What Decca herself called the “Mitford industry” — an endless stream of books about the fascinating sisters — is still going strong, and anyone entering the scene needs a fresh angle. In the last few months alone, there’s been a collection of Mitford murder mysteries, a graphic novel, and a biography of “Muv”, aka family matriarch Lady Redesdale. The new biographer of the second-youngest Mitford is a Woman’s Studies Professor, Carla Kaplan; and she bravely opts for presenting her material as self-help for socialists. Her heroine is pictured as a model radical, rebelling against her fascist origin story. Or as Kaplan solemnly puts it in her introduction: “Those who seek to become good allies can learn a great deal from Decca’s ways of change.” 

The premise is certainly entertaining. The Mitfords might even say it was extraorder, in their comically exaggerated, nursery-speak way. Perhaps in future it might be franchised for other family members too. Someone could write a book of tradwife inspiration based on Debo (marry alcoholic duke, inherit old castle, start making artisanal cheeses to pay for repairs); or of queer liberation, based on Pamela (be a devoted animal lover; eventually leave feckless bisexual husband for a Swiss-Italian horsewoman). There could even be a book of advice for Groypers based on Unity and Diana. But in the meantime, we have to make do with Troublemaker. It is a lot of fun — because the Mitfords are always fun, whatever else they are. But as a case study for contemporary progressives, it is not a wholly convincing read.

Kaplan tells us that, in moving from England to the States, Decca “transformed herself from isolated aristocrat into engaged, effective ally”. She did so “without the benefit of social media, affinity groups, or retreats” and “before widely circulated essays such as Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” or books such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist”. Just imagine. What Decca did possess, of course, is an elite contact list and a high-born English accent. This is presumably why, shortly after arriving in the US, she and her first husband Esmond Romilly almost immediately got offered a husband-and-wife column in the Washington Post. “It’s a distinct advantage to be English here,” Romilly noted. “That is if you continue repeating what a wonderful country America is.”

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In the present, Decca surely would have been viewed with more suspicion by her comrades, if only for genetically induced guilt-by-association. Accusing your relatives of being literal Nazis may be overdone these days, but in Decca’s case it was perfectly true. And there would perhaps also have been less tolerance for the variable presence of her moral scruples. On the one hand, she was brave, determined, and effective in fighting injustice, working collaboratively with other communists and socialists in her new Californian home. On the other, stealing seems to have been her favorite form of economic redistribution, and not only from the rich. She took food from cafes, pilfered toiletries and household goods from kindly hosts and benefactors, and at one point snatched “a mattress from a nearby cabin” so she could get a comfortable night camping in a tent.

And she didn’t mind exploiting others’ labor either. During the war, she was employed as a typist at the Office of Price Administration, but couldn’t type, so — as she herself described it in her own memoir — she would wander into the typing pool and pretend to be a boss: “I want nine copies of this by noon, please, and be sure that it’s correctly proof-read.” Later, newly arrived in San Francisco with an inconvenient baby in tow, Decca persuaded her working-class landlady to babysit “and to charge her less than half the going rate”.

It’s not so clear, then, that Decca’s life functions as idealized woke inspo, for oblivious entitlement is never far enough away, even when she is poor. And she’s unlikely to win any posthumous awards for gentle parenting either. Going on honeymoon with her second husband, and faced with the problem of what to do with her two-year-old, the couple took a bus trip, “passing Constancia and her suitcase out the window to a family to whom they’d been given a letter of introduction”. And when her little boy had an inconvenient fever on the day of a house move, Decca simply deposited him at the hospital and rushed off, leaving the nurses “furious”. By the time Kaplan tells us that her subject was “never a helicopter parent”, the information is fairly superfluous. In 1953, she writes, Decca and her husband were both suddenly subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee for a week, and their children were “left to mostly fend for themselves”. What she doesn’t explain how anyone could tell the difference.

Thankfully, the biographer eventually drops the somewhat strained theme of progressive-flavored canonization, and the rest of the book unfolds as a standard issue cradle-to-grave romp. Much of the material is already covered elsewhere. Still, with a subject like this, you can’t really fail: an eccentric, jolly contrarian, improbably popping up like a posh “Where’s Wally?” character during seismic events in American 20th-century history.

For instance: a blazing row with Decca is the apparent reason for Churchill’s recorded bad mood in the White House on Christmas Day in 1941, or so Kaplan speculates. Twenty years later, she turns up in a church in Montgomery, Alabama, listening in solidarity to Martin Luther King preach while a white supremacist mob rages violently outside. Fast forward again, and her popular book about the funeral business, The American Way of Death, is the reason RFK rejects an expensive metal coffin sent for his brother in Dallas in favor of a cheaper one. And after Jonny Cash gives $10,000 to inmates at Folsom State Prison following his famous appearance there, it is Decca, doing investigative work on prison reform, who discovers that the donation had not been honored, and who makes sure the inmates get the benefit.

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There is certainly lots to admire about this life. Decca was staunchly anti-fascist, at a time when fascists were genuinely threatening; anti-racist, when racism really was systematic and institutional. In her work, she was clever, energetic, and irrepressibly droll, a combination which made her a highly effective activist-journalist — perhaps one of the very first. (“Objectivity: I’ve always had an objective,” she would joke, pouring scorn on “pathetic cabbages without opinions”.) Her comic talent is certainly something modern Leftists could usefully emulate. But whether she ever successfully managed what she called the “uphill work” of “escaping from the private Mitford cosmic joke… into the real world of activism, family, and writing” has never been clear to me; and especially not after reading Kaplan’s book.

For the psychological sources of Decca’s politics — first communism, then socialism — remain quite mysterious. It is never really explained why Left-wing thought originally gripped her, nor why it kept such a hold for the whole of her life. She clung to her communism for a while, even after Stalin’s atrocities were revealed. She stuck to her prison abolitionist stance even after a violent sexual assault by a stranger (which she also refused to report, as he was black).

Her relationship with communism doesn’t seem to have been an intellectual love affair. There are few references in the biography to Marxist ideas. And tender-hearted empathy for her fellow humans also seems unlikely. Kaplan notes that a close friend of Decca’s once remarked that she had “a tendency to laugh off one’s problems… not being sympathetic… it’s almost as if she would rather not get involved”. 

What does seem clear is that Decca was “on fire about injustice” and could be intensely oppositional. In this last respect, she does not seem so very different to Unity, the obstreperous Hitler-loving sister to whom she was closest in childhood. Each was infatuated with a vague political ideal, initially neither knowing nor caring about the details. Each liked shocking their elders and causing trouble. Unity was going to join the British Union of Fascists, so Decca picked the communists to be different. 

On the window of their shared bedroom, Unity carved swastikas with a diamond ring, while Decca carved hammers and sickles. Both put their adolescent fantasies into action: Unity running off to join Hitler, Decca going to “fight” the fascists in Spain, though she saw no action. Sisterly rivalries are weird and intense. If Unity had announced to the nursery that she loved Stalin first, might it all have been the other way round?

We are not going to get the answer from Decca herself. She hated introspection: “I don’t think I could ever take myself seriously enough to go grubbing about looking for my soul.” But maybe the real takeaway from Troublemaker is that political obsessions are often like this, no matter what their flavor. You can tell yourself it is simply because you are a noble, principled, Good Person. But maybe it is the expression of a secret personal struggle, one that began long before you even knew what politics were. Maybe it’s a good way of formalizing the separation from the herd of your siblings. Maybe you are just really attached to the image of yourself, reflected back in your family’s outraged blue eyes. 

Through the lens of Putinism, the global stage in 2025 looks remarkably similar to 1945. Russia’s sphere of influence, and even its heartland, is under threat from forces to its west. But like 80 years ago, in the eyes of Kremlin ideologues, Russia is pushing back the tide, militarily and civilizationally too. But think again to that picture: and who Stalin is slouched with. Not some lackeys from the Politburo, but his two rivals, who both, in their way, would help dictate his country’s imperial ambitions for decades to come. That, for me, is the real lesson of Yalta eight decades on — not that Russia was naturally destined to dominate Eurasia, but that it can only succeed with help from the West.

Even before Russia really existed, its rulers leaned on outsiders. Consider the early 17th century, the so-called Time of Troubles, when Muscovy was beset by succession crises, civil wars, and foreign incursions by the Swedish Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Contrary to the popular version of history most Russians know, Michael Romanov, the first tsar of Russia’s most storied house, was crowned in 1613 only after collaborating with foreigners. Nationalist epics, notably the 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar, have paraded him as an austere hero, who fled the invading Poles instead of submit. In truth, his uncle supported Polish efforts to put a foreigner on the Russian throne, while Michael himself even lived for a time in the Polish-occupied Kremlin.

It’s a thread woven through the long centuries of Russia’s history, as it struggled to overcome the geographic prison that is Eurasia. Despite giving Russia ample space to expand, its geographic position leaves it vulnerable to land invasions from both the east and the west. Flanked, moreover, by mountains to the south, the Arctic ice to the north, and European competitors to the west, it traditionally had scant opportunities to develop its naval strength — vital for any modern superpower. Getting creative about securing sea access, and acquiring plenty of colonial possessions to act as buffers, was crucial if Russia wanted to be anything beyond a backwater outpost along the Moskva River.

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In practice, this could only happen through collaboration with outsiders, something clear enough far beyond the Time of Troubles. In the final decades of the 18th century, for instance, Russia had no qualms about flexing its military muscles. Yet when it came to vanquishing its old rival Poland-Lithuania, it relied on deal-making to carve up the Polish state alongside Austria and Prussia. In the process, it drew up a new balance of power in Eastern Europe, finalized at the Congress of Vienna and which mostly endured until 1914. It was a similar story at sea. Snatching windows on the Black Sea and the Baltic would have meant very little if Russia hadn’t equally secured passage through the Bosphorus (from the Ottomans) and the Kattegat (from Denmark) into the seven seas beyond.

Not, of course, that this heritage has stopped Russian rulers from parading their would be independence. All nationalisms are, to an extent, based on narrative-building and historical erasure, and just as A Life for the Tsar lionized Tsar Michael for the St Petersburg nobility, so too have these themes endured into the 20th century. That’s clear enough from Russian narratives about the Great Patriotic War, which describe how 20 million Soviets gave their lives to defeat the German invaders.

That sacrifice is indisputable: but Russia’s victory in Berlin would have been meaningless had it not been accepted by the Western superpowers. For if Nazi rule in Europe was undone at Stalingrad and Kursk, what came later was decided between 4-11 February 1945, at Yalta, where Roosevelt and Churchill gave Stalin their blessing to establish a new European order. In the space of just a week, Stalin convinced his allies to let him extend his reach right across Eastern Europe, annexing the Baltic States and adding a sizable chunk of Eastern Europe to his sphere of influence.

For Russian elites accustomed to thinking in historic cycles, a revised geopolitical compact, a Yalta 2.0, is therefore unsurprisingly long overdue. Not that we should think Putin is keen on just another power-grab. His famous 2005 quip that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” has been interpreted as a glib expression of Soviet nostalgia — but beneath the surface lurked a deeper fear. A new age had indeed arrived, but an updated balance of power to replace the Cold War order was never established, leaving Russia rudderless in wild geopolitical waters.

To an extent, then, Putin has long felt America’s unipolar moment was simply a delusion, an aberration of history that stubbornly denied the geopolitical realities of Russian power. And with American dominance now sliding, Putin can equally point to the revival of multipolarity, with great powers from Beijing to Delhi establishing geopolitical centers. To rephrase, then, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never just about that country alone. Rather, it was Putin’s attempt to force America and the West to confront what it sees as its natural rights, to settle the destabilizing ambiguity between where Russia’s sphere of influence ends and where America’s starts, and to finally restore balance on Moscow’s terms — the wishes of the locals from Kharkiv to Aleppo be damned.

But just as it always has, Russia cannot set up this new international system alone — despite what he might claim, Putin relies just as much on the West as his precursors in the Kremlin. One good example is that perennial quest for warm-water ports, with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria forcing Moscow to pursue good relations with its revolutionary successor. In an irony of history, and thanks to Ankara’s influence in Damascus, Russia is again forced to bargain with Turks to keep its empire afloat. On the far side of its territory, meanwhile, Russia must reckon with the presence of NATO states like Norway and Canada, as they race to establish facts-on-the-water while the ice caps melt. Faced with America and China, certainly, brute force alone is not a realistic option.

Putin will also be conscious of what happens when Russia tries to act unilaterally. Following the October Revolution, in 1917, communist fervor compelled the Bolsheviks to spread their revolution westwards. Eschewing the diplomatic waltzing of the tsars, they rejected dialogue with Europe’s bourgeois states. Following some initial successes — against newly independent Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — they were stopped by the Poles at the gates of Warsaw. After defeat in 1920, Lenin was forced to sign the Treaty of Riga, delineating the Soviet Union’s boundary with Poland. The young USSR thus had little to show for this brute display of force, and had failed to regain much of the territory Nicholas II had lost through the First World War.

Stalin’s approach two decades later took vital lessons from this historic mistake, combining the military might of the Red Army with clever diplomatic maneuvering at Yalta. Through tough negotiating and sleights of hand, Stalin convinced Roosevelt and Churchill to accept a dramatic expansion of Soviet territory, alongside a bevy of buffer states from Bulgaria to Hungary. In exchange, Stalin promised to hold free elections in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, a vow he never had any intention of keeping. The results of this maneuvering spoke for themselves: Russia extended its power further than it ever had under the tsars, and governments as far west as Berlin answered directly to Moscow.

These days, there are signs that Putin is ready to talk once more. Even before he attacked his neighbor, he had effectively demanded that Nato expel all new members since 1997. That was clearly unrealistic — but nonetheless hinted at an awareness, somewhere behind that inscrutable facade, that negotiations with the West were necessary. That’s doubly true now there’s someone new in the White House. An instinctive dealmaker, ruthless and transactional, Donald Trump may be the partner Putin needs to formalize the bounds of Russia’s new empire, establish a new balance of power in Europe, and ultimately lay down the ground rules of international relations for the rest of the century.

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The President’s other foreign ventures speak vividly to this shift. With Trump on the verge of launching a trade war with the EU, and pushing to construct a new geopolitical pole stretching from Greenland to Panama, Putin’s threats, once fantastical, now seem eminently achievable. And if all this clearly has significant implications for Ukraine — American recognition of Russian sovereignty over swathes of the country beckon — a range of far-reaching issues are also on the agenda for a future Trump-Putin meeting. Among other things, that includes nuclear arms control and energy prices. Worryingly for the Europeans, meanwhile, it’s becoming ever clearer that any such summit will exclude Ukraine, at least at first, and that Trump won’t merely represent the United States, but rather personify Nato and the whole Western world. Putin certainly sees him that way: with the precedent of Yalta at his back, he’ll view the talks as a generational opportunity to clarify the global playing field from the Pacific to the Danube.

That still leaves the question: what exactly might Putin try and secure from his negotiations with Trump? Once more, Yalta is a guide. Trump himself may see Europe as a sideshow, but for Putin, like Stalin before him, it will always be ground zero for the country’s ambitions. Ukraine may have replaced Poland as the primary object of Russian geopolitical maneuvering, but like in 1945, conversations about its future will form only the backdrop for wider questions about Russia’s sphere of influence. Moldova and Georgia are two obvious candidates here, even as Hungary and Romania, both firmly within the Nato orbit, could yet be up for discussion.

In other words, then, whether or not Ukraine is eventually included in the talks will ultimately be irrelevant. For Putin, the country is little more than an American puppet, and for Trump, it’s a burden. Like Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe in 1945, Ukraine’s fate will be decided by Russia and the United States alone, and any subsequent involvement by Kyiv will be little more than window dressing. Once again, we’ve seen this play before. Harry Truman wholeheartedly disagreed with the terms Roosevelt had reached with Stalin — but by the time he took office after FDR’s death, it was too late, and he had no choice but to rubber-stamp Yalta at the Potsdam Conference five months later.

In the end, the green light Moscow received from America was a more powerful tool for its expansionist ambitions than any tank or bomb. Even so, Soviet leaders saw no hint of irony when they played the orchestral finale of A Life for the Tsar at their victory parade in June 1945, a musical retreat to a Russia that never truly existed. Eight decades on, if Yalta 2.0 does indeed come to pass, it will be curious to see if Putin goes for the opera once more. Either way, Michael Romanov would surely be proud.

All this happened 100 years ago, of course, in 1923, when Stalin’s erasure of factionalism was in full putsch. Poor old Trotsky had been banished, and members of The Workers’ Truth — think Momentum blokes with similar beards but sturdier clothes — were expelled from the party, if they were lucky. Of course, nobody for a second is suggesting Keir Starmer is anything like Joseph Stalin. He’s several inches taller and supports an independent Ukraine, for a start. However, the current Purification of Labour certainly has a Stalinist echo, doesn’t it?

So, why does paranoid android Starmer feel the urge to purge? As Marx didn’t say: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, secondly on Twitter.” There is something both tragic and farcical about Starmer’s war on dissent. All those solemn little Komsomol interns wearing I’m here for Keir! lapel badges, bog-snorkelling through the tides of human effluent on social media, trawling for indiscretions, missteps, wrongthink. He did WHAT? Shared a platform with Ken Loach? Expressed support for the idea of a progressive alliance? “Liked” a “problematic tweet”? Oh, here’s a good one — a Labour MP with a Punjabi Sikh dad tweeted saying Rishi Sunak being prime minister, “isn’t a win for Asian representation. He’s a multi-millionaire who, as chancellor, cut taxes on bank profits while overseeing the biggest drop in living standards since 1956”. No, we can’t have that, Keir’s just been on Sky News telling everyone how he congratulated Rishi “for being a prime minister of British Asian descent, and it’s really, really important that I did that”. Say what you like about Starmer. He really, really admires his own probity.

Yeah, it’s a tough time to be a socialist in the Labour Party. No surprise that the brightest meteor in the sky at the moment is shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, who is clearly being positioned as a man for all factions, in the sense that he’s cheerfully drawing fire from all of them and apparently not giving a shit. His dull but likable memoir has been doing the rounds to generally favourable reviews despite its excruciating title — One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up — and prose that’s been ironed flat. It offers an origin story that used to be commonplace among Labour MPs in the days before politicians started going straight into parliament from law, journalism or their gap year.

The Streeting autobiography, like those of Frank Field and Alan Johnson before it, charts a long march from working class poverty to political power. More importantly, here is a young Labour government minister-in-waiting — he’s still only 40 — who understands the acute problems faced by the contemporary poor, not what he calls the imaginary “Hovis working class” beloved of such social scientists as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries. The only thing his Ilford North constituency has plenty of is deprivation. Streeting knows himself well enough to recognise what he’s lost and gained in the transition to middle-class life. His sense of injustice over the plight of the working poor — a class of people very much associated with the last 13 years of Tory government — is raw, his anger real. We’re a world away from the days of Blair’s public sector spendathon, when John Prescott told everyone, we were “all middle class now”. He might just as well have told us we were all millionaires.

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Streeting is certainly showing flair as a self-publicist, and it’s fun to see the fallout. He and his book have been everywhere in the past fortnight, as he relives a Stepney childhood full of stoical women and decent men and a grandfather who was a little bit whee, a little bit whurr, a little bit repeatedly in prison. His media knees-up has already prompted anonymous grumblings among some of his shadow cabinet colleagues, allegedly pissed off that Labour’s policy agenda has been eclipsed by what Trotsky might have called a “cult of personality”. Streeting’s an engaging interviewee. In common with Labour deputy Angela Rayner, he has an ordinary voice. He can be disarmingly frank. He told the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone: “A great night out is going out with friends and getting absolutely plastered … I’m a bad binge drinker. That’s terrible messaging for the shadow health secretary, but I am a binge drinker.”

The Mail, the Express, the Telegraph, the Sun will all keep that in their back pockets of course, but Streeting’s flawed-Christian everyman candour is at the moment playing very much to his advantage. George W. Bush’s home truth that voters essentially want a candidate they could imagine having a beer with is still a useful guide. I and many party members would much rather have a beer with Streeting than with Starmer. Two beers, tops. If it’s binge drinking, I’d go for vodka jellies with Angela in a heartbeat.

Streeting has made no secret of his ambition to one day be leader of the Labour Party, chiefly by unequivocally denying it, and also by pledging total support for Sir Keir. With his solid reputation as a Labour Right-winger, Streeting even gives notice of how he’d launch a leadership bid: “I’d tack Left. You win the Labour leadership from the Left, as I reminded Tony Blair from time to time. His pitch of 1994 was not the Tony Blair of 2007.” Streeting is clearly an ambitious pragmatist, like Starmer. An infuriated membership beseeches Labour leaders to be bolder. In fact, a huge, roiling majority of the public want to renationalise water, rail and energy, and think nurses and teachers shouldn’t have to use food banks. But Team Starmer simply taps the latest polling screenshot and tells them to calm down. Promising nothing is a strategy now. If you could map the level of fury among fellow Labour members at the perceived inertia of His Majesty’s Opposition, it would look like one of those “hottest day on record” charts.

Starmer’s hero is Harold Wilson and on one hand you can understand why. After all, he was head of a Labour government when the Beatles were in power, when the country was redefining itself for a new, optimistic world. We had a roaring economy, equal rights legislation, BBC2 commissioning Monty Python and Kenneth Clark in colour. The Open University. The World Cup. It was the best of times; it was the best of times. But at least Wilson acknowledged the broad church that the party had always been. He was fond of quoting Ian Mikardo’s clunky maxim: “Every bird needs a Left wing and a Right wing and it can’t fly on its Right wing alone.” Perhaps this is why Starmer appears to be in a holding pattern above the political landscape, Labour circling with its single, flapping wing.

One vociferous faction Starmer’s keen to ignore is the young, energised, progressive wing of the party. The Pink News and Canary crowd. The Just Stop Oil, keeping up with the Owen Joneses guys. It’s one thing to dismiss them as smug idealists, out of touch with ordinary people, luxuriating in their bubbly purity whirlpool. It’s quite another to argue against them. This is why Streeting rather than Starmer is emerging as Podcast Left’s bogeyman. Members of the Streeting Tendency share socially conservative views rooted in a traditional, working-class Old Labour, where middle-class issues are treated with some scepticism, and where it’s acceptable to approve of getting on, “bettering” yourself.

While Starmer blanks the party dissenters, Streeting runs straight towards them. His strength as a man for all factions is not that he wants to please everyone but that he’s prepared to be shot by both sides. He upset NHS absolutists by saying he’d use private healthcare to clear waiting lists — a strong echo of Blair’s “whatever works”. He’s also on record recalling with glee how private care turnover “fell off a cliff” under the last Labour administration because the NHS functioned really well, and how he’d love an NHS so strong it would all but kill off the private sector. His views on abortion upset a broad spectrum of people, including secularists (he has sympathy for those opposed on faith grounds) the religious (he votes “in a secular way” because he believes in the diversity of a liberal democracy) and parents of children with Down’s Syndrome — along with Richard Dawkins, he supports late termination of a foetus with Down’s. Sidenote: as the grandparent of a child with DS I am happy to invite him to shove that one right up his moral vacuum. Reinforcing the belief that a child will be a burden to the parents and a drain on society’s resources? Imagine if we had a society that felt an honourable duty to support children with disabilities. Imagine if that was a Labour Party aspiration.

Oh, talking of “existence debating”, Streeting’s even taken multi-faction fire by wading into the Debate That Needn’t Even Speak Its Name. Even more recklessly, he wants to take a centrist position that, according to the rules of social media trench warfare, doesn’t exist. As the former head of education for Stonewall, he has impeccable credentials as a trans ally. Except he insists on recognising and protecting sex-based rights and seems to have no problem with biological framing. In one interview, he subscribed to that framing, before launching an excoriating attack on the gender-critical feminists using ugly, demeaning language to monster trans people. Right after, he got his 15 minutes of hate from both ends, the public forums ablaze.

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And while Starmer is content to allow people to infer that he was always in a way slightly allergic to Corbynism, Streeting smacks his empty lager glass down on the table and calls the 2019 Labour Party “a shipwreck”. Starmer’s personality is still at the printer’s; Streeting meanwhile watches his political stock rise as more and more people in the party see him as the enemy within. Very Blair.

And let’s be frank, a plausible answer to the question “why get tough on Labour factionalism now?” is “have you seen the absolute state of the Tory party?” Stalin — him again, what can I say, he’s quotable — said his two greatest generals on the Eastern Front were January and February. Within living memory, the Tory Party boasted that its two greatest political weapons were loyalty and unity. I mean, look at it now. Its last year has been like Game of Thrones Season Nine. Brutal, tribal, full of awful characters. Boris Johnson trashed the Conservative Party, then half-pulled the scenery down with him when he lurched off-stage. Having effectively created several splinter groups through his presence, he caused several more through his absence. Maybe Starmer took one look at what happens when you don’t ruthlessly suppress factionalism and decided to go the other way. The Tory factions have been getting more desperate and less interesting with each incarnation: “Trussite” was actually a word for at least 36 hours last year. The “New Conservatives”: what do they want?

Rishi Sunak is fading from public view by the day. He’s getting asked the same question as Starmer — what do you stand for? Anything? — but it’s hurting him more. At this stage, Sunak is just vapour in a slim-fit shirt, and Starmer can afford to worry less about being upstaged by his tribal enemy. Perhaps his calculation is that now is the time to quash internal opposition, not in the middle of a general election campaign. At the moment, he seems quite content to make every angry brigade on the Left even angrier, and allow his champion to block the backlash of vengeance. It’s Streeting who faces every beating, and he seems to be thriving. Every purge, after all, needs an anti-hero. Especially one who may lead the party in a few years’ time.

This isn’t, in fact, all that surprising. The more capitalism shatters traditional pieties, disregards frontiers and uproots whole communities, the more strident become the defenders of family, religion and fatherland. The more narratives of God, People and Nation are spurned as outdated, the more potently they return.

Those for whom identity is flexible confront those who know who they are only too well. For every Texan CEO knocking back free booze in the VIP lounges of airports, there’s a bearded patriarch with a rifle for whom the Other is to be found just over the river. There are some glamorous nightclubs in Istanbul, while around Mardin and Diyarbakir in the Kurdish south-east of Turkey people pray on the pavements and donkeys wander through filling stations.

Tradition and modernity are complicit as well as conflicting. A world of constant flux and restless innovation is in danger of eroding the values by which it legitimates itself. This wasn’t a problem for the Victorians, who despite the pace of social change and the clamour of the marketplace still clung to certain eternal verities. They were aware that you couldn’t legitimise what you did in purely secular, pragmatic terms, not least if it included herding people into slums and workhouses. Instead, there were certain foundational principles to which they could appeal, from the laws of God to the sanctity of the family and the supreme value of the individual.

Precepts like these were particularly important if you were trying to run an empire, a discreditable affair for which you need a whole raft of high-minded rationales. It’s true that there can be an embarrassing gap between your principles and your practice, as there is in today’s United States. Having spent the week bribing officials and shafting your competitors, you gather in church on Sunday morning to celebrate the metaphysical aspect of your existence. On the whole, however, the two sides of your life peacefully coexist, rather as Jacob Rees-Mogg is Victorian toff and modern entrepreneur in a single surreal person.

There are limits, however, to this coexistence. Sooner or later, the fluid, unstable, provisional nature of life in the shopping mall and marketplace is likely to infiltrate the moral sphere as well. It’s then that people begin to talk about postmodernism. Eternal verities drop away, and along with them the stout foundations on which you used to rely for defending your way of life. Talk of God, Progress and the Destiny of the Nation starts to sound hollow in the world of Tesco and Google. It served capitalism well in its earlier, more triumphalist phase, but it doesn’t ring true in the era of Britain’s Got Talent. Instead, moral values become relative and subjective: you may object to serial killing, but personally I find it a lot of fun. This kind of thing may be harmless among friends, but it’s no way to run a country. To do that, you need a firmer framework and a tighter consensus, not least at times of political or economic crisis. Yet what if you have just relativised all that out of existence? What if modern capitalism saws off the branch on which it is sitting?

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By Terry Eagleton

It’s at this point that turning to nationalism, populism, religion and traditional ethics has its appeal, whether in Ankara or Washington. It’s particularly attractive if you are confronting an enemy such as Islamism, which has no trouble at all with moral absolutes and metaphysical foundations. You don’t want to be left ideologically disarmed in this struggle, even if you’ve done most of the disarming yourself. So large patches of the globe shift towards authoritarianism, which isn’t necessarily the same as coercion. In the recent Turkish elections, for instance, millions of people have just consented to be coerced, or at least consented to a political regime which works in large measure by authoritarian means.

Like any other form of government, such regimes will only survive in the long run if they can persuade enough citizens to identify with them. People must feel that their identity is at stake in supporting this power. They must find themselves reflected in the Leader, as a child may see itself in the fond look of its parents. Because power, law and the state are abstractions, it’s easier to get people to internalise them if they take on tangible form. In autocratic states, power is incarnate in a single figure; but this means that some of the people might identify not with power itself but with the individual who represents it. To avoid this happening, Nature in its infinite wisdom has made a lot of those individuals either faceless or repulsive. Erdoğan, who looks like a harassed, slightly down-at-heel schoolteacher on the point of retirement, is an example of the former. Adolf Hitler was an ill-favoured little runt, Stalin looked like a crafty walrus and Mao was in sore need of a spell in the gym.

Most of these men were dictators, not just authoritarians, and the power of a dictator is absolute. The word “absolute” means free or unrestricted, which includes being unrestricted by circumstances. To say that torturing a baby is absolutely wrong is to say that it’s wrong irrespective of any circumstances you might specify in order to justify it. Absolute power is power which is in principle unconstrained. It may rein itself in, or even show mercy and compassion, but it does these things only when it feels like it.

Nietzsche believed that the Superman should treat ordinary folk with kindness, but he saw this as an act of condescension, not as a moral obligation. It is a form of sovereignty which rests entirely on itself, and is therefore arbitrary. If it had to appeal to law or custom or tradition to validate itself, these things would take precedence over it and it would cease to be absolute. Besides, there are no laws for how the law is to be established in the first place, which means that law has a close affinity with lawlessness. Many political set-ups rely for their stability on people coming to forget the blood and tears in which they were born.

Because absolute power is unrestrained, it can be hard to distinguish it from anarchy, even though it is often anarchy which it is out to suppress. The two are sides of the same coin. In Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic Where The Wild Things Are, the hero Max becomes king of the wild things, a phrase which contains a crucially ambiguous preposition (of). Does it mean that Max is king over the wild things or the wildest thing of all? The answer, needless to say, is both.

The absolute and the anarchic are also related in another sense. Absolutists are people who fear that the only alternative to rigid laws and precise regulations is total chaos. Unless you have a rule forbidding players to pass the ball back to the goalkeeper, then — key phrase — before you know where you are, all the players will be passing back to the goalie all the time and the game will never get started. One might call this the essence of the authoritarian mind-set. Allow people their freedom and they will abuse it. The fact that they aren’t really people without it is overlooked. How could you possibly have pavements on which people can walk in opposite directions at the same time? Everyone would obstruct everyone else and nobody would ever get anywhere.

It is logical, then, that Shakespeare’s autocratic Lear is accompanied throughout most of the play by the anarchic Fool. There is more than one sense in which the two are terrible twins. For one thing, anyone who wants to be a king must be a fool, at least in Shakespeare’s day. This is one reason why Lear is mad. Monarchs attract envy and aggression, which is why tribal chiefs in pre-modern societies are sometimes ritually beaten during their coronations. This didn’t happen to King Charles, but he still managed to look like a helpless victim throughout the ceremony, as a group of men around his throne kept doing things to him and he just had to sit there and take it.

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For another thing, the Fool’s debunkery strips the mask from his master’s authority, showing it to be just as arbitrary as his own antics. The problem with sovereignty is that, being perched on a height, it can’t see itself in the eyes of other people, and so can’t have its identity confirmed by them. This is why Lear begs for someone to tell him who he is. Without dialogue with others, selfhood simply implodes, which is another reason why Lear is mad. In one or two of his other plays, Shakespeare seeks to repair this situation by drawing on the legend of the ruler who moves incognito among the common people in order to learn about their daily lives. Today, minus the incognito, this is known as a walk-about.

Those who are driven mad by power in our own time aren’t so much kings or politicians as celebrities. Like Lear at the beginning of the play, they are told only what they want to hear, and thus see themselves mirrored everywhere they look. Only by encountering otherness can one know who one is, and thus retain a degree of sanity. Otherwise, like a certain famous entertainer, you will end up asking your assistants to stop the wind from blowing.

“In the old days, we had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are dying of hunger. In the old days, we fed the world. Now they have taken all we had away from us and we have nothing. In the old days, I should have bade you welcome, and given you as my guest chickens and eggs and milk and fine, white bread. Now we have no bread in the house. They are killing us.”

The words are spoken by a Ukrainian peasant to the Welsh Journalist Gareth Jones and duly reported in the Daily Express on 6 April 1933. Jones was the first person to report the truth of the famine that Josef Stalin unleashed on Ukraine when he decided its people were hoarding grain that rightly belonged to the State and duly sent his commissars backed by troops to expropriate (read: steal) it. At least 5 million people died from starvation in the USSR between 1931 and 1934 — including 3.9 million Ukrainians. It was a low point even by the standards of the vertiginously bloody 20th century.

Now, almost a century later, soldiers have once more been sent by Moscow to seize Ukrainian grain. Once more, farmers are killed and their barns and stores looted. And once more, the Ukrainian people are being made to pay for the madness of their neighbouring Tsar.

***

Ukraine is a country cursed by its good luck. It is well-known that it is perennially — and unambiguously — cursed by geography: it sits next to Russia, which has brought it the USSR, Josef Stalin, the gulags and an unsuccessful Cold War. There isn’t really any upside to all this.

Less known is that Ukraine also suffers from its own fecundity. The country is coated in so-called “black soil” (Chernozem), which contains the humus and variety of micro elements that make it the most fertile soil in the world. In it grows massive amounts of barley, wheat, corn, soy, rape seed and sunflowers. Only about 2% of the world’s soil is black soil and about 25% of that is found in Ukraine. The country has around 42 million hectares of agricultural land of which roughly 32 million is cultivated every year — equivalent to roughly one-third of the arable land in the entire European Union. It is an agricultural superpower.

According to former Minister of Agriculture, Roman Leshchenko, “it is no exaggeration to state that Ukraine can feed the world” — and therein lies the problem. Stalin considered Ukraine the “breadbasket” of the Soviet Union and when Hitler dreamt up a demented idea of empire based up on the principle of Lebensraum it was control of Ukraine’s black soil that he hoped would feed the Third Reich. In came the Germans; once more Ukrainian blood flowed.

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Since the Russians invaded on 24 February, they have destroyed civilian districts, smashed public infrastructure, and tortured and executed prisoners. They have also stolen farm equipment, shelled food storage sites and stolen thousands of tonnes of grain. It’s systemic and it’s planned and most obvious in the country’s south, where I spent considerable time over the past two months. In both the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts farmers have reported multiple thefts. In the Kherson village of Mala Lepetykha, Russian soldiers reportedly stole 1,500 tons of grain from storage units which they then drove to Crimea.

“It’s very simple,” says Andrey Stavnitser, co-owner and CEO of Ukrainian port operating company TransInvestService. “They’re stealing grain in the areas they have invaded — Mariupol, Kherson Melitopol and so on — which they then take to Crimea, load onto vessels pretending its Russian grain, and then sell. With grain, if you don’t tag it, it’s impossible to tell where it comes from, especially if they mix it with Crimean and Russian grain.”

Then there is the problem that Ukraine cannot export the grain it has. When I first arrived in Odesa last month, I noticed that the city’s most famous sight, the Potemkin steps that connect the harbour to the city, were inaccessible: surrounded by soldiers who had closed the port for fear of Russian attacks. Russia stole Crimea in 2014 and with it the Ukraine’s most important port. Now it has taken Mariupol and, with it, Ukraine’s access to the Azov sea. Now it heads toward Mykolaiv and then eventually, it hopes, Odesa. In the meantime, it is shelling both cities, rendering their ports unusable. Ukraine cannot get its grain out.

This creates a twofold problem. First, Ukraine has 320 million tonnes of grain stuck in the country from last year’s crop, which Stavnitser calculates is costing Ukraine around $15 billion of revenue. To make matters worse, the new crop is ready in late June, which means more will need to be stored if it cannot be sold. But Kyiv usually just sells its grain immediately so it never bothered investing in the appropriate technology for longer-term storage. Now the grain risks going rotten.

Together this creates a second problem that spreads far beyond Ukraine. Several African countries depend on Ukrainian grain. Around 40% of Egyptian milling grain —the grain that is used for bread — comes from Ukraine. If this fails to materialise there won’t be famine but there would likely be widespread hunger. The effect of this on the country, as well as on the region’s political stability, would almost certainly be catastrophic.

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And there are dangers closer to home, too. Just this week, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England warned that Britain faces an “apocalyptic” rise in food prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “[An inflation risk factor] I am going to sound apocalyptic about is food,” he told the Treasury select committee. “Ukraine does have food in store but can’t get it out at the moment.”

In her book Red Famine, the historian Anne Applebaum writes that “long before collectivisation began, the phenomenon of the violent expropriator — a man who brandished a gun, spouted slogans and demanded food — was familiar in Soviet Ukraine.” Now the violent expropriators are back and almost a century later, not only have their goals — the theft of Ukraine’s resources — remained unchanged, but seemingly also their tactics.

The Russian army still fights like the Red Army did during the Second World War. Its tactics remain equally stupid, its brutality equally unchecked. It murders Ukrainian children. It destroys Ukrainian artefacts. It tries to erase all traces of the country’s national identity. No surprise, then, that its incompetence means it has only succeeded in galvanising it. The more Russia stirs memories of the Holodomor the more national feeling it breeds in Ukranians; the more it steals and rapes and kills, the more Ukraine becomes determined to resist — until the end if need be.

But it needs help. While the world buys Russian oil and finances its war, many countries are also buying its grain, some of which is almost certainly stolen from Ukraine. Beginning in March Moscow has struck new deals with Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Libya. “It is totally unacceptable that anyone can buy grain from Russia because this is fuelling the war,” says Stavnitser. “You cannot protest the war and then go out and do things that only serve to prolong it.”

The next few weeks are likely to prove critical. As Stavnitser concludes: “We all hope the UN succeeds in negotiating humanitarian corridor for grain with Russia and if this happens, we will start exporting last year’s crop fast and also be able to start exporting the new crop in a few weeks’ time. If that doesn’t happen then we will be reduced to using rail and road and some smaller ports and can export only around 1.2 to 1.5 million tonnes [as opposed to 5-6 million]. If this happens then many countries — especially in Africa — will be facing a severe ad urgent food crisis.”

Those squirrelled library loans formed a tiny part of a vast collection amassed by the Soviet dictator, estimated by historian Geoffrey Roberts at 25,000 items. Joseph Stalin’s books, as Roberts recounts in his new study Stalin’s Library, belonged to “a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power”. He spent a lifetime as a “highly active, engaged and methodical reader”. His tastes and interests spanned not only politics, economics and history but literature of many kinds. The book-loving shoemaker’s son from Georgia grew into an absolute ruler who deployed his library not as a prestige adornment but a “working archive”. Its bulging shelves stretched across his Kremlin offices and quarters, and around his dachas outside central Moscow.

Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.

Stalin also drafted, wrote, and re-wrote, keenly and tirelessly — everything from Communist Party propaganda to Soviet legal edicts and textbooks in history, Marxist-Leninist philosophy and economics. He loved to edit and, as Roberts shows, he did it very well, slicing through the verbiage of sycophants to achieve greater “clarity and accuracy”. Although not an original thinker, “his intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser”. Robert Service, in his biography, calls the dictator “an accumulator and regurgitator” of ideas. Stalin never returned to the verse of his adolescence, but the young poet known as “Soselo” had won anthology places for the fragile tenderness of Georgian lyrics such as “To the Moon” (translation by Donald Rayfield):

Know for certain that once
Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man
Strives again to reach the pure mountain,
When exalted by hope.
So, lovely moon, as before
Glimmer through the clouds;
Pleasantly in the azure vault
Make your beams play.

Later, as a vigilant, hands-on editor, Stalin knew how to cut the theoretical waffle, keep things concrete and tell a striking story. In mass-circulation works such as the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with its 36 million copies printed in the decade after 1938, he especially liked to strike out “laudatory accounts of his own role”. He insisted that cloying hero-worship made his stomach turn. “What are people supposed to do?” Stalin asked sarcastically as he toned down the official Short Biography of himself published in 1946. “Get down on their knees and pray to me?” No court jester dared answer: “Yes”.

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Of all the mind-scrambling glimpses of the despot as an “emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual” gathered in Stalin’s Library, none quite matches the record of a Central Committee meeting, held in September 1940, about the limits of artistic expression. The General Secretary spoke up firmly on the side of freedom. “You have to let people express themselves,” Comrade Stalin argued. Artists should avoid fairy-tales that toe the party line.

Take the wonderful Chekhov, who “has no heroes but rather grey people”. Stalin approves. Even the enemies of the Soviet Union should not be depicted as monsters “lacking all human traits”. Even Trotsky — here you imagine stifled intakes of breath around a smoky Kremlin chamber — was a “capable person” who must be shown with all his “positive qualities”. Was a capable person: just a couple of weeks earlier, Ramón Mercader had, on Stalin’s orders, buried an ice-axe in Trotsky’s skull in Mexico City. Thus putting a definitive end to his character development, positive or negative.

How many other people did Stalin kill? If Cold War-era historians such as Robert Conquest laid 15-20 million deaths at his door (in The Great Terror), post-Soviet research has led scholars such as Timothy Snyder to suggest a revised estimate of between six and nine million (Bloodlands). Even the lowest figure freezes the imagination. For almost a century, allies, enemies, victims and a wondering posterity have struggled to understand how this gigantic annihilation of life and hope emerged from the ideas and deeds not of a “psychopath” — Roberts rightly rejects the term — but a shrewd, calm, widely-read and thoughtful politician-manager who had learned both to “rationalise and abstract himself from his terrible rule”. Trotsky lies dead in a Mexican morgue. A shame: such a smart guy…

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Stalin, then, presents a challenge to anyone who claims a specific link between deep reading and the pursuit of ethical or social virtue. Learning nurtures wisdom in many ancient traditions. But the years since the millennium have seen a small explosion in research that tries to prove a non-trivial link between consistent reading and the empathy that allows us to inhabit other souls and walk a verst (or many) in their shoes. If literature doesn’t exactly make you better, runs the refrain of many experimental papers in psychology and neuroscience, then regular exposure to it — especially fiction — will enhance those social skills that demand an understanding of the world perceived through other eyes.

“Specifically, engaging with narrative fiction and mentally simulating the social experiences represented may improve or maintain social skills, especially skills of empathy and social understanding,” reports one widely-cited Canadian paper from 2009, referenced in the back-up materials for World Book Day (celebrated on 3 March). Toronto novelist-psychologist Keith Oatley, one of its authors, has emerged as a leading champion of reading as an empathy shot. (Interestingly, his University of Toronto co-researchers on that paper included Jordan B Peterson, later to find wider fame elsewhere.)

A survey of the evidence from 2016 affirms that “Readers of fiction score higher on measures of empathy and theory of mind (ToM) — the ability to think about others’ thoughts and feelings — than non-readers, even after controlling for age, gender, intelligence and personality factors”. The World Book Day outreach projects aim to put books into non-readers’ hands, on the basis that “Reading for pleasure is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success — more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.” Here, empathy as social asset takes a back seat as voluntary reading becomes a sort of educational superpower.

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Stalin, by the way, did read plenty of fiction, drama, poetry and narrative history in addition to political and economic analysis. He loved the novels of Émile Zola, made writer Maxim Gorky the most fêted private citizen in the USSR, and ran the Stalin Prizes for creative writing from his own office. Dmitry Shepilov, Pravda editor and court intellectual, later wrote that Stalin “was probably better prepared for the meetings than anyone else”. Sinister tales abound of his creepily close-focus attention to the literary arts in Soviet Russia.

One of the best known, not mentioned in Roberts’s book, concerns the arrest and persecution of the poet Osip Mandelstam. In 1934, Stalin phoned the detained poet’s friend, Boris Pasternak. “Mandelstam’s case is being analysed”, Stalin reassures Pasternak:

“Everything will be worked out. Why haven’t the writers’ organisations come to me? If I were a poet and my friend had fallen into disgrace, I would climb the walls to help him.”

Then Stalin dons his critic’s hat to ask “But is he or is he not a master?” Pasternak replies “That’s not the point!”, and requests a meeting. But Stalin hangs up. In the event, the Kremlin Mountaineer — the title of Mandelstam’s famous anti-Stalin satire — did not exactly murder the poet. Exile, jail and illness killed Mandelstam in 1938. It was not quite an execution; not an exoneration either. More a lethal “m-da”.

Although it lies beyond the author’s remit, Stalin’s Library tests to destruction the consoling notion that long, wide, extensive reading confers the gift of empathy — or rather, that empathy is a value to cherish. Roberts, though, maintains that whatever vital sparks of humanity the Soviet autocrat lacked, the ability to conceive the independent life of other minds was not among them. Indeed, he credits Stalin with “too much human empathy” as the grand paranoiac envisaged the hearts of his rivals seething with non-existent plots and stratagems to oust him. What the ultimate scholar-slayer missed was any shred of the “compassion or sympathy” that might stay his hand before he sent the bodies of those minds to a slow, cold fate in the Gulag or a quicker end in the basement of the Lubyanka.

In his reading, Stalin preferred strong characters — real or fictional — with firmly-marked personality and agency, not blurred ciphers of a class or an epoch. “Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine,” he proclaimed about the great Tsars in the course of a critique of the over-theoretical Soviet textbooks of the 1930s, “They rested on certain classes … but they acted, they were historical figures”. Stalin may never actually have said anything like “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic” (though the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky did). But the apocryphal wisecrack at least captures an empathetic reader’s ability to feel the weight of individual lives and minds.

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Stalin did not lack empathy, then, for writers or their work. He grasped too — as censorious heresy-hunters still do not — that books acquire meaning and value separate from their creators’ beliefs. Defending the genius of the “reactionary” Nicolai Gogol, he urged that “the world views of writers should not be confused with the impact of their works on readers”. Nothing in Stalin’s long, complex and sometimes subtle engagement with culture disproves the advocates of intensive reading as a highway to empathy. The flaw, rather, lies in treating that quality as a firm proxy for interpersonal goodwill.

However robust and reliable on its own terms, research on the reading-empathy connection comes out of a cognitive science that finds it hard to define and describe a social world far beyond its probings of the story-stimulated mind. The 2016 paper I cited on “Reading fiction and reading minds” leaps from a scrutiny of the brain’s “default network”, and its activation by reading, to the assertion that: “Historically, highly literate societies, especially societies that produced psychologically rich literature, function more empathically and less violently than less literate societies.”

Show me a society with a greater “psychologically rich literature” than Russia. Now show me one that, in modern times, has brutalised its own people and its neighbours with more savagery. China, perhaps, or Germany? Both are also powerhouses of “psychologically rich literature”. Without the norms, laws and institutions to scale up private understanding into public civility, the solitary reader’s empathy will be, at best, an advantageous knack. After all, every low-grade swindler, conman and fraudster depends on a serviceable theory of other minds and how they work. And, if your milieu and your ideology impose no veto on mass persecution and state murder, the ability to mess with your victims’ heads simply adds another weapon to the oppressor’s armoury.

Perhaps the empathy that books deepen can only do collective good if a community — whether a household or a nation — decides to reward the sort of fellow-feeling that brings help and not harm to others. Whereas in the moral wasteland of Stalin’s Russia, the insight into other minds conferred by some of these 25,000 volumes served as just another manipulative tool of domination. Reading alone, could not make Stalin less Stalinist. If anything, his lifelong bookworm’s habits seem to have turned him — to quote his own formula for the writer’s role — into a more cunning and devious “engineer of human souls”.

A running commentary on the criminal nature of the administration has been silenced: what is now happening is less dramatic, less easily grasped, without a dominant figure pointing to its venality.

The pressure comes in two forms. One is wholly willed by the regime, aimed at discrediting dissidence of all kinds. The other, less apparent, is a by-product of the economic and social policies of a government which has set its face against economic reform of any depth, on the grounds that it risks destabilising the form of governance which has developed under the Putin presidency.

The latter of these is the subject of an excoriating report, published at the end of last month, under the title of The Coming Deluge (a reference to the remark — “After us, the deluge” —  said to have been made, several decades before the revolution, by Louis XV of France in 1857 to his favourite, Madame de Pompadour — or by her to him). The highly regarded commentator Andrei Kolesnikov, who with Denis Volkov wrote the report based on interviews made over the past six months with a number of leading business figures and economists, argues that “the prevailing attitude among members of the ruling class appears to be that there is enough oil and gas to keep the state coffers full, buy voters’ loyalty, and control civil society and the media for as long as the country’s current leaders are in power (until 2036, when President Vladimir Putin may at last have to step down). What comes after that does not concern them: ‘After us, the deluge.'”

The governing class, secure in their control of the rents derived from oil and gas, “are mired in inaction by feelings of complacency and a widespread reluctance to engage in any long-term strategic planning or change… Unless something drastically changes, stagnation in the broadest sense of the word — from economic depression to social apathy — is the only possible medium and long-term scenario for Russia.”

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One result, largely ignored by the administration, is what one respondent to the Kolesnikov report termed a pervasive “inequality of rights”, arising from “vastly different access to healthcare, education, state services and other infrastructure”.

The longer term outcome, however, is one which is presently degrading Russia’s once formidable intellectual capital, and which helps solves the elite’s problem of discontented young protestors — by persuading them that change was impossible.

Sergei Guriev, once head of the New Economic School who chose to leave Russia after “a frightening and humiliating interrogation” in 2013 because of his support for Navalny, told Kolesnikov and Volkov: “Russia’s main problem is the deterioration of human capital. Russia inherited an important competitive advantage from the Soviet period, but this advantage — its education system and respect for human capital — is constantly being demolished; educated people are leaving; colleges and schools are falling behind their peers. It’s possible that, in ten or fifteen years, Russia will not have obvious sources of economic growth or be catching up to its neighbours.”

The more direct assault on the Russian mind, increasingly evident over the past decade, has been focussed on leading figures in the remaining institutions of liberal education and culture. Over the past year, some 20 leaders of universities have been replaced, in nearly all cases by academics who are also members of Putin’s United Russia party — which won the parliamentary elections in September and thus two thirds of the seats in the Duma, a result attended by protests from most parts of the country of fraud, ballot stuffing and intimidation.

The three most prestigious academic centres, created after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, are the Higher Economic School, the New Economic School and the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. Guriev fled from his post in 2013; and in July this year, Jaroslav Kuzminov, who had struggled to keep his School out of the Kremlin’s disfavour,  resigned as head of the Higher Economic School after the arrest of several of his students, who had produced a magazine critical of the government.

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Also this year, a unique joint programme between St Petersburg University and the US’s Bard College, conceived in 1994, whose fruit was the founding of Russia’s first liberal arts programme at Smolny College, was abruptly terminated. The Russian Prosecutor General’s office declared Bard an “undesirable organisation” under a recent law aimed at banning foreign institutions and influences, calling it “a threat to the foundations of Russia’s constitutional order”.

The most recent assault, and the most obviously ruthless, zeroes in on the Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences — universally known as the “Shaninka”, or Shanin’s place. Teodor Shanin born in 1930 to a Jewish family, in Wilno, now Vilnius, survived the a spell in Siberia, reached Israel in time to fight in the Arab-Israeli war, worked and studied in Israel until 1964, joined the academic staff of the University of Birmingham in 1965 and in 1995, returned to Russia and founded, with others, the “Shaninka”, which he directed from its foundation in 1995 until his death in 2020. Energetic and non-conformist, his School became the first place of study of sociology, including a clear-eyed  view of Putin’s Russia, a tradition carried on by his successors, including the present rector, Sergei Zuev.

In October, Zuev, who has a serious heart condition, was taken from hospital for a 30-hour interrogation; returned to house arrest, then taken back to prison once more. He was charged with embezzling 21m roubles ($300,000), linked to a broader case against a former deputy Education Minister, Marina Rakova, also now imprisoned. In an analysis of the case, Nikolai Petrov, himself an alumnus of the Higher School of Economics, argued that the Zuev, Rakova and other arrests are part of intense manoeuvring within the Kremlin elite, in which individuals are used as pawns — the more so, if they are thought to be “disloyal” because of liberal sympathies. Petrov writes that “the brutality meted out has now become the norm… the current wave of arrests are unrestrained, and enfolding in full view of the nation and the world”.

Andrei Zorin, a close friend of Zuev’s and chair of Russian at Oxford University, has organised letters, now being signed by hundreds of scholars, protesting the inhumanity of Zuev’s treatment and warning that his health is now precarious. Both Zorin and Petrov believe Zuev, and the Shaninka, are targeted because of their liberalism in an increasingly authoritarian state — but also judge that many of the complex moves within and between the power groups involved are aimed as much at securing finance streams, especially from the Education Ministry, as in combatting anti-regime figures.

The Zuev case is similar to that of Kirill Sebrennikov, the most highly regarded ballet director in Russia — confined to house arrest since mid-2017, on charges of embezzlement of over 60m roubles, after producing “Nureyev” at the Bolshoi Theatre (he has since been released but cannot leave Russia while the charges remain pending). Wildly acclaimed, it is built around the dancer’s defection from the Soviet Union in 1961 — but with the dancing broken up by readings, including from a letter to Nureyev after his defection lamenting that Russia “does not value its heroes”.

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This case, as others, is opaque, with no information released, supporters certain of innocence and an impression of the law being used to punish and warn. The Moscow-based journalist Joshua Yaffa writes that “many observers see his case as a sign of a deeper and troubling turn in Russian political life, a symbol — and a warning — of a state that has grown more inflexible, rapacious, and unpredictable, liable to turn even on those it once fêted”.

The deliberate closing of the Russian mind, and the deliberate choice to eschew reform while rents from fossil fuels sustain a kleptocratic elite, raises the possibility of Russians, in a decade or so of continued decline,  joining the ranks of migrants, escaping poverty and oppression, These migrants should be more welcome than the oligarchs and their retinues who use London as a money laundry, a means of burnishing their public profile and a legal space with strict laws on libel and slander from which several have benefitted. But it will leave Russia increasingly stripped of reformist and brilliant talent, more inclined to see the West as malevolent and thus requiring increased aggression in return.

But though there has never been a human culture that is anything but flawed, all lasting cultures in history have been rooted. That is to say, they have been tied down by, and to, things more solid, timeless and lasting than the day-to-day processes of their functioning, or the personal desires of the individuals who inhabit them. Some of those solid things are human creations: cultural traditions, a sense of lineage and ancestry, ceremonies designed for worship or initiation. Others are non-human: the natural world in which those cultures dwell, or the divine force that they worship or communicate with in some form.

We need these roots. We need a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than us, across both space and time, and we underestimate that need at our peril. In her book The Need for Roots, written in 1943, the French philosopher and reluctant mystic Simone Weil puts the case like this:

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future.”

Weil was writing from exile in England, as her homeland was still under Nazi occupation. She saw National Socialism’s perversion of the notion of rootedness, and the evil that was being done with it. But unlike many intellectuals of the Left, the Nazis’ racial tyranny did not lead her to reject the human need for roots in favour of some universalist flavour of “global justice.” She saw that notion for what it was: the same flavour of perfectionism that was leading the USSR to roll out a tyranny that matched that of fascism, right down to the barbed wire that surrounded the camps designated for those who did not fit into the model.

Weil saw beyond: when she looked at Hitler and Stalin, she saw two tyrants leading nations that had already been uprooted — by the industrial revolution, by Bolshevism, by the Great War, by the depression, by the wider process of modernity. Both men promised a return to, or a forward march towards, security, power and meaning through the imposition of a totalitarian ideology which they claimed would speak for the masses. Both delivered hell instead.

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Weil’s book was commissioned by the Free French in London, led by Charles de Gaulle. It was intended to be a manifesto for the renewal of France, and Europe, after the scourge of Nazism. Her prescription was radical. Europeans, she said, had been uprooted by industry, by the state and by an aggressive form of pseudo-Christianity (Weil was a sometimes reluctant Christian, but was scathing about official forms of the faith which had, she said, in most cases aligned themselves with “the interests of those who exploit the people.”)

Both state nationalism and state socialism were con tricks, according to Weil: exploiters of the people posing as their liberators. The “totalitarian idol” of grand world-saving ideologies such as communism and fascism was the scourge of the twentieth century. The whole game had to be junked, the terms redefined: “The only punishment capable of punishing Hitler, and deterring little boys thirsting for greatness in coming centuries from following his example,” she wrote, “is such a total transformation of the meaning attached to greatness that he should thereby be excluded from it.”

“A transformation of the meaning attached to greatness”: perhaps this has always been the task, and perhaps it has always been urgent. But it certainly is now. Our idols today are economic conquest, unending “growth” built on turning all life into “resources” for human consumption, scientism disguised as objective inquiry, manic forward-motion, and the same old quest for perfectibility. Charles de Gaulle, when he returned to France victorious, was an effective competitor in this game. He never read the book that Weil aimed at him.

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What did Weil mean by this “transformation”? Perhaps the answer explains why she is not as widely read as she should be. Her attachment was to the eternal things, and she could never be boxed in. She wrote in praise of God, tradition, roots, peoples and culture; but also of justice, freedom of speech and thought, honour and equality. She could be equally scathing about fascism, communism, established religion, liberal elites, capitalism and mass education.

One minute she is incinerating the “uprooted intellectuals obsessed with progress” who dominated the cultural elite of her time (and who have entirely conquered ours), assailing the Left for its contempt of the peasantry or asserting that “of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital … than love of the past.” But just when you think you’re dealing with a conservative Defender of the West, you read something like this:

“For centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. If in certain respects there has been, nevertheless, progress during this period, it is not because of this frenzy but in spite of it, under the impulse of what little of the past remained alive.“

Weil wasn’t wrong. We in the West invented this thing called modernity, and then we took it out into the world, whether the world wanted it or not. Once we called this process the White Man’s Burden, and exported it with dreadnoughts. Now we call it development, and export it via World Bank loans and the War on Terror.

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But — and here is the point so often missed, especially by the “progressives” currently leading the charge in the culture wars — before we could eat the world, we first had to eat ourselves. Our states and economic elites had to dispossess their own people before they could venture out to dispossess others. The ordinary folk of the “developed” West were the prototype; the guinea pigs in a giant global experiment. Now we find ourselves rootless, rudderless, unmoored in a great sea of chaos; angry, confused, shouting at the world and each other.

Furthermore, this process accelerates under its own steam, as Weil explained, because “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others”. The more we are pulled, or pushed, away from our cultures, traditions and places — if we had them in the first place — the more we take that restlessness out with us into the world. If you have ever wondered why it is de rigueur amongst Western cultural elites to demonise roots and glorify movement, to downplay cohesion and talk up diversity, to deny links with the past and strike out instead for a future that never quite arrives, consider this: they are the children of globalised capitalism, and the inheritors of the unsettling of the West, and they have transformed that rootlessness into an ideology. They — we — are both perpetrators and victims of a Great Unsettling.

This is not to say that “Western” people alone are responsible for the rolling destruction of culture and nature that is overwhelming the world. We may have set the ball rolling, but the culture of uprooting is global now, and was when Weil was writing. You can see it everywhere you care to look. India has been uprooting its adivasi (tribal) people systemically since independence; its government is currently trying to undermine the power and agency of the peasant farmers of the Punjab, and have triggered a rural rebellion by doing so. The Chinese state is increasingly looking like the most efficient machine ever invented for uprooting, resettling and controlling mass populations. The Indonesian state is systematically unsettling the tribal people of West Papua, in cahoots with a cluster of multinational corporations. African governments are corralling the last of the San people. This is what states do, all over the world. It’s the ancient human game of power and control, turbo-charged with fossil fuels and digital surveillance technology.

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For the past several centuries, this intersection of financial power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies has constituted an ongoing war against roots and against limits. The momentum of the “global economy” is always forward: it demolishes borders and boundaries, traditions and cultures, languages and ways of seeing wherever it goes, and it will not stop until the world has been entirely remade. Record numbers of people are on the move as a result, and as the population increases and climate change bites, those numbers will rise everywhere, churning cultures and nations into entirely new shapes — or, worse, no shapes at all — with all the consequent turmoil and conflict. Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer.

Plenty of people, of course, are quite happy with all of this, and have no time for Romantic Luddites like me when we lament it. Even we Romantic Luddites are here on the internet, lamenting, so perhaps the last laugh is on us. But we are, I think, desperately in need of real culture. We want to go home again, but if we even know where home is to be found, we see that we can’t return. And so a void is created, and into the void rush monsters: toxic imitations of our lost roots. Identity politics, newly rigid racial categories, extreme nationalisms, intolerant strains of religion, endlessly multiplying genders and “identities” constructed online with no reference to reality. The mono-ethnic identitarianism of the far Right or the diversity identitarianism of the far Left: take your pick according to your predilections and fears. But these fake roots can never replace the real thing and the result is an orgy of anger, iconoclasm and rising bile. Meanwhile, the machine of techno-modernity pushes on, relentless.

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In all the time I have spent with people who live in genuinely rooted cultures — rooted in time, place and spirit — whether in the west of Ireland or West Papua, I’ve generally been struck by two things. One is that rooted people are harder to control. The industrial revolution could not have happened without the enclosure of land, and the destruction of the peasantry and the artisan class. People with their feet on the ground are less easily swayed by the currents of politics, or by the fashions of urban ideologues or academic theorists.

The second observation is that people don’t tend to talk much about their “identity” — or even think about it — unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, it seems, the more you have probably lost. The range of freewheeling, self-curated “identities” thrown up by the current “culture war” shows that we are already a long way down the road that leads away from genuine culture.

When a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. Our current cultural — and spiritual — crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not dying — it is already dead. We turned away from a mythic, rooted understanding of the world, and turned away from the divine, in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands. Now, we are living in a time of consequences. Some day soon, we are going to have to look up and begin searching for what we have lost. I have a feeling that this process has already begun.

A longer version of this essay originally appeared at The Abbey of Misrule.

Or so Khruschev hoped. But Stalin, it turned out, could not be so easily forgotten. This June, Russians named him the “most notable” figure in history for the 10th year running; and now, a mere two months later, a new poll by the the Levada Center has found that nearly half of Russians want a Stalin statue to celebrate the USSR’s victory over the Nazis — a figure that has nearly doubled in the past ten years. Surprisingly, this is largely driven by people under the age of 40, among whom support for a monument has quintupled over the past decade.

Around this point in articles on Stalin it is customary to observe that the Russians, unlike the Germans, have not reckoned with their dark past. But this comparison is not exactly apples with apples. If Stalin had killed himself in a bunker surrounded by Karl May novels after starting and losing a war that had led to the collapse of the Soviet regime then nobody would be talking about erecting a monument to him today. But Stalin won — beating Hitler, establishing a vast empire and making the USSR respected and feared in the process.

In fact, if Stalin is on the verge of making a comeback, then he is about the last significant figure from Russia’s past to do so. This is a country exceedingly keen on resurrection: it is, after all, the land that produced Nikolai Fedorov, a philosopher who believed that it was mankind’s duty to reconstitute the dead of all past generations, atom by atom, that they might live again and colonise space.

Indeed, I can’t think of another country that has destroyed or suppressed so much only to bring back so much. When Gorbachev implemented glasnost in the 1980s, the response of many was not to look ahead but backwards. Authors and artists who had been memory-holed were rediscovered and republished, while the crimes of Stalin, buried by Khruschev, were exposed. Suddenly it was possible to read Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov without fear of punishment; it is no coincidence that one of Russia’s main human rights organisations, founded during this act of unearthing, is called “Memorial”.

Then Russia’s imperial past was exhumed. Nikolai II, the last Tsar, was dug up months before the USSR collapsed. Leningrad became Saint Petersburg once again, Gorky became Nizhny Novgorod and countless streets reclaimed their pre-Revolutionary names. Monumental buildings destroyed by the Soviets reappeared as shiny replicas: I vividly recall my first day in Moscow in 1997, walking down the street to the school where I was going to be teaching English to New Russians, when suddenly I saw looming ahead of me the golden dome and concrete shell of the Church of Christ the Saviour, reborn on the exact spot where the original had stood before the Stalinist regime blew it up. This was not the only cloned old building in the area: half a mile away, the gates to Red Square which I thought were ancient turned out to be a replica, as was the nearby Kazan Cathedral.

New monuments commemorating figures from history also appeared. The most notorious was Zurab Tsereteli’s enormous statue of Peter the Great standing on a toy boat in the Moskva River; the story goes that he had originally pitched it as a sculpture of Columbus to the authorities in NYC, but when they rejected (presumably on the grounds that it was terrible) he simply placed a different head on the body and had his good friend the Mayor of Moscow commission it instead.

Later, Tsar Alexander II got a monument in the grounds of the church of Christ the Saviour, while Dostoevsky got a giant statue in front of the Lenin Library in central Moscow — thus the great critic of revolutionaries got to cast his shadow over a building named after the greatest revolutionary of all. Meanwhile, the last Tsar and (most of) his family were buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg in 1998, seven years after their exhumation. They were canonised two years later.

Yet even as Russia was resurrecting symbols of its Tsarist and Orthodox past, so Soviet elements were already creeping back in. A monument to the Second World War-era General Zhukov was unveiled a stone’s throw from the Kremlin in 1995. When Putin became president five years later, he almost immediately brought back the Soviet national anthem, albeit commissioning new lyrics from the 87-year-old children’s author Sergei Mikhalkov (who had written the original words for Stalin in 1944, and a second set in 1977).

At the eternal flame by the Kremlin Walls, the “hero city” of Volgograd was commemorated by its old name, Stalingrad. By the time I needed to get a police report for my US green card application in 2005, a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, first head of the Cheka, was waiting to greet me at Petrovka 38, headquarters of the Moscow police. There were also more innocuous manifestations of this fascination with the past — a TV channel called “Nostalgia” played back-to-back broadcasts from the USSR, while restaurants modeled on Soviet-era canteens were serving up compote and bowls of borscht.

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No doubt this is all a response to the war on memory and culture that was waged by the Soviet elites against their own people for much of the duration of the USSR’s existence. But it is also the case that the Soviets themselves had a complicated relationship with what had preceded them and were also quite keen on resurrecting selected bits of it. To begin with, they would not let their founder die — rather they preserved his body in a glass box, and spent decades declaring “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” And while the likes of Vladimir Mayakovsky composed avant-garde poems addressed to readers living in the future, the art that would dominate — Socialist Realism — owed much more to the 19^th century novels and poems and paintings the regime’s leaders had enjoyed in their youth.

Yes, the Soviets destroyed a lot of churches (and other religious buildings), but they also assiduously maintained the cathedrals inside the Kremlin, preserved the painted interiors inside Saint Basil’s and collected the finest examples of icon painting in a dedicated museum in the capital of world communism. During World War II, Stalin rehabilitated Tsarist era generals such as Kutuzov and Bagrationov to inspire the war effort against Hitler. Post-war, the Soviets reconstructed historic buildings that that had been destroyed by the Nazis, preserved entire villages as open-air museums, published scholarly and popular collections of folk tales, and even formed “folk orchestras” to keep alive traditional songs. Thus, the new civilisation was obsessed with and beholden to the civilisation that had proceeded it, (although these acts of recreation also entailed mutation, needless to say).

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Meanwhile Putin, now that he is ageing out of posing shirtless with tigers, has taken to penning long historical essays which are published on Kremlin.ru. In Russia, the past is always coming back. Viewed in that context, it’s as if the rising support for some sort of formal commemoration of Stalin is the terminal point of that urge towards resurrection, the last stage in a process that they can’t quite pull the trigger on.

You can understand why: Stalin was an evil, murderous bastard. But it’s important to realise that many Russians have reckoned with this: the Levada report notes that Stalin’s “repressions, executions and military blunders are well-known” and that “only a small number of Russians” would “completely deny these facts”. But Russia is also no stranger to monsters. Ivan the Terrible — who received his first monument in 2016 — murdered his son, murdered princes, slaughtered priests, massacred the population of Novgorod, implemented a reign of terror and invented the oprichniki, the prototypical secret police organisation. But “terrible” is a mistranslation of grozny, which in Ivan’s case might be more accurately rendered as “formidable” or “awesome.”

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Now that the generation directly oppressed by Stalin is dying out, and a new generation raised on tales of heroism in World War II has come of age, it would seem that increasing numbers of Russians are coming to the conclusion that Stalin, like Ivan before him, was just one of those rulers who had to do terrible things to achieve great things. In fact, if you really want to see a monument to Stalin you don’t need to wait; according to Der Spiegel there are already quite a few busts and statues knocking about — they just tend to be out of the way. A Stalin in mosaic form very nearly made it into the Cathedral of the Armed Forces, which was inaugurated last year to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Included in the original plans for the interior décor, he was ultimately dropped.

For now, however, Stalin lacks a grandiose monument. Perhaps he will never get one. But the truth is, Stalin began his long comeback during Glasnost, when the archives were opened; he returned with his victims. From that moment on it became impossible to keep him buried. And so, despite Krushchev’s best efforts, the old man’s back again — whether we like it or not.

Throughout history many people have felt terror when the end seemed nigh; but there have also been those for whom the apocalypse could not come soon enough. Zoroaster, Christ, Mohammed and Marx all posited the coming of a happy day when this corrupted world would end, giving way to a better one.

