There’s a strange thing that happens to some autocratic leaders after spending a decade or so in power … Things start getting pervy.

The brutal Nigerian military dictator Sani Abachi had to leave office in a body bag when his heart finally expired under a mountain of Indian prostitutes.  The Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic for three decades while engaging in rampant cases of sexual abuse (the subject was the focus of a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, who discovered that Trujillo “used sex as an instrument of power to humiliate and degrade his collaborators.”)  Nobody really knows for sure what Muammar Gaddafi has been up to all these years, but his insistence on all-female bodyguard shock troops and voluptuous Ukrainian nurses is enough to raise eyebrows.  Then, of course, we have the walking advertisement for Viagra, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose unparalleled exploits in these areas have been the subject of extensive discussion, and sometimes, public outrage.

The bromance between Berlusconi and Russian premier Vladimir Putin is no secret, but it wasn’t known if they necessarily shared all the same “values” (apart from, of course, their criminal activities together as revealed by Wikileaks).  So when a suggestive online video appeared this week in Russia featuring a new cadre very young women calling themselves “Putin’s Army,” promising to get together to strip off their clothes for their favorite premier, the comparisons with Italy’s pervert-in-chief were a logical next step.

Journalist Julia Ioffe has a good piece on “Putin’s Army” published in The New Yorker: