But the Kremlin’s true target audience is not on the right-wing fringes of western politics but people in what was once called the Soviet sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union, Middle East and Africa. Russian diplomats and academics have taken a leading role in promoting an anti-gay-rights resolution in the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in Geneva, building a coalition of conservative nations behind a resolution declaring that human rights had to be subordinate to ‘traditional values and cultural sovereignty’. (In 2011 the US backed a resolution explicitly protecting sexual minorities under the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights — but Russia stepped in to lead the counteroffensive.) ‘Russia has been using this issue to develop a constituency in Muslim and African countries,’ says Mark Gevisser, an Open Society Fellow who is writing a book on the global debate on gay rights. ‘This brand of ideological moral conservatism was originally minted in the US. It is highly ironic that these countries are mounting an anti-western crusade using a western tool.’ Moscow plays on opposition to gay rights most effectively closer to home. Last November, when it looked like the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was close to signing an Association Agreement with the European Union, billboards appeared across the country warning that the ‘EU means legalising same-sex marriage’. The campaign was paid for by Ukraine’s Choice, a group associated with the Kremlin-connected politician and businessman Viktor Medvedchuk.

But Putin’s new mission goes deeper than political opportunism. Like the old Communist International, or Comintern, in its day, Moscow is again building an international ideological alliance. The Comintern sought to bring ‘progressives’ and left-wingers of every stripe into Moscow’s ideological big tent; Putin is pitching for moral leadership of all conservatives who dislike liberal values. And again, like the Comintern, Putin appears convinced that he is embarking on a world-historical mission. It’s certainly true that such a moral mission has deep roots in Russian history. Many previous occupants of the Kremlin have set themselves up as defenders of orthodoxy and autocracy — notably Nicholas I, the ‘gendarme of Europe’, and the arch-conservative Alexander III. Putin quoted the 19th-century conservative thinker Nikolai Berdyaev in his Duma speech. ‘The point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward,’ Putin said, ‘but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.’