Putin’s first, modest speeches were shaped for Western applause. He suggested Russia might join Nato. He embraced the freedoms of the media and speech. He gave a book length interview where he revealed that he had, under his mother’s influence from 1993, embraced Orthodox Christianity. In his first inauguration speech, in May 2000, he said, “the path to a free society was not simple and easy: in our history there have been tragic and bright pages. The construction of a democratic state is far from complete, but much has already been done.”

The façade which he and his aides had constructed during these first months soon crumbled. The rackety, already corrupt and incomplete democracy Putin inherited has, in the 22 years since that speech, been undone. Among the most shocking, tragic acts of undoing came last month, a little before Christmas: the central offices of Memorial, a human rights group, were closed.

Memorial was founded, in the dying years of the Soviet Union, by Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear scientist and human rights activist and the historian Arseny Roginsky. Sakharov had been released from internal exile by Mikhail Gorbachev; Roginsky was once imprisoned for publishing a document named “Memory” — a doomed effort to hold the mass incarcerations of the Stalinist period to account. Memorial took on Roginsky’s lone work. It had research offices in the main camp zones. It was backed by large support from abroad and researchers devoted to often savage discoveries. Memorial would diligently publicise their findings.

While a reporter in Moscow, I flew, in the early winter of 1992, to Vorkuta in the Arctic Circle to report on the campaign for the coming parliamentary elections of Yegor Gaidar, the prime minister. Vorkuta had been built in the early Thirties to be the administrative hub for a network of camps, whose prisoners dug coal from anthracite mines. Gaidar had been booked to give a speech in the town’s cultural centre. The town council organised a good show by local dancers, musicians, actors and singers. When the small, tubby prime minister came on stage, he was given a cheer — a reception which soured quickly. Gaidar, a brave and principled man, spoke of the town’s past as a centre for oppression. Scattered at first, then louder, came the hisses and boos. When Gaidar left, I struggled to get near him because of the crush of people angrily mobbing him, his security detail ploughing their way through.

It was the first time I had seen how much the invoking of the past as a horror struck people as an insult. These citizens — who had a tough life in that freezing city, which is now rapidly becoming a ghost town — wanted a sense that they and their parents and grandparents, who had staffed the city-prison, had honour. Gaidar was impugning it.

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By closing Memorial, Putin will, for a substantial number of Russians, gain rather than lose points, as he and his advisors must have calculated. Yet does this mean — as many commentators, Russian and foreign, now believe — that the suppression of an institute dedicated to exhuming the truth foreshadows a descent into a state comparable to Nazism, or Stalinism in the Thirties?

I do not believe so.

Hitler and Stalin advertised themselves, from the beginning, as tyrants. Tyrants in a noble cause, they believed. Tyrants of necessity, who would lead their people though sacrifice into societies of freedom and plenty, underpinned by ideologies and force which removed enemies. Putin came in as an awkward democrat and progressed, by degrees, into a fitful authoritarian, finding his mission not before but as he ruled — a mission to reconstitute as much of the lost Soviet Union as was possible. And among many — though they tend to be the older generations — that’s a fine ambition. Not for so many of the young.

Putin isn’t popular with the rising generation. Polls by the Levada Institute in February and October last year show that nearly half of 18-24 year olds disapprove of the President’s performance, and only one third wish him to be re-elected. An essay by the commentator Andrei Kolesnikov last month, based on polls by the Carnegie Institute, detailed a strong aversion to a war with Ukraine, and a positive view of the country by two thirds of the 18-24 year olds. Putin doesn’t have the force, the ideology or, likely, the stomach for mass repression, once wide-scale protests begin over a bloody war with the nearest neighbour.

This isn’t the Thirties. Then, throughout the industrialised world, the globalisation of the early 20th century had failed. Depression ruled. Now globalisation is unavoidable. Russia is ill-equipped to benefit properly from it, since its feeble attempts at industrial modernisation have yielded little. But it is energy rich: it is crucial to keeping much of Europe, especially Germany, supplied with light and heat. Its elite, many of the members corruptly enriched by the Putin presidency, wish to be able to spend their money in Europe, North America and the Caribbean. When Stalin was dictator he possessed an ideology that could be used to excuse the hideous consequences of his rule. Putin’s corruption, dependent on international cooperation from tax havens and the City of London, is more limited in scale.