Some enthusiastic souls proposed precise dates: in AD156 the followers of Montanus gathered on the plains of Asia Minor waiting for the New Jerusalem to descend, while 1,500 years later Isaac Newton pored over the books of Daniel and Revelation, before coming to the conclusion that the world would end within a hundred years of his own lifetime. Montanus and Newton were wrong, like all the others who have sought to fix a date for the end.

But what if it were possible to wrest the apocalyptic timetable from the hands of God or History and accelerate the advent of the new world? Well, some claim to have done that, too — such as Kondraty Selivanov, a Russian peasant who in the 18^th century revealed to his followers, the Skopts, that if they castrated 144,000 people (the number of “the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb” in chapter 14 of Revelation) then they would bring about the end of the world, last judgement and resurrection. That the Skopts may have numbered 100,000 before being annihilated by Stalin nearly a century and half later says a lot about the motivating power of apocalyptic longing.

The Skopts first appear in the historical record in 1771, in a strange encounter between two peasants bathing in a river in the Oryol region, close to the modern-day border with the Ukraine. One of them lacked genitals and explained to the other that he had castrated himself to avoid performing his conjugal duties. The authorities were called in to investigate and eventually discovered that 32 men in the surrounding villages had submitted to what Selivanov referred to as the “fiery baptism” in the hope of securing salvation.

Russia provided fertile soil for apocalyptic movements. In the mid-17^th century liturgical reforms had caused a schism in the Church, giving rise to a multitude of radical sects convinced that they were living in the end times. For a hundred years assorted ascetics, orgiasts and self-immolators had suffered persecution at the hands of the state; Selivanov was originally a “Khlyst”, who followed their own Christs and whirled themselves into states of ecstatic delirium.

By a phonetic sleight-of-hand he transformed Christ the Saviour (iskupitel’) into Christ the Castrator (oskopitel’), while also teaching that John the Baptist had castrated Christ, and sexual characteristics only sprouted on Adam and Eve after they ate the forbidden fruit. Skopt baptism came in two styles: “the Little Seal” entailed either the removal of the testicles or a woman’s nipples. “The Great Seal” required the amputation of the penis or breasts. A cauterising blade was applied afterwards, the Skopts applying the same techniques they used on their livestock to themselves.

In the old days, Selivanov would have been burned at the stake, but he lived during the reign of Catherine the Great, who fancied herself enlightened. Catherine’s response to the Skopts was that they were “simpletons” who believed in “irrational nonsense”. Selivanov was sent out of harm’s way to Siberia; but a man capable of castrating himself does not bend easily, and Selivanov did not change his opinions during the two decades he spent in exile. Rather, he started claiming that he was both the Messiah and Catherine’s deceased husband, Peter III. After her death he travelled to Saint Petersburg where he won an audience with the new Tsar, Pavel I, who was curious to meet this strange character claiming to be his father. When Selivanov urged his “son” to get castrated, he was dispatched to a mad house.

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This was a temporary setback, however. In 1801, Pavel’s son Alexander ascended to the throne, a fad for mysticism swept through Saint Petersburg and the castrated messiah soon found himself a welcome guest at mansions in the capital. Alexei Elyansky, the Royal Chamberlain, was so much a true believer that he prepared a detailed proposal for the conversion of all Russia to the Skopt faith, which he submitted to Alexander in 1804.

In Elyansky’s vision, the army and every state institution would be guided by a holy eunuch, while Selivanov himself would advise Alexander. Inexplicably, the Tsar rejected this plan, and Elyansky was dispatched to a monastery. Selivanov was permitted to remain in Saint Petersburg, however, and the Skopts were allowed a temple which held 300 worshippers. In 1805 Alexander is said to have consulted with Selivanov before embarking on his campaign against Napoleon, who the Skopts regarded as Antichrist. It was only in 1820, when the Tsar found out that members of the military had submitted to the fiery baptism, that the extraordinarily persuasive Selivanov was expelled from the capital. Confined to a monastery outside Moscow, he died in 1832 at the age of 112.

The Skopts regarded their 20-year period in the capital as their “golden age”. After the fall of their charismatic leader, they had to come up with explanations for their missing genitalia, as self-castration had been made illegal in 1816. Excuses ranged from injuries sustained in the Napoleonic war to random passers-by carrying sharp blades; in 1826 the law was revised so that blaming your missing body parts on the deeds of wicked strangers was treated as an admission of guilt. Those found guilty were dispatched to Siberia, where they could prove useful to the Tsar by helping settle the frontier.

Scattered across the empire, the Skopts awaited the return of Selivanov, who they believed was still roaming Russia in secret. As each generation of the sect faced its own built-in apocalypse, members were allowed to have a child before submitting to the fiery baptism. They tried not to draw attention to themselves and were known as a prosperous community. But stories circulated that they ate the testicles and breasts they amputated, while Andrei Sinyavsky states in Ivan the Fool, his account of Russian folk history, that they paid poor people to let them castrate them. Echoing anti-Semitic tropes, the Skopts were also accused of draining blood from infants and using their ground up corpses as an ingredient in communion bread.

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Meanwhile, as the Skopts were alternately evading or enduring the attention of the authorities, the works of a new prophet were published in Saint Petersburg. Like Selivanov, Karl Marx predicted that an end to the existing order was coming, although it was not the castrated but the proletariat who would inherit the earth. Vladimir Lenin was the most successful of Marx’s interpreters: like Selivanov, he was not content to wait for the apocalyptic moment but set out to accelerate it. According to Marxist theory, the Revolution was not supposed to begin in backwards Russia but rather in an advanced capitalist nation such as Germany. But Lenin, like Selivanov before him, revised doctrine to suit his psychological needs, and after seizing power in 1917 dispatched agents to accelerate the world revolution.

As for the Skopts, they welcomed the new regime, hoping that the Bolsheviks meant what they said about religious tolerance. They did not realise that revolutionary ethics justified lying for the sake of the cause, just as their own ethics justified lying to protect their pursuit of 144,000 castrations. But the Skopts were marked for extinction: derided in anti-religious propaganda, they were then targeted for violent repression as “Kulaks” — rich peasants — during the Stalinist regime. After a century and a half of cutting and cauterising their way towards a happy ending, they were swiftly wiped out by a rival sect that aimed its violence at its enemies rather than its members’ groins.

Today the Skopts occupy a marginal place in the study of Russian history. There is one book about them in English, by Laura Engelstein, a chapter in Sinyavsky’s out-of-print study, and a few mentions in encyclopedias of religion here and there. But sometimes I imagine an Adam Curtis-style retelling of the last two and a half centuries that places the Skopts at the centre of things, as if they represent the most perfect articulation of an idea that played out over time.

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After all, lots of religions involve some kind of mortification of the flesh to help the faithful overcome their earthly desires, but since Origen castrated himself in the early 3rd century AD, very few adherents of any creed have shown much willingness to go all in and cut off temptation at its root, and none besides Selivanov have built a theology around it. That it took a millennium and half to happen gives us a sense of what it takes to override the command to multiply received from God in Genesis 1:28 and which Richard Dawkins tells us is encoded in our very genes.

Understand the power of the desire that drove the Skopts and you might also better understand just how it was that the Bolsheviks, an obscure sect with a still more accelerationist apocalyptic creed managed to take over the world’s largest country; and you can also see how impoverished our modern pseudo-religions are in comparison, amounting to little more than intra-elite games played for power in earthly institutions.

Even the passionate protestors of Extinction Rebellion seem to lack all motivation next to the Skopts. The truth is that anxiety about apocalypse is not enough; you have to believe in something wonderful awaiting us once we have passed through the ordeals of the end. If you have that then truly incredible things are possible — including incredibly grotesque, stupid and destructive things.

For me, it’s always been different. The Soviet Union was hardly a wallflower at any stage in history; going from Tsarist empire to Communist superpower to an entire era of muscle-flexing under Vladimir Putin, up to and including Moscow’s Victory Day parades at the weekend. But that hardly put me off — for the simple reason that I was raised as a Soviet patriot.

When I hear friends’ horror stories about their parents, I always think how lucky I was. My dad was handsome and witty, generous and kind — even if he was a big fan of a system believed to have killed around 20 million people.

He wasn’t a big reader; it wasn’t the Communist theory he liked. Rather, he idealised the Soviet Union in a manner that reminds me of the images on the cover of The Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witness magazine; people wandering beatifically unharmed among wild animals, the lion and the lamb making eyes at each other.

He was, for example, obsessed with the cleanliness of the Moscow underground stations; in a television film I wrote about him, Prince, a young Sean Bean tells his daughter about Russia: “It’s very cold, very clean… and everybody’s happy. Because the country belongs to them. Their subways stations are immaculate — you could eat your dinner off the floor. Because nobody drops rubbish. Because it all belongs to them — the people.” Never religious, the USSR was his Promised Land.

A clever man from an illiterate, poverty-wracked home, he refused the promotions offered him at the distillery where he worked and instead organised his trade union, in the interests of not being bought by the bourgeoisie. ­After the factory closed, and before he died of the mesothelioma that he had contracted as a teenage builder, his last job was as a ­car-park attendant. He died seeing it as a triumph that he had made no advancement up the class ladder.

Stalin, who was definitely his Top of the Pops, was the peasant son of a drunken cobbler and a washerwoman who outlived communism’s intellectuals and turned his country into a superpower to match the United States. He spoke to my father’s frustrated leadership qualities, I think now.

On the other hand, lots of bright proletarian men grow up with no opportunities and they don’t cleave to a genocidal tyrant — but because my dad was such a charming man, I didn’t mind humouring him. He’d given up on trying to interest my mum in politics early on in their courtship, so I was his little comrade, always happy to stay up late cheering for the USSR during the Olympics.

In return, though he hated “men capering about showing off” — as he referred to the likes of Lionel Blair on TV — he got us a box for the Bolshoi Ballet when they came to Bristol, even if he did refuse to look at the stage, doing his trade union summer school homework the whole way through.

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Duly rewarded, I returned refreshed to my Soviet-cheerleading duties — mostly composed of urging on the Viet Cong, which was all over the news as they fought their war with Russian weapons, and taking a keen interest in the USSR’s proxy wars all over Africa. (My dad was particularly excited when a young African Communist rocked up at his local one weekend. He became a respected guest at our house until he mentioned how racist he had found the Moscovites while attending the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, after which he was promptly sent into exile by my furious father.)

Of course, it wasn’t all Red Army tanks and grim Kremlin faces. Watching the May Day parades on the evening news, it was impossible not to be bewitched by the beautiful Communist gymnasts: Nellie Kim, Ludmilla Tourischeva and Olga Korbut, “the sparrow from Minsk” who was told by President Nixon that her performance in the 1972 Munich Olympics “did more to reduce the political tension between our two countries than the embassies were able to do in five years”. I still remember when Nadia Comăneci, the most gifted Romanian girl of all, was named the youngest ever Hero Of Socialist Labor by the dictator Ceausescu. Suddenly, the popular girls at my school were taking Communist heroines as their role models; never one to knowingly embrace consensus, this left me feeling mildly miffed.

But what I most approved of about the gymnasts was the way Soviet children who showed a particular talent were snatched away from home at an early age — Korbut was in full-time training from the age of eight — and sent to work in academies of excellence; meritocracy at its rawest.

I wasn’t scared of hard work, but I was scared of going nowhere. As a smart working-class girl at a provincial Seventies sink school, the most I could hope for was teacher training college, which I didn’t fancy one little bit. Why couldn’t I be snatched away from my parents and stuck in an academy of writing excellence? At 17, I escaped through a job at the New Musical Express instead.

I’m not sure what my father would disapprove of more; the fact that I let a boy wearing a swastika (“Before Hitler, it stood for peace!”) buy me a drink or the fact that I briefly joined the Socialist Workers Party? (To old school Communists, metropolitan offshoots like the SWP were treated with suspicion, and suspected of practising free love.)

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By Julie Burchill

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I remember my father for the first time failed to do that adorable thing that working-class dads have done forever: call out to their wives to come to the phone immediately and talk to their child. Instead he bent my ear for a good five minutes moaning about the imminent downfall of civilisation. By this time I’d learned more than enough about Stalin’s antics, and I gave him short shrift.

After he died at the turn of the century, I transferred my affections to Israel, and began to travel there and propagandise on its behalf. It helped that Israel was always in the news, so always needed someone to defend it. Why did I feel the need to latch on to somewhere new? I’m not entirely sure. Though if you’ve been brought up to think of an unseen land as your own, it can feel small-minded just cheering on the place where you happened to be born.

I hear of young people calling themselves Communists now; they’re not, they are simply ABEs: Anyone But England. And they’ll have their work cut out should their dreams come true — they’re always Wokers and Woke is the opposite of Communism, based on a strict class conflict theory which would judge identity politics to be bourgeoise deviation.

Certainly today’s revolutionaries share none of the Soviet stoicism that appealed to my dad, his twin pillars of philosophy being Fair Play and No Fussing. Though considering what we know now — the Terror, the massacres, the starvation and beatings which went into making Comrade Comăneci the youngest ever Hero Of Socialist Labor — perhaps there can be such a thing as too much Stoicism.

And yet I occasionally get a flicker of the old feeling; Red Army Choir songs, the image of the hammer and sickle flag being hoist over a destroyed Reichstag, Yuri Gagarin’s birthday. But of course: no image, however beautiful, means anything compared to all the sorrow and pain inflicted by my saintly father’s favourite belief system.

From this point we can construct an alternative timeline for the territory, which retains the name Russian America, while Novo-Arkhangelsk remains the administrative capital. Prospectors arrive en masse, along with religious nonconformists seeking to practice their beliefs free of repression. Thus, the region quickly becomes home to thousands of Skopts, members of a millenarian sect whose goal was to hasten Christ’s return by initiating 144,000 people into the “fiery baptism” of castration.

Then comes the Bolshevik coup of 1917. Lenin publishes his American Theses in which he argues that “Soviet America” will serve as the spearhead of the (imminent) world revolution as it spreads to the Americas. Instead, civil war breaks out and the White Army seizes control, forcing the indigenous population to dig for gold to fund weapons purchases. The Whites remain in power until Mikhail Frunze, fresh from his victories over Kolchak and Wrangel, overthrows their regime in early 1921. Refugees pour across the border into Canada, among them thousands of Skopts, who seek new candidates for castration in the Yukon and British Columbia.

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Russian America now becomes the American Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) within the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). The indigenous peoples are promised equal rights, Novo-Arkhangelsk becomes a naval base, and the inland Skopt settlement of Oskupitel becomes the new capital. It is renamed Londonsk in honour of Jack London, one of Lenin’s favourite authors. Chekists are everywhere.

Following the abortive San Francisco uprising of 1922, Warren G. Harding demands that Lenin stop sending his agents into the US to foment revolution; while dictating his official denial of involvement, the Soviet leader suffers a debilitating stroke. In the following months, Lenin’s would-be successors deliver speeches on the crucial role the American ASSR will play in the coming global revolution. Stalin reissues his Marxism and the National Question with a new postscript on the indigenous peoples of Soviet America. When Lenin dies in 1924, Trotsky is in Londonsk.

By 1927 Stalin has established absolute power over the USSR. He upgrades the American ASSR to a full union republic and nation-building begins in earnest. Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism is translated into Aleut, Tlingit and other local languages. Londonsk acquires broad avenues, theatres, factories (including a Ford auto plant), a university and a circus while Le Corbusier designs a never-to-be-completed House of the Soviets.

Anti-US provocations are of course a major part of Soviet foreign policy. In 1929, Stalin establishes the Nat Turner Autonomous Oblast, named in honour of the leader of the 1831 slave rebellion, in the southwestern ASSR as a new homeland for the descendants of slaves; Svoboda —“Freedom” — is its capital. Stalin invites all who endure racist oppression in the US to start new lives there, promising them full participation in a “prosperous and cultured society”. Tens of thousands of black Americans take him up on the offer, only for many to find themselves enslaved in the Arctic gulags of the John Reed oblast a few years later.

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Stories of the terrible sufferings of the ASSR’s black émigrés first appear in the foreign press around 1933, but the US — still a deeply racist country — shows little interest in their fate. Meanwhile, Western journalists and useful idiots provide cover for the Soviet regime. In 1935 Walter Duranty of The New York Times wins a Pulitzer for his article proclaiming the success of the “Turner Experiment”; that same year George Bernard Shaw pays a visit and declares that he has never heard so many joyful songs sung so exquisitely as he did in the factories of Svoboda.

The ASSR’s close proximity to the US exacerbates Stalin’s paranoia, and he attempts to turn Canada into a buffer state. When prime minister William Lyon McKenzie King dies suddenly in 1937 and is replaced by a pro-Moscow politician, the US protests vociferously — and suddenly takes an interest in the fate of the black émigrés to the ASSR. By 1941 war appears imminent, but when Hitler invades the USSR Stalin turns away from Canada to focus his attention on the Western Front. In 1942, Japan bombs Pearl Harbour and the two rival powers find themselves fighting alongside each other.

After the war, relations between the USA and the USSR are frostily cordial until 1949, when the Soviets successfully test an atomic bomb in Kazakhstan; the uranium comes from a mine on Mayakovsky Island in the American SSR. The US enters a period of profound existential crisis and Senator Joseph McCarthy leads a mass purge of communist intellectuals and other “enemies of the state” that meets with broad public support.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, hopes of a thaw are dashed when the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschev, denies that the USSR has any nuclear missiles in North America, although Stalin has been stockpiling them since 1949. Khruschev presents himself as the heir to Lenin, and even the independently minded Mao Zedong (grudgingly) falls in line behind this strong horse. Identifying the American SSR as the most significant showroom for what “full communism” will look like, Khruschev pours resources into the region, with the intent of turning Londonsk into the “most advanced, most communist” city in the world. The Yankees, he declares, will “cry like tiny babies” in their jealous rage. Khruschev also permits black émigrés to return to the Nat Turner Autonomous Oblast, although he will not allow repatriations to the US or communication with their families.

