On his journey from Moscow through Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris to Brussels, the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) pursued various missions. With his most famous assignment, the recontextualization of Hegel at the École pratique des hautes études in 1930s Paris, he influenced generations of French intellectuals up to the present day. He also presented the first theoretical work on concrete art, inspired by the works of his uncle Wassily Kandinsky, and critically engaged with Leo Strauss and his political art of writing, which he himself practiced with great skill. Politically charged were his letter to Stalin—a thousand-page manuscript in Russian that Bataille hid alongside Benjamin's manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale—and his essay on the concept of authority addressed to the Vichy regime. As a philosophical official in the French Ministry of Economy, he played a significant role in the establishment of the OECD and is still credited today with promoting EU-friendly thinking in France.