Russia’s ever-closer relations with China also impose limits on Putin. In Stalin’s day, the Soviet Union was the inspiring model, the “big brother”, for Mao Tse Tung; now China has assumed the big brother role. The CCP, learning from the sight of Gorbachev giving the basis of communism away, has kept its ability to inspire fear, identify and suppress its enemies — presently, the Uighurs. Nevertheless, even more than for Russia, globalisation is the lifeblood of communism with Chinese characteristics. China seeks to acquire at least equal status with the United States, but not to destroy it, whether through ideology or war. It, too, has limits, and will enforce them on little brother.

What options for containment are available to the West, beyond registering revulsion at the closure of a great institution such as Memorial? The looming possibility of an invasion of Ukraine sharpens the question.

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The answer is mostly obvious. It is to recognise the nature of the Russian (and Chinese) regimes, dedicated to covert subversion in Western states — and to strengthen democracies against them. In part this is military, where the US remains unparalleled and where Nato leaders last week, according to the New York Times’ Steven Erlanger, “spoke, in talks with the Russians, with exceptional unity for a 30-member alliance whose commitment to collective defence was increasingly in question”. Erlanger quoted Anna Wieslander, chair of Sweden’s Institute for Security and Development, as saying that “Deterring Russia is in the DNA of Nato because Russia is what can bring existential threats to European nations”. Sweden, like Finland, is not a Nato member, but both the Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and the Finnish Premier Sauli Niinistö have recently indicated that they might now argue for membership. Putin’s threats have caused Nato’s popularity to surge — not, presumably, what he wished for.

As important as military strength is the renewal of our ideology, which is based on freedom, and depends on states with democratic politics which foster civil society. The Democracy Summit, hosted by President Joe Biden in December, was encouraging: as was his earlier recognition that democracy “doesn’t happen by accident: we have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it”. Renewing it, above all, by elevating the fight against corruption to being a constant theme in politics and in the media. Without this struggle, Western societies, where the majority of people are just getting by, will continue to fragment. Civic life in a democracy must be exemplary. Democracy and freedom certainly don’t happen by accident — and they aren’t sustained by being taken for granted.

Putin’s Russia warns of what happens when corruption goes unchecked. Memorial was dedicated to revealing the tragedies of history, and for that Putin’s government considered it a threat and an outrage. The state’s prosecutor charged them with being “traitors to the motherland and Nazi collaborators” — a grimly ironic reversion to the Stalinist language of the past. Such lies can only be the product of fragility, and fear. The Russian government knows that a generation is growing full of men and women intolerant of a state fashioned to make authoritarian leaders rich, and history what Vladimir Putin says it is.

I had first met Putin seven years before and was not surprised by his rapid domination of the new Russia. We were introduced by Yevgeny Primakov, widely known as “Russia’s Kissinger”, who I had met in Moscow multiple times during the Cold War years when I advised Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. Primakov was a no-nonsense thinker and writer. He was also a special emissary for the Kremlin in conducting secret discussions with national leaders around the world.

When Yeltsin tasked his advisor Anatoly Sobchak with identifying and recruiting Russia’s best and brightest, Putin, then a local politician in his hometown of St Petersburg, was top of his list — so Primakov took Putin under his wing to tutor him in global power and security issues. Eventually, Primakov introduced Kissinger to Putin, and they became close. That both Primakov and Kissinger took time to coach Putin on geopolitics and geosecurity was a clear demonstration that they saw in him the characteristics of a powerful leader. It also showed Putin’s capacity for listening to lengthy lessons on geopolitics — as I was soon to learn.

In 1992, I received a call from a meeting organiser at the CSIS think tank inviting me to join a US-Russia St Petersburg Commission to be chaired by Kissinger and Sobchak. The purpose would be to help the new Russian leadership in opening channels of business and banking with the West. Most of the Western members would be CEOs of major US and European companies, as well as key officials of the new Russian government. I would attend as an expert. I was told that a “Mr Primakov” had personally asked if I could make time to participate. I could hardly refuse such a request, and I was intensely curious about the emerging Russian leadership, especially about Putin.

