Sobaka: Heydar Aliyev and US Politicians

From the most ragged fringe of the far-flung Soviet borderlands, Heydar Aliyev stabbed, stole and strong-armed his way to power in the 1960s as protege of corrupt proletarian chieftains like Leonid Brezhnev and KGB henchmen like Yuri Andropov. Deemed too crooked and too conservative for Mikhail Gorbachev's glory boys of glasnost,he was stripped of all authority and shunted off to the cradle of his obscurity in a remote corner of Azerbaijan, clutching his KGB-issue revolver, his souvenirs and medals dulling with verdigris. Then, finding rejuvenation at a period when most of his contemporaries were giving in to the debts of old age, he did it all over again, clawing his way back into authority as atmanof an independent Azerbaijan, easing into power over the bodies of his countrymen and the ruin of his country.

Aliyev is quite possibly the only man alive who once had his paystubs ticked by Lavrentii Beria and Joseph Stalin, and certainly the only one still in power anywhere in the world. Once a truncheon-wielding enforcer of Soviet atheism, he now unveils gilded mosques named in his honour and even went on hajjto Mecca. Once the patron of the Kurdish terrorist PKK army, he now poses as a friend of Turkey and vengeful sentry with a sword of fire patrolling the perimeter of Mount Ararat.