Those people? Claire Fox and the LM crowd? They're professional contrarians. Very good at picking the side most guaranteed to make people angry, which is how they went seamlessly from far left to far right.

Yes, those people, what they learned was political praxis: How to succeed and win an argument. How to be effective, in a minority, how to dominate a room. I was a member of a less rigid, less orthodox, (markedly less effective!) socialist student movement in the UK at a similar time as them in the late 70s and I know some, a little, of how they operate. An older generation in the SDS learned similar lessons during the anti Vietnam war campaign in the USA.

Some anticommunists fail to understand or believe you can ever cease to be a communist. Arguably, they're right: there are political lessons which can't be unlearned. Putin is anything but a communist, Russia is not a socialist state. Do you think Putin has unlearned what he learned across the sixties and seventies and eighties as a loyal party member? Different to Claire Fox but similar lessons learned I would argue.

The USSR was built on a weird combination of Marxist-Leninist ideology (which should, in principle, be anti-imperialist) and ye olde Russian imperialism, and Putin seems to have absorbed most of the latter.

I don't mean literally Claire and Vladimir are "the same" but they certainly learned similar lessons about polemic, argument and behaviour to an outcome. The revolutionary left in Britain from my personal perspective was a very odd power trip between the groups, as well as against the state. The RCP was an offshoot of the WRP which Vanessa and Corin Redgrave were in and probably loathed the SWP and the other 4th international splitting groups.

I have a diagram remarkably like the UNIX family tree about the complex splits and mergers since the 1940s. Winding up in the Tory party.. unexpected but once you see it, sort of .. "yeah"

The Mitrokhin Archive gives multiple examples of spies who became spies by rejecting their former ideology and doing a 180 degree turn. You think that those people changed, while in reality this is textbook method used by russians. Cambrige five did the same thing, they supposedly rejected their old ways. But it was all a lie.

KGB made whole fake right wing organizations to fish out real right wingers in Russia.

On a side note, it is quite clear that UK conservatives are on GRU / FSB leash. UK is now cutting military expenses due to Brexit. Someone in Moscow probably received a medal for that.