Arriving at the first meeting, I saw several people gathered around Kissinger and a man I was told was Putin. An official identified himself to me and said he had been asked by Primakov to introduce me to Putin. He interrupted the conversation with Kissinger to announce my arrival; Putin warmly responded that he was looking forward to chatting with me about how I see the world from inside Washington.

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We spoke on several occasions between meetings, and he arranged to sit next to me at a dinner, accompanied by his interpreter. At that dinner, he asked me: “What is the single most important obstacle between your Western businessmen and my fellow Russians in starting up business connections?”

Off the top of my head, I responded: “The absence of legally defined property rights — without those there is no basis for resolving disputes.”

“Ah yes,” he said, “in your system a dispute between businesses is resolved by attorneys paid by the hour representing each side, sometimes taking the dispute to the courts which normally takes months and accumulation of hourly attorney fees.”

“In Russia,” he continued, “disputes are usually resolved by common sense. If a dispute is about very significant money or property, then the two sides would typically send representatives to a dinner. Everyone attending arriving would be armed. Facing the possibility of a bloody, fatal outcome both sides always find a mutually agreeable solution. Fear provides the catalyst for common sense.”

He used his argument in the context of disputes between sovereign nations. Solutions often require an element of fear of disproportionate responses if no deal is struck. The idea of forcing adversaries to face horrific alternatives seemed to excite him. In essence, he was describing to me the current Ukraine impasse between the US and Russia. Putin knows Russia cannot afford a prolonged ground war with Ukraine. He also can see Biden is facing crucial midterm elections with a domestic congressional impasse, and cannot afford a major foreign crisis distraction. The two sides have no choice but to strike a deal.

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On a different occasion, Putin asked me how decisions are really made in Washington, with its complex division of Presidential and Congressional powers. He said Kissinger could explain the broad parameters of a Presidential policy decision, but could not clarify how political consensus was achieved between the House, Senate, and the Executive Branch.

It was evident he had been given a deep intelligence brief on my career. He said Kissinger enjoys the public theatre of powerful people meeting in elaborate dinners or meetings with many aides ready to guide them. And he told me he had been informed that I preferred backroom meetings to shape consensus and provide room for negotiating details.

I tried to explain the elaborate process of balancing the interests of the many players in Washington, including Congress, the major agencies, and the intricate business arrangements that might be affected by any decision. I told him of my first personal meeting with Nixon, who had said he was impressed that I had strong personal support from leaders of both major parties. However, he added, this raised worries among his staff in the White House — so he really needed to know whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. To which I replied: “Yes.”

When Nixon asked what that meant, I explained that I was not a partisan warrior, but rather a problem solver. To get a solution I would always be ready to work with key players of both parties depending upon the specific problem. This seemed to amuse Putin.

The impression of Putin that I was left with was of a man who was more intelligent than most of the politicians I had met in Washington and in other capitals around the world. I was reminded of my childhood: I grew up in a predominantly Sicilian neighbourhood, with a mafia maintaining order. No disorganised crime allowed. Putin did seem to have the instincts of a Sicilian mafia boss: quick to reward but quick to pose mortal risk in the event of non-conformity to the family rules.

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Looking back to those times of growing disarray in Russia’s leadership, I can recall the prolonged, multi-year paralysis of the Brezhnev Presidency, which was followed by the brief Presidencies of Andropov and Chernenko. Gorbachev was not strong enough to impose his will. Yeltsin had good ideas but was easily distracted and lacked follow through. Russia was in urgent need of a strong leader — and so Putin stepped in.

As for how Putin sees himself, he did bring up several times his admiration for Peter the Great, so much so I was convinced he sees himself as his incarnation. I have not been a guest of the Kremlin since 1988, but I am told Putin had portraits of Peter the Great hung in several important meeting rooms there — rather than portraits of himself, as would be more customary. What this means for Biden, Nato and Ukraine is slowly becoming clear. There is more to Putin than meets the eye.