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When the hapless JFK is assassinated in 1963, it seems that America may be on the losing side of history. The USSR has put a man in space, extended its influence in Latin America and it also has a large nuclear arsenal in the American SSR. The explosion of the Apollo 11 rocket on the launchpad in 1969, killing everyone on board, set against a background of civil unrest and the disastrous war in Vietnam, becomes a bitterly potent symbol of a nation that has lost its way. A year later Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, becomes the first man to walk on the moon.

In 1971, the ailing Khruschev successfully manages a transition of power to the youthful 57-year-old KGB boss, Yuri Andropov, who has a long track record of quelling dissent both within the USSR and among its satellites. Andropov curtails spending on the “showroom” of the American SSR and redirects that money towards the USSR’s defense capabilities. The Nixon and then Carter administrations make various overtures towards Andropov which are rebuffed. The humiliations of the US reach an apex with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which ends with Andropov sending in Soviet forces to install the communist Tudeh Party in power and then magnanimously freeing the hostages held hostage by Islamic radicals in the US embassy. The rage against Jimmy Carter is overwhelming; hardline anti-communist Ronald Reagan is elected with a landslide on the promise that he will reverse two decades of decline and restore America’s honour.

Restoring that honour, of course, entails ramping up weapons production to face the threat (almost) next door. Reagan delivers speech after speech denouncing the USSR for its crimes against the African-Americans it lured to its territory in the 1930s, for its interference in Canadian politics and its belligerence. Andropov, startled by this sudden change in tone from a US that was previously always seeking to strike some kind of deal, responds in kind, and is backed by a wave of op-eds in the elite media from American intellectuals who blame Reagan for stoking tensions between the two superpowers. This reinvigorated cold war turns suddenly hot in 1983, when a siren rings at a base in the American SSR, indicating that the United States has launched a missile strike on the Soviet Union.

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Now when a similar event happened in our timeline, Stanislav Petrov, the steely-nerved officer on duty thought that it was likely a false alarm and decided against informing his superiors. But we should not allow survivor’s bias to seduce us into thinking that our escape from fiery Armageddon was inevitable. In this alternative timeline, a different man is on duty, and, obeying protocol, he reports the missiles to his superiors. Andropov — who is chronically ill and on the verge of death — launches a retaliatory strike, leading to a full-scale nuclear war. This moment coincides with the Skopts in Canada achieving their long-desired goal of castrating their 144,000th convert. Alas, Christ does not return.

When we imagine alternative outcomes we base our speculations on things that we have seen before, and everything in this essay up to this point is inspired by an event or action that actually took place in the USSR or the US throughout their long rivalry. Soviet propaganda highlighted American racism from its earliest days, and the Nat Turner Autonomous Oblast is based on the Jewish Autonomous Oblast that Stalin established in Russia’s far east. Khruschev’s challenge to US global economic hegemony is imaginatively explored in Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty. The Skopts persisted in their millenarian quest for over a century. Russia’s need to establish buffer states predates the USSR — and continues to this day. Each superpower saw the other as its shadow; how much more intense would the rivalry and paranoia been had the two rivals been de facto neighbours? If anything, war might have broken out earlier.

But nuclear war? We have never seen that, other than in science fiction. So as much as I am tempted to introduce talking apes or telepathic dogs into the narrative, such phenomena have no analogues in our species’ experience. What happens next, in truth, is unimaginable. And so, we reach the End of History — and not in the Francis Fukuyama sense, either.

It is slightly hidden away from the house, not far from what was once the chicken coop. Or to be more precise, not far from Leon Trotsky’s chicken coop. For it is in Leon Trotsky’s garden that the plaque sits. And it is there that it caught my eye as I was moseying around the garden earlier this year.

The story of Robert Sheldon Harte is both deservedly forgotten and slightly suggestive. For Harte was not just a communist, he was an American communist — born in the US in 1915. A member of the Communist Party of the USA, he offered his services as a guard at the Trotsky household in Mexico at the age of 25. On 24 May, 1940, a GPU unit turned up at the house intending to kill Trotsky. The attempt failed, and so the unit settled with abducting Harte who was subsequently shot in the head and buried in quicklime in a shallow grave.

Since Harte’s death, there have been claims and counter-claims about exactly who he was working for. Was he merely an idealistic supporter of the exiled Trotsky or was he in fact — as some have claimed — a double agent, recruited by the NKVD and sent by Stalin’s agents to help in the assassination of the man he was purporting to protect? Whatever the answer, Trotsky himself believed that Harte had been loyal and had the plaque erected himself.

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Though he wasn’t able to enjoy it for very long. For only a few months later – 80 years ago today, as it happens — Stalin’s agents were successful in their attempts to get Stalin’s greatest enemy. On August 21, 1940, agents of the NKVD managed to get into the Trotsky compound and one – Ramon Mercader – successfully killed Trotsky with an ice-pick while he was in his study.

There remains something not just gruesome but impressive about this act of political assassination. Impressive because of the message of strength it sent out. By the time of his assassination, Trotsky had been away from the Soviet Union for over a decade. He had eked out that time in a variety of comfortable and miserable surroundings, moving from Turkey to France, to Norway and eventually — not least thanks to the efforts of Frida Kahlo — to his final home of Mexico.

By the time he was there, his name — indeed any association with it — had become more dangerous than any other inside the Soviet Union. At the show trials of 1936, it was enough to be accused of having been in league with Trotsky, to be assured a death sentence. Though, of course, for Stalin it was not necessary for there to be any such connection. Trotskyist connections or tendencies were enough on their own: a routine, useful cipher when the regime needed to make up its quotas of people who needed to be killed.

And of course the impressive thing — the impressive, typically Stalinist message — is that Stalin was able to pursue this enemy to the other end of the earth and, after numerous attempts, actually get him. The assassination of Trotsky was more than an assertion of vengeance, it was an assertion of power. A demonstration that the writ of Stalin ran wherever he wanted it to run. For a dictator, this is a most useful fear to spread around.

But in many ways, what is most interesting about Trotsky is not his death, or life, but his afterlife. For, to a great extent he remained (and for some people amazingly remains still) the great ‘might have been’ of the Soviet era. Never mind the people who actually grew up while the horrors of the Soviet system were ongoing, I have heard people in my own adult life, born in my own lifetime, and sometimes younger than myself (people in their twenties or thirties), seriously describe themselves as being (or at some point having been) a Trotskyist.

How is this possible? Nobody alive, let alone any reasonably intelligent person under the age of 40, would describe themselves as having gone through a period of following Ernst Rohm, before moderating their political views somewhat.

The explanation lies in a corner of Sovietology which is still not settled, though goodness knows it should have been by now. This is the corner which continues to imagine that had Stalin not taken over (or even Lenin, in the views of some), then the catastrophe that all but the most deluded communists now admit to, might never have taken place. Of all the might-have-beens and roads tantalisingly-never-travelled, none has continued to have such appeal as that held out by Leon Trotsky.

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In the Fifties and Sixties, Isaac Deutscher performed a work of personal hero-worship in his fluent and slanted three-volume biography (The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast). Although this work had significant critics – not least in the form of Isaiah Berlin – the works helped to cement among English-speakers a perception of Trotsky as the great what-if of Soviet history.

Of course, however long they have tried to sustain this belief, they could not have been more wrong. For all the what-ifs, history shows that had Trotsky been in power, the history of Russia in the 20th Century would hardly have been any different.

From the start of the revolution, till the day he died, Trotsky was the most fanatical and among the most persuasive of the communist leaders. He was as at ease and adept at the use of violence as any of those around him. His only aversion to the same began to emerge as he discovered that he, his associates, and his closest followers might have been on the receiving end of a thing he thought only worth dishing out. So why has the figure of Trotsky retained some allure even 80 years after his timely death?

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Several reasons present themselves. One is the possibility that his undoubted intellectual ability, plus his assassination in a far-away land gave him a certain martyr-like glamour. He was working on his magnum opus about his enemy right up until the moment of his death; the combination of work ethic and premature demise can be a heady brew. Especially so for a certain type of Western intellectual who likes the idea of fanaticism for a cause precisely because they have themselves never had to suffer at the hands of such fanatics.

But the greater reason would appear to be that reason which remains perhaps the greatest bit of unfinished business of the 20th Century. The recognition that the Soviet, Communist, Marxist experiments were not trees which just happened to give off some poison fruits. Or beautiful ideas which were just mishandled and misappropriated by misguided hands. But rather that the whole dream was a nightmare from beginning to end. And always was going to be. That the Communist experiment had no more likelihood of delivering peace on earth than did the Fascist attempt to try to produce the same.

Yet it is strange, this. There are still no shrines around the world (as the house of Trotsky in Mexico effectively is) commemorating and glamorising any of the intellectual heroes — let alone physical progenitors — of fascism. Yet here still, on several continents, these memorials to the glamorous heroes of communism remain. And it is an intellectual, as well as moral, failing that this should still be the case.

There is a passage in Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev worth bearing in mind. One of the novel’s many characters, who is hauled away for a crime which he had nothing to do with, is a man who has been a member of the party since 1907. For more than 20 years he has seen his colleagues, superiors, underlings and many others taken away. And now — for a suspected association with something he has no more to do with than all those others did — it is his turn to be taken away. It is a trap, he realises. The whole thing.”That’s the trap,” he realises. “The beast in the trap is you, the trapped beast, you old revolutionist, it’s you… And we’re all in it, all in the trap… Didn’t we all go absolutely wrong somewhere?”

Certainly they did. Sometimes the beast in the trap was a whole population, sometimes it was a single individual. Sometimes it was an unintelligent young fanatic like Robert Sheldon Harte.  Sometimes it was a cultured and intelligent intellectual like the man he apparently wanted to protect. It didn’t matter. They all got caught in the trap. And it is quite hard to feel any admiration or sadness for those caught in a trap that they themselves set.

Still, despite the fact that Stalin was a) obviously clever and b) highly successful as far as evil despots go, the idea that he was some kind of grey nonentity persisted for decades. And I think that we still have a habit of belittling tyrants and authoritarians. It makes us feel better whenever they run circles around us at some geopolitical game or other, which is quite often these days.

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Take Putin, for instance. When he was first elected, a lot of coverage focused on this bland, faceless nonentity, an ex-KGB officer of middling rank leading a decrepit ex-superpower. They kept that up for a while, then switched to mocking him for posing shirtless. Next thing you know, he’s annexed the Crimea. Similarly, Gaddafi was barely coherent, yet he was pretty good at charming Blair and Mandelson — and might still be up waving his golden gun about if we hadn’t gone and dropped a pile of bombs on Libya.

Being a dictator is a difficult job, then, and those who succeed at it should not be underestimated. There is more going on behind those dead eyes than we think, even when they seem unhinged, weird or boring. Yet there is perhaps one exception, a dictator so profoundly mediocre that it would be difficult to underestimate him: Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the leader of the ex-Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. Recently turned 63, he is a man without qualities, and even, it seems, a bit dim. However, 13 years into his reign he remains firmly in power. So how has he achieved this feat, and what can we learn from it?

Berdymukhamedov came to power in 2007, after his corpulent, megalomaniacal predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, dropped dead of a heart attack. Niyazov, a.k.a Turkmenbashi (“father of all Turkmen”) had become famous due to his extravagant personality cult. He literally renamed the month of January after himself, and renamed bread after his mother, while also authoring a truly atrocious “holy book” that he called The Ruhnama, or “book of the soul”.

That level of totalitarian excess is quite rare, and so it seemed that the Turkmen were due a break. Surely it was time for a normal dictator, less given to erecting gold statues of himself that rotated to face the sun?

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At first Berdymukhamedov was very dull. A former dentist who had risen to the position of deputy prime minister, he was made interim president when Niyazov went to his eternal reward. This was in defiance of the constitution — the job should have gone to the speaker of parliament — so perhaps some powerful forces thought he would prove to be malleable. And Berdymukhamedov was cautious at first, making only vague statements about change, while adding that the country would walk rather than run.

Definitely a bit dull, then, and perhaps in more ways than one. Months later, I interviewed some Turkmen emigres in Moscow, and one of them said this to me:

“The new president? I know someone who studied at the medical school where he was the principal. They said he was an idiot. And that the teachers said it openly, about him, and to his face — you’re an idiot, an idiot. What can we hope for from him?”

At the time I thought this was an exaggeration; emigres can be pretty bitter about the countries they have left behind, especially when they are repressive dictatorships. But as the years rolled by, and Berdymukhamedov grew more comfortable in his new job and started to adapt the structures his predecessor had left in place to his own use, well, I started to wonder.

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Berdymukhamedov’s cult was strikingly derivative and pedestrian. Niyazov was “Father of All Turkmen”; Berdymukhamedov was “protector”. Niyazov was leading Turkmenistan into the “golden age”; Berdymukhamedov was spearheading the “renaissance”. Clearly, he did not have too many ideas. And nowhere was that more obvious than in the books that he put his name to.

While Niyazov’s cult was grotesque and obscene, it was, at least, ambitious. Similarly, The Ruhnama was terrible, but its author at least knew what ought to be in such a book — history, myth, moral teachings, God, the people and his own personal story. Berdymukhamedov’s books were a lot less complicated. One of the emigres had predicted to me that since he was a medical professional his book would follow that theme — and sure enough, a series on the Turkmen herbal remedies appeared under his name. With that out of the way, he cast around for other themes, but he didn’t cast far. Turkmen were famous horse riders, so there was a book about horses. Then he produced a book about his dad. Running low on national motifs, he eventually put his name to a tome about drinking tea. The books were strikingly literal, strikingly pointless, oblivious to their own bathos. They were unselfconscious and kinda dumb. Here was a dictator with no depth at all.

Don’t just take my word for it. In 2010, Wikileaks published diplomatic cables from a US diplomat who, after referring to the Turkmen president as a “practiced liar” and “micromanager” made this memorable observation: “Berdymukhamedov does not like people who are smarter than he is. Since he’s not a very bright guy, our source offered, he is suspicious of a lot of people.”

This lack of sophistication gives Berdymukhamedov’s propaganda an impressively transparent quality. Classic cults of personality, like those of Stalin or Mao, usually serve to efface the characteristics of the leader, who is always a universal genius and superlative leader. Even Niyazov, who built his own traumatic childhood into the cult, remained a remote, aloof figure.

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Berdymukhamedov, however, is a simple sort. He enjoys his hobbies and they are reflected in the cult. He likes horses and racing cars and shooting guns and fishing and is often filmed engaged in one of these pastimes. But most of all, it seems, he likes playing music and singing. He isn’t the first musical dictator — Kim Jong-il wrote opera librettos, while Stalin was a decent tenor who liked to sing Georgian folk songs, though only for the inner circle. But Berdymukhamedov is surely the first dictator DJ, the first dictator to bust a rhyme in public, and also the first dictator to serenade his people on New Year’s Eve.

His musical oeuvre is quite broad. In 2015 Berdymukhamedov entered the Guinness Book of Records when over 4,000 of his adoring subjects (no pressure) joined him in singing a Eurodisco number he had written himself. Berdymukhamedov enjoyed the experience and he has since performed in public many times, though without so large an ensemble to share the spotlight.

On International Women’s Day, he serenaded the ladies (and some gents) with a cover version of Karakum, a Soviet rock song about the Turkmen desert. More recently, he laid some beats on the populace during Turkmenistan’s televised 2019 New Year’s Eve celebration. He has also been filmed demonstrating to soldiers how to play guitar, though often the camera mysteriously cuts away from his face whenever it comes to difficult bit.

My favorite performances, however, are his duets with his beloved grandson Kerimguly. The themes are powerful and moving: in one song, the intergenerational duo hymn the praises of his favourite horse, while in another Kerimguly sings in English while his grandpa delivers a rap dedicated to the glory of the nation. Indeed, Kerimguly appears to be getting a mini-cult of his own. Opposition sites report that he appears on TV more often than his father, Berdymukhamedov’s only son; a state news website reports that he recently won the “Golden Age” artistic award and received a gold chain and some cash.

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So clumsy and naïve is Berdymukhamedov’s cult that it serves as a particularly potent reminder of Anthony Daniels’ famous observation that the purpose of propaganda is “not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate”. But while Turkmen citizens, condemned to live in a repressive police state run by a dullard, have little choice but to play along with Berdymukhamedov’s fantasy image of himself, the truly impressive thing is the way in which the president sometimes succeeds in getting foreign diplomats and organisations to abase themselves before him.

For instance, the regime’s response to the coronavirus pandemic is extremely stupid, even by Berdymukhamedov’s standards. The authorities deny that Turkmenistan has any Covid-19 cases but say that there might be a problem with “dust” — and so insist that everybody wear masks and gloves and practice social distancing. Apparently there’s quite a lot of dust about. And also “pneumonia”.

The mendacity, goading in its transparency, is almost impressive. But it isn’t, not really; rather it’s ridiculous, worthy of contempt. Yet Eurasianet reports that the British ambassador, after tweeting a selfie of himself wearing a face mask and urging others to do the same subsequently denied in a Twitter exchange that he was implying that Turkmenistan had the virus. Instead he urged people to “pay attention to the findings of WHO and Turkmen government experts, who are the experts here”. That’ll be the same WHO that recently sent a delegation to the country, praised the government for its high level of preparedness, didn’t say whether Covid-19 was on the loose, but then advised the Turkmen authorities to act “as if” the virus was circulating and adopt the standard protective measures.

