Alexander Pushkin and Boris Johnson.

Besides other things, Pushkin is famous for writing this amazing historical play, Boris Godunov. The play, in which he applied what he has learned from Shakespeare to Russian history.

Godunov was the ruler of Russia during the so called Time of Troubles, the period, when the death of Ivan the Terrible had left Russia with a vacuum. Of legitimacy and vision, of direction and leadership.

Consequently, the political field has opened up for all sorts of ambitions, dubious alliances, intrigues, treachery, and people's revolts.

Boris Godunov was skillful, clever, and knowledgeable in the ways of the world. But he grabbed the position which wasn't quite his. And somehow it was felt so by the Russians, by the foreigners, by the commoners and boyars alike. Out of the blue, all sort of pretenders, impostors, and other people with very distant claims to the crown began to emerge. If Boris can do it, we can do it. The Kremlin began to shake, until the Poles along with one of the impostors they’ve brought along, named Grigory Otrep’ev, had invaded Russia, came to Moscow and began their rule. The ambitions of others, have destroyed Godunov, exactly like he was destroying rivals in his quest for the throne.

Sad morality tale based on real history.

It is both funny and uncanny, that two other historical figures named Boris (Johnson and Yeltsin) echo the story of the original one. Ambitious, skillful, capable of being at the right place at the right time, knowing how to exploit nationalism and populism. And yet, and yet…

The vacuum of legitimacy that surrounds them, their cynicism that believes that all fair in the conquest of power, the failure to understand that people sooner or later learn to differentiate between true care and cheap signs of populism, all these have brough their downfall. New ambitions arise, new cynicism, new hopes that a proper balance of jingoism and handouts to people will take care of things. But they never do.

Shakespeare knew it well, and so did his readers. At least, those who’ve read Ulysses’ famous speech on degree to the very end:  

"Then every thing includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself."

Well, Boris Johnson. You rode this universal wolf all the way to 10 Downing Street. Now it has turned against you.