Today, and hopefully over the next several months, we are planning to do a significant amount of blogging about Russia from a comparative perspective – focusing often on the commonalities of the Russian experience and the Latin American experience. I would argue that those who study Russia can learn a lot by looking at popular movements across this distant continent. Case in point, there is a terrific column by Enrique Krauze, the editor of the excellent Mexican magazine Letras Libres, in the IHT today about the Venezuelan student movements which makes mention of the Russian student idealist “Sashka Zhegulyov” (a character from a 1911 novel by Leonid Andreyev). What can we learn about Vladimir Putin and Russia from the experiences of Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chavez, Lazaro Cárdenas, and other populist authoritarians of Latin America?