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Thus Berdymukhamedov, despite being a “not very bright guy” gets away with it.

Sometimes, when I read about evil regimes and go looking for small consolations, I remind myself that it is not, in the end, all that enjoyable to be a dictator. Yes, you have a lot of power, but the trade-off is isolation, paranoia, a loss of humanity and a life spent looking over your shoulder. As far as punishments go, it never fits the crime, but it’s something. Yet when I look at Berdymukhamedov, I just don’t see a whole lot of angst there. Maybe he’s worried about the economy; maybe, deep down, he’s a bit nervous about Covid-19. But he long ago started to believe in his own luck and looks as though he’s enjoying himself a lot of the time.

The only comparison I can think of for dictatorial ebullience is the footage of Kim Jong-il from years ago, when he managed to get Bill Clinton to come to North Korea and eat a shit sandwich in exchange for the release of some American journalists. Kim was really enjoying himself that day; but that was a very complicated pleasure to arrange. All Berdymukhamedov has to do to feel good about himself is call up Kerimguly and sing a few songs for the cameras and he’s happy as Larry. Not quite stupid enough to mess up the repression machine he inherited from Niyazov and his Soviet predecessors, Berdymukhamedov carries on dictating with a song in his heart, and — as often as not — on his lips too.

I have been caught out a number of times by these semi-committed recommendations — most memorably with Hilary Mantel’s novel of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety.

But for years, one book has sat like a stone on my shelf, a permanent reminder of my failure to read it. I first heard of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate from the late Persian writer, Shusha Guppy. She had read everything, in many different languages.

She had an especially high literary bar when it came to novels, and a deep intolerance of those that ran over a few hundred pages (something she generally saw, correctly, as a demonstration of authorial ill-discipline). “There are only two truly great novels of the 20th century,” she once told me assuredly. “Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (obviously) and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate“. I had read Lampedusa and agreed, but it took me almost 15 years to get beyond the first few pages of Life and Fate.

Yet, in some way, great books wait for you, biding their time until the moment you are ready for them. And when I finally took up Grossman, late last year, I knew that I needed to commit a couple of weeks to finally climbing this literary mountain. It took a good deal longer.

Anyhow, I come down from the mountain with the unoriginal but urgent recommendation to every other reader that it is one very worth climbing. Though Grossman’s journalism (including his unforgettable first-hand account of the discovery of Treblinka) is a good place to start, Life and Fate is a narrative without equal. It is the story of the midnight of the 20th century. Rotating between the atrocities in the Nazi camps and the atrocities in the Soviet Gulag system, in the midst of all this, is the centrepiece standoff of the battle for Stalingrad: the axis on which the course of the world would turn.

So what is it that makes Life and Fate so deserving of the description “great”, a realisation of which more and more English readers — not least thanks to Robert Chandler’s translation — are becoming aware? There are a number of ways in which the term can be used of a novel; a key one is if the work appears to convey every aspect of the world which it describes.

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Though it might seem impossible to do that with the panorama Grossman surveys, he manages it: from the mother of a Russian soldier travelling to find the grave of her son, to the civilians and soldiers still eking out their lives in the rubble of the besieged city; from the minds of Hitler and Eichmann to those of Stalin and the NKVD, the novel is a vivid, living x-ray of the whole 20th-century nightmare.

The novel’s tricky publishing history is now well-known. Completed in 1960, it was confiscated by the KGB and only smuggled into the West in 1980. But you can see immediately why, even in the Khrushchev period, this novel could never have been allowed. One of the central, simple insights of the work is the way in which it innocently demonstrates how Nazism and Communism were mirrors of each other.

On one side, the Nazis would put people in camps because of their racial origin. On the other, Soviet, side people could be consigned to the camps because of a relative who had chosen to live abroad or who had the “wrong” job before the revolution. In both cases, the individual could be disappeared due to factors over which they had absolutely no control. As one of the more decent Russian characters of the novel reflects:

“To me, a distinction based on social origin seems legitimate and moral. But the Germans obviously consider a distinction based on nationality to be equally moral. One thing I am certain of: it’s terrible to kill someone simply because he’s a Jew.  They’re people like any others — good, bad, gifted, stupid, stolid, cheerful, kind, sensitive, greedy… Hitler says none of that matters — all that matters is that they’re Jewish. And I protest with my whole being. But then we have the same principle: what matters is whether or not you’re the son of an aristocrat, the son of a merchant, the son of a kulak; and whether you’re good-natured, wicked, gifted, kind, stupid, happy is neither here nor there. And we’re not talking about the merchants, priests and aristocrats themselves — but about their children and grandchildren. Does noble blood run in one’s veins like Jewishness? Is one a priest or a merchant by heredity?”

Never over-laboured, the mirror keeps offering up reflections. The Germans had their crazed purges just as the Russians — before, and after, as well as during 1937 — had theirs. The Nazis had Rohm, the Russians had Bukharin. Stalin and Hitler are not just evil geniuses of their own creation, but clever students of each other.

A genius of Grossman’s narrative is not just that he explains the uniqueness and similarity of these evils, but that he causes the reader to get meshed up in this for themselves. As the chapters switch from one camp to another or one command control to another, it takes time — often not until the give-away of a surname — to work out which totalitarianism we are in. It is not always at first clear whether we are in the Gulag or Auschwitz, the Reich Chancellery or the Kremlin.

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They are so close, that at one breath-holding point Grossman has the two dictators communing. Immediately after the German defeat in the city that has taken his name, Stalin has a moment of “superstitious anxiety” which makes him put down his pencil at his desk. “At that moment he could feel very clearly that Hitler — conscious of Stalin’s thoughts — was thinking about him.”

Yet it is not the occasional appearances by the dictators themselves, or the high-ups in either system, which sustains most of the narrative. What sustains it is a huge cast of families and individuals — soldiers, children, scientists, widows and functionaries — who find themselves trying to survive and who discover, and show, the unbelievably multifarious means by which human beings both manage and fail to do so. People in the worst situations suddenly do the most saintly things. And people who are far from being in the worst situations do the worst things only then to console themselves with a reflection of what their fate might otherwise have been had they acted “better”.

Some people regard Russian novels as being pretty much the only novels worth reading. And there is a reason for that: it is hard to think of any other such high literary culture in which catastrophe has been piled upon catastrophe for entire populations without respite and without any discernible meaning. Certainly with no happy ending. The Soviet troops drink radiator water and suffer the intestinal indignities of Stalingrad, where they fight, kill and die their way to victory. It is a battle, as Grossman puts it at one point, not just for the destiny but for “the freedom, of Man”.

And yet the Soviet soldiers who win, do not themselves find freedom. They win the great war for freedom only to then continue to live in Stalin’s Russia, with all the lies and indignities that will entail. One man whose heroic actions in defying a Kremlin order at a crucial moment does more than anything to win the battle for Stalingrad does not only find himself celebrated for his actions. He finds the decision he made — the correct decision — to have also been an incorrect one: because he defied an order from the Kremlin itself, his defiance is raised as something that may yet be used against him.

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Such a vast — and, yes, great — work does not lend itself to summaries or easy conclusions. But one of the dozens of things which is still milling in my head, days after finally laying down this brick of a book, are the reflections of one of the women towards the end. It is a reflection on that thing which more than anything else united the Nazis and the Communists. The thing that they both had so little care for: the individual.

She says:

“In the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her own life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realising that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour-camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings.

“No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour-camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be…”

In one regard, however, Vincent did leave a legacy. His memoir of one of the salient periods of his career — his time as a British Envoy to Warsaw in 1920 — made the grand claim that the fight for the Polish capital that summer was one of the most important battles in world history; alongside Marathon, Blenheim and Hastings. Yet, the Battle of Warsaw — like much of Polish history — is almost unknown to English-speaking audiences.

The year 1920 was one of chaotic flux across much of Europe. The baleful effects of the industrialised slaughter of the First World War were still being felt, and in central and eastern Europe states newly emerged from the collapse of the German, Austrian and Russian empires struggled to unify and assert themselves. As Winston Churchill pithily summarised: “The war of giants has ended, the wars of the pygmies begin.”

Poland provided perhaps the most pressing example. Reappearing on the map in 1918 after a 123-year absence, during which time it had been partitioned by its larger neighbours, Poland filled something of a central European void, in the process fighting a number of squabbles and conflicts in attempting to define its frontiers.

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The most serious of these was the Polish-Soviet War, which had begun in the early spring of 1919, when Polish forces had engaged those of Lenin’s Red Army in what is now Belarus. The conflict that followed was no pygmy sideshow — it would last for more than 18 months, range over hundreds of miles and cost the lives of more than 100,000 men.

So it was that Polish and Soviet forces engaged that spring. What followed was a curious conflict, far removed from the static, industrialised warfare that had recently drawn to a close in the west of Europe. Here, across the vast expanses of what is now Belarus and Ukraine, where roads and infrastructure were sparse, more traditional — and more mobile — methods of war prevailed. Armoured trains played a role, but cavalry was king. Poland’s Uhlans and the Bolshevik Konarmia — the Red Cavalry, which would become synonymous with a proto-Blitzkrieg of brutal ideologically-charged warfare — took centre stage in campaigns that ebbed and flowed across the landscape, ranging from the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, to the very gates of Warsaw.

By the summer of 1920, however, the war appeared to be nearing its end. Polish forces were in headlong retreat, driven westward by the numerical superiority of their enemy. They had already lost the cities of Lwów, Brest-Litowsk and Zamość, and were now in danger of losing the capital itself. Poland’s new-found independence, it seemed, was about to be snuffed out after less than two years.

But, in the middle of August, a desperate Polish counterattack to the east of Warsaw drove northward into the overextended Soviet flank, finally halting the Red Army’s advance in a ten-day engagement, at the cost of around 20,000 lives. Known to Poles as “The Miracle on the Vistula”, the battle not only relieved the capital, it routed Soviet forces, scattering them north into East Prussia and Lithuania. With that, the Soviet front collapsed, and the Kremlin finally sued for peace.

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The consequences of the Miracle were far reaching, with Poland securing its independence for a generation, its place on the map of Europe not challenged again until 1939.

In addition, the Soviet defeat arguably poisoned Kremlin attitudes towards the Poles. Relations between the two Slavic nations were never rosy — the long years of Russian partition and oppression had seen to that — but the Bolsheviks saw themselves as a new dawn, with a seductively universal ideology. Yet, outside Warsaw, they found that their message of socialist fraternity was decisively rejected; their vanguard of revolution — the Red Army — roundly defeated. As Stalin would later complain, bringing communism to Poland was “like putting a saddle on a cow”.

This rejection would have profound consequences. Soviet anti-Polish sentiment resulted in the execution by the NKVD secret police of over 100,000 Poles living within the Soviet Union in 1937-8, in a systematic attempt to eradicate them as an ethnic minority. More ominously still, a shared desire to destroy Poland was instrumental in bringing Hitler and Stalin together to agree the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939.

And, following their invasion of Poland three weeks later, Soviet forces were predictably brutal, targeting the Polish officer class and educated elites with persecution, deportation and execution. One might conclude that the road to the death pits of Katyń forest — where many of the 22,000 Polish officers executed by the Soviets in 1940 were killed — began two decades earlier with the Soviet defeat outside Warsaw.

Stalin also had a personal reason to look back on 1920 in anger. At that time, he was commander of the south-western front, around Lwów, and was widely criticised as culpable for the failure to adequately reinforce the Warsaw front.  Rebuked by Lenin, the Politburo and the Supreme Command, he was humiliated, even scapegoated, and simmered with anger thereafter. Coincidentally or not, his most vociferous critics – Trotsky and Tukhachevsky among them – would all later feel the hot lead (or cold ice-pick steel) of his ire.

And yet, significant though these aspects are, they were unknown to D’Abernon as he wrote his memoir in 1930. So why then, did he rate this still little-known battle as one of the most important military engagements in human history? The answer lies in the realm of grand strategy.

For Moscow, spreading communism westward in 1920 was not only desirable, it was an ideological imperative. In Marxist ideological terms, the Russian revolution made little sense. After all, Marxism foretold that communism was supposed to be the inevitable, scientifically determined, result of the collapse of capitalism. And yet, the first country to become communist had scarcely entered its capitalist phase; its industrial proletariat class was miniscule and insignificant.

The vital imperative, therefore, was to spread communism westward to more advanced, industrialised countries — most importantly Germany — not only to secure the revolution at home, but to make the entire edifice of communist revolution make ideological sense.

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And Germany in 1920 was in a state of near-collapse; its economy in ruins, its population exhausted, angry and disillusioned, its political life fraught with revolutionary tensions on both Right and Left. If there was ever a time for the Red Army to ride in to spur the German communists and other malcontents to victory, it was now. It was no surprise therefore that Tukhachevsky’s order of the day to his troops implored them to “Go West! Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration!”

Yet the Poles would prove to be very un-corpse-like. For one thing, the supposedly “universal” appeal of communism proved pretty unappealing to them, prefaced as it had been by a brutal military campaign and imported alongside an army of secret policemen, militiamen and “requisitioning agents”. Moreover, for many Poles, anything imported from the east was automatically tainted by association with Russia, Poland’s historic oppressor and occupier.

Consequently, the Poles bitterly resisted the horsemen of the revolution, handing the Soviets a crushing defeat at the very moment that victory appeared to be within their grasp. In so doing, they checked the Kremlin’s ambitions, dented its apparent ideological sheen, and crucially saved a west that — in that moment — was on its knees.

It was this that D’Abernon was referring to in raising Warsaw to the Pantheon of history’s most significant battles. In his book, he opined that, had the Poles “failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled.”

Just as the Battle of Tours “saved our ancestors from the Yoke of the Koran”, he concluded, so the Battle of Warsaw saved Western Europe from “a far more subversive danger – the fanatical tyranny of the Soviet.” D’Abernon’s language may not have been that of the modern diplomat or politician, but his fundamental historical judgement was sound. It is hard not to conclude that in this at least he was right.

Warsaw in 1920 represented that rare thing in history: a moment of genuine existential peril, akin to the Battle of Britain or Waterloo. We in the English-speaking world would do well to remember it.

We conducted it in a chivalrous fashion. And We Won It. Knighted historians have denounced me for saying so, but the common idea of that war in modern Britain is a vague belief that we went to war in 1939 to save the Jews of Europe.

Of course no historian says this. Nobody who knows anything at all about the war could possibly believe it. As it happens, we did not in fact save most of the Jews of Europe, or make any great efforts to do so once we knew they were being murdered. But then, most people don’t really know anything about the war.

Where was Narvik? Did we really attack the French fleet? Why did Danzig matter? What are the Ardennes? What happened at Tobruk? How on earth was HMS Hood sunk so easily? Why did the USA take so long to enter the war? Why weren’t we invaded in fact, as we have been so many times in fiction?

How come we ended up in alliance with the monster, Stalin, if our cause was freedom and civilisation? Why did we send all our gold to America? Did we get it back?

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The whole story is a bafflement of obscurity and confusion. Most of us just know the legend, which more or less requires us not to think, or study the matter. Let’s just have another book about codebreaking geniuses at Bletchley Park or brave Special Operations Executive agents parachuted into occupied France.

Or perhaps another film about the Dunkirk evacuation, which entirely glosses over why our army, bereft of equipment worth billions, was standing up to its armpits in salt water on the French coast. And the newspapers print the legend. And the publishers print the legend. And TV shows the legend.

TV’s latest excursion into this Churchilliad is a drama called World on Fire. It features a number of plucky and intrepid characters, several of them quite Left-wing — for this is after all an anti-Nazi war, which was therefore surely Left-wing. But here come the contradictions again, which I doubt the BBC will bother with very much: it was not so Left-wing at the start, if you happened to be a Communist, hamstrung by Stalin’s 1939-41 alliance with Hitler.

And much of it is set in Poland, at that time a military dictatorship which had recently taken part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and where anti-Semitism was common, even if not officially encouraged. We are invited to sympathise with one character’s fury at Britain’s inaction as the Nazis prepare to invade. Yet most British people at the time were baffled by our alliance with Poland, and Britain never had any intention of doing anything serious about it, lacking the offensive forces needed to do so.

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The historical vagueness and confusion in the scenes which follow is astonishing. I doubt whether one in a hundred of those watching could find Danzig on a map, or know why its Polish Post Office was so important in 1939 (A clue. Danzig at that date was so overwhelmingly German by population — 98% — that the Polish Post Office was one of the very few pieces of Polish real estate in the city).

I personally was puzzled to see, in late August 1939, young Polish men shown apparently volunteering to join their country’s army in its hour of need, as they would already have been under arms. Poland, which though poor and poorly-equipped and not as big a military power as it liked to think, was not unwarlike, and had maintained a two-year compulsory military service requirement since the 1920s.

This misty lack of clarity about checkable facts is, in my view, a direct result of the wilful ignorance we have imposed on ourselves, rather than make an honest examination of the origins and aims of that war. Asked why we signed a treaty with Poland, I doubt one British person in 100 could tell you. Asked what British troops were even doing in North Africa, where there was so much fighting, they cannot really explain.

You will hear stuff about the need to defend the Suez Canal, in fact rendered almost useless throughout the war by our inability to control the Mediterranean. Or there will be the need to defend “the oilfields”, by which is meant those in Iraq, a vast distance from North Africa.

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In fact, how is it that a war which began very much in the heart of Europe so quickly spun into lots of small pieces on the far side of the world? Why, for four years of a six year war, from Dunkirk to D-Day, were British soldiers not in direct contact with the main body of the main enemy, Germany?

