Europe has recently been politically destabilized and socially convulsed by the arrival of a million Syrian migrants seeking asylum. Future migrations from Africa, with a large Muslim component, could pose the greatest threat to the social cohesion of Europe since 1945, or even since invading Arab forces were halted at Poitiers in 732.

Undermining the West’s confident sense of itself is important to Putin’s implementation of his ideology of Eurasianism. It holds that Russia’s security and greatness depend on what Ben Judah calls a “geographically ordained empire” that “looks east to Tashkent, not west to Paris.”

Writing in the British journal Standpoint, Judah reports that Russian television relentlessly presents “a dangerous, angry wonderland”: “Russia is special, Russia is under attack, Russia swarms with traitors, Russia was betrayed in 1991, Russia was glorious under Stalin’s steady hand.” This justifies gigantic military, intelligence and police establishments steeped in Eurasianist tracts published by the Russian General Staff.

Putin’s Russia, writes Owen Matthews in the Spectator, is developing a “state-sponsored culture of prudery” to make it a “moral fortress” against Western decadence. The Russian Orthodox Church benefits from a 2013 law that criminalizes “offending the feelings of religious believers.” Twenty-one percent of Russians want homosexuals “liquidated,” and 37 percent favor “separating them from society.”