“I told him he was an idiot to write to Putin like that,” Dorenko later recalled. “I said, ‘You don’t understand—Putin is a Russian tsar, not a European leader. In Russia a tsar is not a leader, a tsar is a high priest. You can’t write letters to a high priest. You need to crawl, kiss the carpet and kneel before the throne. Because he is not Volodya—he is the throne of the Russians, a mystical, ancient throne.’”18