In August 1991, while the USSR’s reforming General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev holidayed in his Ukrainian dacha, a group of hard-liners seized power. Gorbachev, under house arrest, turned to the BBC to find out what was going on, since in the Soviet Union nothing the media said was true unless the party said so. He learned that, in the centre of Moscow, Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin courageously stood in front of the city’s White House in defiance of the plotters, surrounded by supporters brandishing the old Russian flag.

Perhaps what wasn’t clear to everyone was that Yeltsin was drunk for much of it. The true extent of his alcoholism became more apparent in the years after he dissolved the communist state a few months later and became president of an independent Russia, although he already had a colourful reputation for drink-related antics.

The plotters, it turned out, were also mostly legless. Having began a cack-handed coup that they weren’t prepared to kill for, the ringleaders appeared on television looking ashen-faced, some shaking nervously, their insides rotting from vodka. Most of all, though, they just appeared old, old and old beyond their years, the face of a fading empire based on a faith no one really believed in anymore.

By this stage, the Soviet Union was itself dying of alcohol, and attempts to treat it proved fruitless. One of the biggest mistakes made by Gorbachev — a very moderate drinker, which is why he’s alive and his rival Yeltsin is long dead — was to raise the tax on vodka, as part of a drive to tackle the country’s catastrophic problem with drink. Russian humour is famously bleak and sharp, and this led to a joke in which a boy asks, “Papa, and this means that you shall drink less?” “No, son, this means that you shall eat less”.

Alcohol played a central part in the demographic collapse that pre-empted the political fall of the USSR. It was back in the Seventies that people first noticed that in the Soviet Union people were starting to die younger. The decline in life expectancy affected not only the old, but the middle-aged. There was no famine, no foreign invasion, no natural disaster; instead people were drinking themselves to death out of despair. A country in which life is getting shorter — and worse — for its citizens has no future.

Russia’s birth rate had long collapsed, too. Two things drive higher fertility in wealthy countries — religion and affordability. All the major religions promote childbearing, give prestige and status to women who have children, and men who stick around; on top of that, attending a church, mosque or synagogue is associated with a number of measures of wellbeing that breed optimism.

The second factor is money. If both partners in a couple must work in order to survive, fertility is going to be severely depressed. The Soviet Union had extensive day care provision for mothers, but it was nowhere near enough to make up for the shortfall caused by mediocre wages. Back in the 1970s, Russian women marvelled at how their American equivalents could afford to leave work while they had children. As the New York Times reported, they “express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife’s working. Many are also surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.” For them, it was a huge struggle to raise just one.

The Soviet Union’s main adversary in the Cold War was also defined by ideology, to some extent. Many western nations had embraced liberalism, but no other was created with the words of John Locke enshrined in its foundation. Yet liberalism, too, faced its challenges in the late 20th century, not from the obviously failing Soviet Communism, but from rival ideas within the democratic tradition. Starting in the 1960s, a new way of thinking began to predominate in the US that was not really liberal, although its opponents confusingly still referred to it as such.

This new way of thinking was more hostile to freedom of speech, and its adherents began the process of chasing deviant thinkers out of academia that began in the late 1960s and would massively reduce political diversity by the 21st century; it supported not just personal sexual freedom, as did liberalism, but radical ideas about sex, including hostility to the family; it was anti-religion and would become more so when religion clashed with sexual rights. As for freedom of association, the “master freedom” in Christopher Caldwell’s words, this was also incompatible with a worldview that prioritised equality over liberty.

This new way of thinking — progressivism is probably the fairest term — is far less tolerant than liberalism. Indeed, in its hostility to freedom of speech, its Manichean worldview, its suspicion that its opponents are fascists, and the belief that politics should be inserted into everything — from science to children’s books — it is closer to the totalitarian tradition. American progressivism is not communism, obviously, anymore than its opponents are Nazis; the market is perfectly capable of achieving most progressive goals, and America has become more culturally Left-wing as Right-wing economic policies have dominated, globalisation being the common theme that links the two.