Why, if the peril of invasion was so great in 1940, did that invasion never happen? Would you be surprised to know that in 1940 Germany did not possess, or build, a single landing craft? Or that its naval chiefs were strongly against any attempt to mount such an invasion, which was never seriously prepared?

We rightly condemn the horrors of the Blitz, especially on poor Coventry. How come almost nobody has heard of any German city bombed, in a morally dubious way, by the Allies — except Dresden in February 1945, which even the most bellicose person accepts may have been going a bit far? In fact from 1943 to 1945, we deliberately bombed working-class German civilians in their homes in dozens of German cities, killing hundreds of thousands.

As for our endorsement, at Potsdam, of a colossal and extremely violent ethnic cleansing of central Europe after the war, it is perhaps the least known major event in human history. To know of these things is to be unable, any more, to listen to the legend in the same way.

Yes, it was good that we won and they lost. Yes, our enemy represents an appalling unequalled evil. No bad deed done by us could possibly obscure or cancel the evils of the Third Reich, or be equated with them. But the unique evil of the Nazis does not wholly blot out lesser evils on our side.

This bleak realisation has been a loss for me, for as a child I loved the legend, and kept a place for it in my heart well into adulthood. It was only when it was repeatedly used as a sort of exemplar for modern wars of choice that I began to wonder about it.

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In the end I grew tired of being told that every crisis was a new Munich and every petty foreign despot was a new Hitler, from Manuel Noriega to Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. I grew even more tired of being told that people such as Anthony Blair and George W. Bush were the inheritors of Winston Churchill.

And I grew sick of being told that, as an opponent or critic of voluntary war, I was the modern version of Neville Chamberlain — or worse. And because I was dismayed by the use to which the legend was being put, I eventually examined the legend and found it wanting.

But we are on the dangerous edge of things here. If you mention doubts about the World War Two myth, you are quite likely to be falsely accused of several severe misdeeds. You will immediately be told that you are a defeatist who thinks we should have made peace with Berlin in 1940. I am no such thing, and have never written a syllable to suggest that I am. Yet I find that people just assume it to be so, of anyone who departs from the cult of unmixed heroism and virtue. As it happens, I think Churchill’s greatest action was to refuse to talk to Hitler in 1940, and I believe that a peace with the Third Reich would have been a crime and a mistake.

I am filled with admiration for those who fought and took appalling risks to fight the war. I should be, as my father was one of them, spending long months on the “Worst Journey in the World”, the Russian convoys between Scapa Flow and Murmansk. Knowing what I know about that theatre of war (my father seldom spoke about it, but suggested some reading so that I could learn from others), I doubt whether most present-day British people (including me) would even have been prepared to set out, let alone endure what happened on the way.

Though my father died more than 30 years ago, I recently devoted some months to obtaining the British medal which was eventually issued to those who took part in this very severe theatre of war. It arrived, at length, in a cheap plastic case, very inferior to those in which modern civilian honours are presented. This seemed in a way to symbolise the contrast between the grandeur of what we believe and the pinched, stretched and weary truth about what actually happened.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday and author of The Phoney Victory: Britain’s World War Two Illusion (Tauris)

Meanwhile, in the US, we have Donald Trump. What is there to say about this would-be Caesar that The Washington Post did not encapsulate in the slogan it adopted in 2017: “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (T-shirts available in S, M and XXL)? A tad histrionic, you might say, but what about the enormous gold statue Trump recently erected to himself on the National Mall? And the new lines added to the pledge of allegiance “At the moment of my betrayal to Donald the America-Father let my breath stop”?

Well okay, there is no statue and the pledge hasn’t changed. Yet Google “Trump dictator” and you’ll get 15,000,000 results. Switch “dictator” for “Hitler” and the total rises to 65,000,000. The facts – that in the US we have a chaotic, disorganised administration that lurches from one crisis to the next, while in Britain the Government can’t get a single act through Parliament – make little difference. Many, many people are highly agitated and prone to making overheated comparisons, completely untethered to any observable reality.

If more people knew about actual dictatorships, would they be less slap-happy about constantly invoking the monsters of the 20th century whenever they got a bit upset by a politician? Probably not, but in his How to be a Dictator: the Cult of Personality in the 20th Century, Dutch historian Frank Dikotter provides a primer that would do the job, if anybody were willing to listen.

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Dikotter has written extensively on Mao’s China and knows a thing or two about totalitarian excess, but here he expands his scope to cover eight appalling regimes across four continents, ranging from Mussolini at the start of the 20th century through to Mengistu at its end. His emphasis is on the phenomenon of the personality cults, the establishment of which is, in his view, “the most efficient” way for a dictator “to claw his way to power and get rid of his rivals”, beating out even purges and the principle of divide and rule – though they certainly have a role to play.

Mussolini established the template that many dictatorial cult-builders would subsequently follow. Although he was less interested in establishing a coherent ideology than his Marxist-Leninist peers, he shared their desire to concentrate as much power as possible in his own hands, to establish himself as a supreme and unquestioned leader, and duly forced himself into his subjects’ consciousnesses via photographs, posters, slogans, books, radio broadcasts and newsreels, while also turning up in person to dig ditches or inspect things. He was also highly attentive to detail: “In the middle of the war he found time to change the colour of a woman’s magazine from purple to brown,” writes Dikotter. Then it all collapsed, and Mussolini’s cult crumbled overnight.

Dikotter also explores the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung who, despite their ideological and personal differences, all managed to find a lot of common ground with their Italian predecessor, sharing such passions as self-glorification, terror, war, books with their names on the spines, and the act of naming lots of streets, avenues and cities after themselves. (They did, however, have limits: while Stalin was big on erecting statues to himself, Hitler would not permit them; monuments were for the past, and he was a leader of the future. Mao was okay with statues, but he did not want parks or cities to be named in his honour.)

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Then there are the rarely discussed regimes of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. Here, things get weirder. The Voodoo-obsessed Duvalier, who declared himself as the “personification of God” and liked to wear top hat and tails, was clearly operating in a very different cultural context from the despots of Europe and Asia, yet he had enough in common with them that Dikotter proclaims him “a dictator’s dictator, a man who wielded naked power without the pretence of ideology”. Mengistu, meanwhile, moved into Haile Selassie’s Grand Palace, had the emperor’s corpse interred underneath his office, kept the cheetahs on chains, and then caused the famine that inspired Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to write Do They Know It’s Christmas?

And so it happened, again and again. Millions would live and die in the nightmare worlds constructed by evil men, only for it all to disappear as these despots fell or died; the 20th century’s own lunatic, appalling “eternal return“, an epoch of murder, torture and degradation inspired by absurd utopian fantasies.

All of which underscores the radical stupidity of comparing controversial and/or unpopular elected leaders with Hitler and Stalin. Yes, I’ll admit that Trump straws and the unedited Trump rallies I see on Fox when I’m at the gym seem a bit odd, but CNN is running concurrently on another screen and it’s non-stop Trump-bashing. As for Boris Johnson, aside from his books and some swag sold at the last Tory conference, he has nothing at all in terms of personality cult.

Both men will also, whether or not they win their next elections, be gone very soon in the grand scheme of things. Would Stalin or Mao have allowed themselves to be voted out? Obviously not. Dikotter sees this as a sign of weakness – that they were not willing to put their ideas and regimes to the test of a plebiscite – but this is naive. There are many reasons not to hold elections if you can get away with it, and, indeed, the overwhelming majority of leaders throughout history have not bothered to ask the masses what they think.

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In fact, even when you turn your attention to actual, successful contemporary authoritarians, you’ll see little like the horrors of the recent past, aside from a handful of places such as North Korea or Turkmenistan. Today’s tyrants, while unquestionably awful, pale in comparison to their 20th century antecedents. Yes, Putin is sinister and repressive, but he is more liberal than almost every Russian leader before him bar the occasional drunk and naif.

Erdogan is an appalling thug but he was patient enough to wait decades to advance his goals through elections, constitutional reform and a long march through the institutions. And then there is Xi Jinping, a man guilty of many sins, but no Mao. As Dikotter points out: “hardly a month goes by without a new book announcing ‘the Death of Democracy'” yet “even a modicum of perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline when compared to the twentieth century”.

So why do so many people feel the need to pretend that we are living on the edge of a new era of totalitarian horror all the time, when they are not only trivialising the sufferings of those who lived under terrible regimes, but also concealing the true nature of the problems we face?

After all, honest language would bring clarity of thought, and with it, a merciless focus on the weakness and confusion of our leaders, the desperation of our elected representatives, and the pitiful sadness of their squabbles. It would also denude excitable journalists and all keyboard warriors of the fantasy that they are engaged in a battle between forces of light and darkness, replacing it with a sense that they are witness only to intractable squabbles over things which are very complicated, which no-one will win, and where everyone will feel disappointed in the end. It would also point to the fact that even second and third tier despots regularly outwit the leaders of the democratic West.

Hmm, I can see why they don’t want to do that. But still.

Luzgin’s case tells us all we need to know about Russia under Vladimir Putin. The odious communist ideology may be gone, but the aggressive mendacity of the Kremlin continues. Those who once accused the outside world of “falsifying history” over the existence of the Secret Protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Pact are falsifying history still.

To those in the West’s comfortable “permanent present”, such arguments might seem impossibly arcane, but the Luzgin case is far from trivial. Indeed, it strikes at the very heart of the Soviet – and now Russian – narrative of the Second World War; the idea that the Soviet Union’s war only began in 1941, with the German invasion, and that – consequently – the Soviet contribution to that war was only ever that of victim and liberator.

The truth – verboten in Putin’s Russia – is much more complex: for the 22 months before June 1941, Stalin’s Soviet Union was Hitler’s accomplice, invading Poland and Finland, and occupying the Baltic States and Bessarabia (modern-day Moldova). The USSR entered World War Two in 1939 very much as an aggressor.

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Understandably, then, the Soviet invasion of Poland – which opened at dawn on 17 September 1939 – is still a touchstone issue for modern Russia, not least as it began the USSR’s involvement in the war, and marked the first concrete manifestation of that collaboration with Hitler’s Germany.

It all began somewhat haltingly. In the weeks before the invasion, Hitler’s diplomats had pressed Stalin for a date when the Red Army would advance to claim the territories earmarked for Moscow in the Nazi-Soviet Pact’s Secret Protocol. But Stalin had hesitated, watching for Western reactions and wary of jeopardising his professed “neutrality” by appearing too closely aligned to Hitler.

When Stalin finally acted, a propaganda narrative was devised to dress up his invasion as a humanitarian intervention. It was trailed in a Pravda article by his propaganda chief Andrei Zhdanov, on 14 September, as an attempt to secure order following the supposed collapse of the Polish state, an effort to bring succour to the region’s beleaguered Byelorussian and Ukrainian populations. The word invasion, of course, was never mentioned. But an invasion it most certainly was.

The Red Army, which had been conducting large-scale exercises on the Polish frontier for days, had amassed some 500,000 troops for the operation, alongside 5,000 tanks and over 2,000 aircraft. The instruction issued by Boris Shaposhnikov, the Chief of the General Staff, to his commanders said nothing about humanitarian intervention. Instead, it spoke – without irony – of a “lightning strike” to destroy Polish forces.

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Shaposhnikov got his wish. The Red Army – despite its own lack of preparedness and equipment – advanced swiftly against the lightly armed troops of the Polish “KOP” border defence corps, which lacked aircraft, armour and artillery. The resulting chaos among the defenders was exemplified by the report of the KOP commander of the city of Czortków, who was asked by his superiors in Warsaw: “Is it German or Soviet planes that are attacking?” It was a question that neatly summed up Poland’s predicament.

The Soviet advance into Poland was also aided by some more modish tactics: the deployment of agents provocateurs, deception – and most notably the use of disinformation. The Red Army invasion was accompanied by a host of – often conflicting – propaganda messages to confuse the defenders; announcing, for instance, that Soviet forces were coming to liberate the working class, or that they were coming to Poland’s aid against the Germans. In one instance, the invaders were played into town by a Red Army band playing the Polish military hymn “We are the First Brigade”. Such ruses succeeded. It was not unusual for Polish garrisons to welcome Soviet forces before realising their mistake.

Others were not so accommodating. Bitter pitched battles were fought at Husiatyn, Dzisna and around the static defences and bunkers at Sarny; while sieges ensued before the cities of Grodno and Wilno fell to Red Army forces. Later in the campaign, Polish resistance would bloody Red Army noses at Szack, Husynne and Wytyczno.

In a few instances, German and Soviet forces even collaborated, despite the official order that they were to maintain a 25-km distance from one another. The best example of this collusion was at Brześć (the former Brest-Litovsk), where a joint parade of Wehrmacht and Red Army troops was held to mark the German handover of the city to Soviet control. General Heinz Guderian and his Soviet counterpart Semyon Krivoshein smiled amicably for the newsreel cameras, as a swastika fluttered behind them.

Suggested reading

How Salvini overplayed his hand

By Andrea Capussela

Like its German equivalent, the Soviet invasion of Poland was studded with atrocities. The Red Army, carrying world revolution in its knapsack, eagerly targeted Polish officers, aristocrats and local dignitaries, many of whom would meet their fate the following year in the death pits of the Katyń massacres. For others, Soviet “class justice” was more immediate. A local official at Pińsk was tied to a wagon by his feet and driven around the cobbled streets until he breathed his last. At Mokrany, captured Polish officers were summarily executed by firing squad. As they were led away, their men were told: “Those are your masters, shot dead in Mokrany forest.” Just as the Germans had imported race war to western Poland, so the Red Army brought class war to the east.

That brutal campaign would be the prelude to a brutal occupation. Within months, Polish society in the Soviet zone of occupation would be communised, with those deemed socially or politically undesirable deported to an unknown fate in Siberia, Kazakhstan and the other less hospitable parts of the USSR. After sham elections, the region was then annexed to the Soviet Union. By that time, Poland had already been wiped from the map by Hitler and Stalin’s collusion.

The Soviet Union entered the Second World War on 17 September 1939, when it invaded Poland as an aggressor and as Hitler’s confederate. This, obviously, is profoundly – and embarrassingly – at odds with the old Soviet narrative of the war, and now with the narrative propounded by Putin’s Russia, which is one reason why the latter has been so vehement in its denials and its efforts to smear Poland.

But, however much it might be denied, the truth is clear; Vladimir Luzgin was right. The Soviet Union invaded Poland in collusion with Nazi Germany, and until modern Russia can acknowledge that fact, and look its dark Soviet history squarely in the eye, its narrative of the Second World War will be based upon a lie.

Roger Moorhouse’s First to Fight: The Polish War 1939 is published by Bodley Head

Of course, to confess to a classic you have not read risks opening you up to scorn and ridicule. Which is why most people say that they have “re-read” a book, even if they have in fact just read it for the first time. But people should be honest about what they don’t know. Though even this, like everything, has limits.

In David Lodge’s 1975 novel, Changing Places, a group of academics play the game of admitting to the great literary work they’ve never read. There are obvious ones that aren’t too embarrassing. Everyone thinks they’ve read Oliver Twist but, in fact, someone admitting they’ve only seen the adaptations is a great relief all round. One of Lodge’s characters goes too far, though, and amid the thrill of confession he, a professor of literature, admits that he has never read Hamlet. After which he loses his job.

More Christmas Reading

Why you should read more history

By Tom Chivers

Anyway, earlier this year, when I was given a thumping great modern novel, the rewards of which did not strike me as obviously being worth the journey, I decided to read Dostoyevsky instead. I’d read some of the other works. But to my shame, I had never read Crime and Punishment. So I cast aside the modern novel and delved into one of my biggest reading gaps.

Crime and Punishment is not a chore, and it is most certainly worth the journey. From the start, I couldn’t put it down. Then after the first 100 pages, or so, I had to. Not least because I was starting to feel like I had committed the crime myself. Dostoyevsky’s description of the lead up to the terrible act, with Raskolnikov feeling drawn towards his crime as someone whose clothing has got caught up in a machine, tugs the reader in with it. The crime itself is described with such vivid horror that you might be forgiven for sweating through it – as I did.

One thing in particular struck me, and worried me, when I finally put the novel down. As those who have read – or “re-read” the novel – will know, the story is ultimately one of redemption. In all the years that I have known about it but not read it, and right up to cracking open the spine of the novel itself this year, I had expected the story of Crime and Punishment to be far worse than it is.

Suggested reading

Communism's forgotten victims

By Douglas Murray

As Raskolnikov’s mother and sister arrive in St Petersburg, I was imagining the depths of suffering, violence and devastation that would eventually be brought down on them. I was picturing the same with the one woman who – not to give the tale away – seems able to save Raskolnikov as well as the prison to which he goes. But all of this, and much more besides, seemed almost tame in the reading, compared with the horrors of bleakness I was expecting Dostoyevsky to perform.

And then it struck me that my expectation wasn’t because I have an unusually dark view of the world. It is because after the horrors of the 20th century, we all do. When we think of a prison or a camp in Russia, we don’t conjure the bleak workplace of the Tsars. We think of the horrors of the Gulag. When we imagine terrible vengeance being wreaked on people, we think of their entire family being decimated. They do not suffer: they are annihilated. And it all happens without justification or meaning and without the slightest chance of any redemption.

This – at any rate it seems to me – is one of the lessons that almost everybody has taken from the century between Dostoyevsky’s and our own. And that made me wonder not just about Dostoyevsky’s world, and the lessons which it might impart, but of the lessons we have absorbed from our own time and cannot shrug off.

So I would say, read Dostoyevsky not to fill a gap in your reading knowledge or to win a competition among peers, but for an understanding of Dostoyevsky’s own time, and ours, and of some hopes that would appear to be timeless.