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement took Mr Putin’s side against the West, and the anti-immigrant Northern League, led by Matteo Salvini, has enthused about his Russia. “No clandestine immigrants, no squeegee merchants and no Roma encampments [in Moscow],” tweeted Mr Salvini during a visit in 2014.

In France Marine Le Pen, whose National Front received a loan from a Russian bank, attacks the European Union and America for being too aggressive towards Russia. In the words of Dimitar Bechev, the author of a forthcoming book on Russia in the Balkans, “Putin enjoys a cult status with all holding a grudge against the West.” Nowhere is that status greater than with the nationalists of America’s “alt-right”. Matthew Heimbach, the founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party and a crusader against “anti-Christian degeneracy”, told the New York Times he sees Mr Putin as “the leader of the free world.” He called for the creation of a “Traditionalist International”—a reference to the Communist International founded in 1919.

The last time Russia had such a role in crystallising anti-establishment ideas was in the 1920s and 1930s, after the Bolshevik revolution. When Stalin wrote that the Soviet Union had become an “open centre of the world revolutionary movement”, it was not just propaganda. In her book, “Moscow, the Fourth Rome”, Katerina Clark, a historian, writes that Moscow aspired to form the centre of a new civilisation, attracting Western intellectuals and claiming to be the only legitimate heir to the world’s greatest artists. “Moscow as a concept is the concentration of the socialist future of the entire world,” wrote the Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein in 1933.

Today, 25 years after the Soviet collapse, Russia is again seen as an emblem—this time of a nationalist imperial order. And just as in the 1930s, its isolationism does not prevent it from being involved in the global populist, anti-establishment trend. The Kremlin’s bet on marginal right-wing parties has paid off as they have moved into the mainstream. It has pumped out disinformation and propaganda both through its official media channels, such as the RT and Sputnik news networks, and through thousands of paid internet trolls. Its cyber-attacks against Western countries produced troves of emails and documents which it dumped into the hands of foreign media, disrupting America’s presidential elections to the benefit of Mr Trump.

According to Bruno Kahl, the boss of Germany’s internal intelligence agency, the BND, “Europe is the focus” of Russia’s cyberattacks and disinformation—especially Germany, which will hold a federal election next autumn. France’s spooks say Russian backers may interfere in its presidential elections, too. Such activity recalls the Soviet Union’s so-called “active measures”, which aimed to disrupt and discredit Western democracies. In West Germany, says Anton Shekhovtsov, an expert on European far-right movements, the KGB propped up not only Communist parties and militants such as the Red Brigades, but also extreme right-wing groups.

Unlike the Socialists of the 1930s, the Kremlin and its friends today are driven not so much by ideology as by opportunism (and, in Russia’s case, corruption). Mr Putin’s primary goal is not to present an alternative political model but to undermine Western democracies whose models present an existential threat to his rule at home. Having lived through the Soviet collapse, he is well aware that the attraction of the prosperous, value-based West helped defeat communism. The retreat of that liberal democratic idea allows Russian propagandists to claim a victory.

Mr Putin has been careful not to endorse his admirers, whether Ms Le Pen, Mr Trump or radical nationalist activists. The president proclaims himself “the biggest nationalist in Russia,” but the nationalism he propounds is imperial rather than ethnically-based. Russia has nearly 20m ethnic Muslims, which makes official expressions of religious or racial chauvinism dangerous. Alexander Verkhovsky, an expert on Russian nationalism, observes that while the Kremlin fans and manipulates anti-Western nationalism, it has put grass-roots ultra-nationalist groups within Russia under unprecedented pressure. In August a Russian court sentenced Alexander Belov, a leader of the banned Movement Against Illegal Immigrants (DPNI), to seven and a half years in jail. The DPNI’s slogan is “Russia for [ethnic] Russians”. Last month, a nationalist demonstration was confined to the far outskirts of Moscow. A dozen marchers were arrested.

The Kremlin “counters ethnic nationalism with its own version of state nationalism,” Mr Verkhovsky writes—one based on wars and other state achievements, not on ethnic identity. In Mr Putin’s view the nation must consolidate around events, figures and ideas provided by the Kremlin. The regime was spooked by the violent, spontaneous rally staged by radicals and football hooligans in Moscow in 2010, and by long-running anti-Putin protests in 2011-2012 that brought liberals and nationalists together. In response, it came up with an imperial state nationalism that manifested itself in the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine.

By doing so it successfully split the nationalists. Many nationalist protesters rallied to the imperialist cause. Liberal protesters were demoralised. Some of the radicals went to fight in Donbass, and later resurfaced in Syria. Russia’s actions abroad allowed Mr Putin to channel nationalist protest of any kind away from his own corrupt elite. And yet, while Mr Putin recognises the potential of nationalist populism in America and Europe to discredit democracies, he knows that it is a dangerous substance. After all, Mr Trump’s victory could serve as an inspiration to Mr Putin’s opponents, who see him as the epitome of the corrupt establishment.