But globalisation came with a price, with millions of jobs lost after the 2001 trade deal with China, made two months after George W. Bush had followed the Soviet example by invading Afghanistan. It was in those former industrial heartlands where people first began to notice an epidemic of drug-related deaths that now constitutes one of the greatest social disasters in history.

Four decades on from its superpower rival, the United States had now become a country in which people were dying younger, driven by overdoses and suicides. That this epidemic took so long to register may have been the solitary and often legal nature of the drug problem; unlike Aids, it did not affect too many celebrities, Prince being the exception. But it could also be who the victims were — predominantly rural white Americans, neither powerful themselves nor championed by powerful supporters.

Like the Soviet Union, the United States has developed a system in which some social classes and races are officially favoured, and some are disfavoured, reflected in post-war legal innovations like affirmative action.

Affirmative action was originally introduced as a counter-measure to segregation, either of the official or unofficial variety, but as with many things its purpose evolved as bureaucracies grew. Today, government interference in private institutions is aimed at the goal of equality — not the liberal concept of equality of opportunity, but the more ambitious equality of outcomes, or “equity”.

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Under this theory, each racial group should have equal representation in elite institutions, which means that, depending on their race, Americans must achieve different scores to attend certain colleges. Equality is achieved through inequality. If this sounds illiberal, indeed un-American, that is because it is not unlike the “nationalities policies” created by communist revolutionaries, and under which the Russian majority were officially discriminated against in certain positions.

The Soviet nationalities policies allowed minority groups a certain degree of self-rule and recognition, while also ensuring that their elites remained utterly under the control of the party. Sometimes other nationalities would be disfavoured because they were seen as too anti-communist or otherwise disloyal, as happened to Ukrainians, Tartars and Jews at different times, but only Russian identity was actively discouraged. Stalin condemned the “Great Russian chauvinist spirit” and the Soviet Union saw majority nationalism as by far the greater evil.

This did not lead to a brotherhood of man, amazingly. The ethnic spoils system benefited the party, and minority members within it especially, but it is also a zero-sum game. The benefits of diversity, like the benefits of liberalism and capitalism, are supposed to be non-zero-sum, and often are: migrants benefit from moving to a richer or safer country, but the host population gains from their skills or cultural niches. When your migrant neighbour gets rich — and even richer than you — not only will it not harm you but you may well benefit.

Equity is similarly a zero-sum game: someone has to lose, and if one group is feted, in some cases even sacrilised, then others have to suffer, whether with tangible matters like college places or simply status and prestige.

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Today America’s thought-leaders are obsessed with white nationalism and regularly denounce white supremacy as a lethal danger to the nation, in what is probably history’s least ever white supremacist country; a country in which the majority  is officially discriminated against by certain institutions, and where membership of the group is considered so tainted and wicked that the media has regular denunciations of whiteness, and where numerous people avoid this taint by faking their ethnic origins.

There are other resemblances to the older empire. At the heart of Soviet thinking was the blank slate, the idea that life outcomes are determined entirely, or almost entirely, by social forces rather than genes. As Mao said of the peasantry, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it”.

Likewise, American progressivism today is entirely built on the blank slate, and as in the USSR, where belief in Mendelian genetics led to internal exile, American social scientists offering any sort of genetic explanation for outcomes face ostracism. Privately, lots of people will agree, but they’ll lose their job if they speak out, or their publisher will drop them, or it will only embolden the party’s enemies and harm the noble goals of progressivism.

Communists saw their political beliefs as so all-encompassing that even science was political: if science contradicted the goals of communism, it wasn’t science. In today’s United States the slow death of liberalism has resulted in the blatant politicisation of science, to the extent that as in Russia, scientists teach things which are obviously untrue because it supports the prevailing ideology. Then there is the media, much of which parrots the party line with almost embarrassing, “Comrade Stalin has driven pig iron to record production” levels of conformity. Once again, if you want to hear the truth, go to the BBC (until the young people who run the website take over).

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America, once the most trusting of societies, is heading in the direction of Russia, one of the least trusting. Most disturbing of all is that, formerly the most demographically vibrant of western countries, today the United States has suffered a spectacular collapse in fertility. This is mostly down to stagnant wages among the middle class, who can no longer afford a family with one breadwinner, and a rapid decline of religious faith. But maybe people have also lost belief in themselves, and the ideals of their country.

