Alexander Dugin is one of the best-known writers and political commentators in post- Soviet Russia. During the 1980s, he was a principal member of the underground traditionalist movement in the Soviet Union, for which he was arrested by the KGB and expelled from his studies at the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1983. He continued to support his private studies in traditionalist philosophy by working as a street sweeper. After the collapse of the USSR opened up new possibilities, Dugin began associating with several of the major figures of the European New Right such as Alain de Benoist, and came to international prominence as a leader of the National Bolshevik Party, which sought to revive the ideals of the political movements of 1920s Russia and Germany which had gone by that name, and which had sought a synthesis of both Left- and Right- wing doctrines.