The Soviet Union broke into 15 different pieces, and the transition was, as CNN might put it, mostly peaceful — although Gorbachev’s old dacha is now in Russia once again after some local unpleasantness.

Today it is the United States where people talk of secession, escaping a crumbling superpower ruled by geriatrics. This seems very unlikely to happen, more clickbait than reality, because why would you leave what has been for more than two centuries the richest, most impressive state on earth? But then a generation ago few would have foreseen the Soviet Union crumbling in a haze of alcoholic despair.

Sound familiar? Welcome to Russia in 1996, just after the re-election of President Boris Yeltsin, the onetime Soviet apparatchik turned champion of democracy, who then presided over the rapid immiseration of his nation on an epic scale.

It’s a little-understood period, not least because so many Western experts and institutions (many of them still going strong today) were complicit in the human tragedy that came about as a result of Yeltsin’s economic “shock therapy”. An expert class incurious about its own failures is a familiar enough phenomenon, of course, but there are other instructive parallels between Russia in 1996 and the US in 2021. And these parallels could, perhaps, give us a glance into what will become of the apparent corporate-media-political monolith that has ascended to power behind Biden.

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There are important differences of course. When somebody in Russia starts panicking about dictatorship, they know a lot more about what it means than your typical American pundit angling for a book deal. And in 1996, many Russian liberals were worried that dictatorship was on the horizon. Yeltsin’s first term had been a failure, with millions thrown into poverty and a precipitous decline in life expectancy. As a result his opponent — one Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Communist Party — looked likely to win the election, which would have been bad news for business, as well as the values and ideals of Russia’s pro-Western liberals.

And so practically the entirety of Russia’s business, media and liberal elite rallied around Yeltsin to support his re-election. Remarkably, this was despite the fact that Yeltsin himself had, only a few years earlier, ordered an attack on Russia’s parliament when it kept blocking his executive orders. Unlike Trump’s fiasco, this incident ended not with a mob in fancy dress storming the building but rather 147 people losing their lives after an assault by tanks and helicopters.

So Yeltsin was pretty unconvincing as a champion of democracy (even if Clinton’s secretary of state praised him for his “superb handling” of the parliament). But the prospect of Zyuganov was regarded as still worse, providing Russia’s “liberal” forces with a “moral clarity”: a conviction that they had to bend and break all rules and norms to prevent him from being elected. Like America’s establishment in 2021, Russia’s elites in 1996 had no time for journalistic objectivity or “both sidesism”. The future of the nation itself was at stake.

There was no social media back then, but television had enormous influence, and the three main channels railed against Zyuganov and his communists. Of those three, one was owned 100% by the state, while the other two were controlled by oligarchs. Boris Berezovsky — later to enjoy some notoriety as a foe of Putin living in exile in England — ran ORT, while a stage director-turned-banker by the name of Vladimir Gusinsky ran NTV. Certainly Zyuganov posed a direct threat to their business interests — but they may also have entertained the notion that they were fighting for liberal democracy, and that this was far bigger than their rivalry.

As a result, Zyuganov had it considerably worse than Trump. Bar the likes of Pravda, he had very few allies in the media. ORT and NTV filled the airwaves with hagiographies of Yeltsin and documentaries on the horrors of communism. The editor of the news magazine Itogi declared, “This is not a game with equal stakes,” adding that he was “willing to be unfair” and “willing to stir up a wild anti-Communist psychosis among the people”. The general director of NTV openly took a job on Yeltsin’s campaign team.

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Perhaps no American journalist was quite so honest as to take a job directly on Biden’s campaign team, but The Washington Post did retroactively edit an article that cast Kamala Harris in an unflattering light, and the LA Times has launched an ongoing series of fawning coverage of the Vice President. So it might be slightly less irritating if significant parts of the American media did openly declare what they’re up to, instead of trying to disguise it as “journalism”.

But perhaps the most interesting parallel is that Zyuganov was not only denied any kind of favourable media coverage; he was denied access even to the communications infrastructure. When the communists tried to buy advertising on state TV, their money was turned down. At least Twitter and Facebook waited until Trump was on the way out before they switched him off. But they did still eject the actual President of the US from access to social media, whereas the bosses of Russian TV were merely excluding an opposition candidate from the airwaves. The reasoning was similar: both men were too dangerous to be granted access to a channel by which they could communicate directly with their supporters.

Yeltsin, of course, won, and the oligarchs and media barons who had supported him wound up closer to the government, wealthier and more powerful than before, while preserving — for the time being — their own status quo. And if life were a movie, that would have been a great time to roll credits, with the commies defeated and all the rich people getting to keep their money and influence.

But life carried on, and it’s the next act that’s perhaps the most instructive for us. The underlying problems that had made Zyuganov popular in the first place did not go away. Russia’s economic woes deepened. The overt collusion between the media, the oligarchs and Yeltsin — combined with disappointment in an aging President who was increasingly decrepit and erratic — led to further degradation of trust in the media and Russia’s governing institutions; democracy itself was rechristened dermokratiya — “shitocracy”.

And then, four years later, an ex-KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Putin came to power. A more effective authoritarian than Zyuganov, he swiftly chased Berezovsky out of the country and stripped Gusinsky of his TV station. Having been part of the Yeltsin regime himself, he understood what many members of America’s current ruling class appear not to — that any weapon you deploy against a foe can also be turned against you.

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And so we turn from Russia to the US in 2021. Again, if life were a movie, then the recent inauguration would have been a great moment to roll credits — perhaps as Lady Gaga was singing the national anthem, while a tear trickled down Stephen Colbert’s cheek. But life has already moved on.

A recent poll reveals that trust in traditional media has dropped below 50% for the first time ever, while trust in social media sits at a mighty 27%. Many Americans, like the Russians before them, are adjusting to the default assumption that at best they are not receiving the full picture. At least Russian journalists lacked the comical levels of self-regard of their US counterparts.

Nor are other institutions doing that well on the trust front, even — or perhaps especially — as they all espouse the same package of received ideas. And once the relief that Trump has gone has passed, what will become of Biden? Unlike Yeltsin, he may not disappear for days on alcoholic benders, but it is fair to say that he has not, for much of his very long career, inspired a lot of confidence. As Obama himself is reported to have said: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

Now I don’t think that Biden will flame out to the extent that Yeltsin did, with the result that a sinister Putin-type rough beast shall slouch forward, to be born in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But I do think that this apparent corporate-media-institutional monolith is unlikely to endure — despite the persistent belief among some American political fantasists that each victory is their chance to exercise eternal hegemony over their enemies.

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For instance, when the billionaires behind Twitter and Facebook ejected Trump from Twitter — and, under pressure from the Democrats, began censoring all kinds of opinions of which they disapproved — they crossed a Rubicon. Once the Republicans have stopped rolling around in their own mess, they will realise that large monopolies controlled by people who are closely allied with your opposition and who wield the power to switch you off at will are not a thing to be tolerated. Alexei Navlany agrees, as do Angela Merkel and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, and we can assume that many other leaders around the world sat up and took notice, too. Some kind of rebalancing will happen, and that is not a bad thing.

While we should never underestimate the resilience of Zombie Reaganism, it, too, must eventually lose its grip on the brains of the Republicans, whose leadership is likewise very old, if not quite so old as that of the Democrats. They will realise that the market does not always correct itself, and that something will have to be done. The American context will provide its own tools for change. A new interpretation of the First Amendment, perhaps. Or a redefinition of the public square. Or the application of antitrust law to certain platforms. Or a re-examination of CDA 230 — the legislation that allows tech oligarchs to have their cake and eat it by granting them immunity from liability for what users post on their platforms, while also reserving for them the right to censor or withdraw services from users if they dislike what they post on their platforms.

If that sounds like wishful thinking, then remember that far more radical political evolutions have happened. After all, today’s Democrats may be closely allied with woke tech oligarchs, but they used to be rather friendly with the KKK, an organisation with a history of violence far worse than any of those currently being purged from social media platforms.