Yet if “October” is a socialist epic, chiseled in soft gray stone to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Lenin’s putsch, it barely receives any attention. Locals mostly seem to ignore it, instead keen only on busting through the cinema’s doors to watch the latest action flick, or grabbing a bite to eat at the Burger King on its corner–or even stopping for a coffee at the adjacent Starbucks. That’s surprising, not least given the revolution “October” commemorates would soon travel from Petrograd to the steppe and grasp Kazakhstan’s people, choking the country and killing millions.

It might seem reasonable, then, to assume that locals would prefer this and other such Soviet monuments to disappear. In fact, the opposite is true. “I’m proud of it,” a Kazakh local told me when I asked her about its place in the city. “It represents a bad time, but that time has gone. It needs to be saved because it is art — and art is beautiful.”

It is a sentiment that has found a home on social media in the last decade, where you will find no end of accounts with thousands of followers and millions of likes and views, each sharing the curious beauty of art and architecture from across the former communist world. From dazzling mosaics to statues of long-dead revolutionaries, these span a bewildering range of styles, from the faux classicism of the Stalin-era Central Academic Theatre of the Russian Army in Moscow to the brutalism of Belgrade’s Eastern and Western City Gates — and indeed the bas-relief style of the “October” mural in Almaty.

Each of these pieces has been able to reinvent itself by doing little more than existing. With the passage of time, the ideologies and messages forged into them have almost disappeared. And, witnessing such a radical change in historical perception got me thinking about Britain’s architectural legacy. Since 2020, after all, debates have raged over whether we should or shouldn’t remove physical history from our public spaces, particularly colonial-era figures who supported despicable racist policies and engaged in the barbaric slave trade.

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These debates existed before, of course, but the Rhodes Must Fall campaign against the British imperial legacy in South Africa, together with the Black Lives Matter movement in America, sparked a new wave of anti-colonialism and historical reframing across the UK. In practice, this manifested itself as anger towards statues of historical figures. These figures, who in some cases lived hundreds of years ago, were seen to have abetted present-day racism.

There’s no need, here, to recapitulate everything that followed — from the Colston debacle to the damage visited against statues of everyone from Robert the Bruce to Queen Victoria. Suffice to say that such actions were popular: multiple 2020 surveys found that the majority of Brits supported removing the statues, with one YouGov survey suggesting 53% of people wanted Colston gone from Bristol. Though grumbles about colonial-era architecture had long existed in academic and activist circles, 2020 marked the time the general public became collectively aware of, and indeed vocal about, the physical heritage around them.

It’s not hard to understand why this might happen. You can see, certainly, why people would want to destroy a statue of a man who made his riches by crushing the potential of countless black lives. Why would we want to celebrate a man who enslaved people? After many years of extensive travel across the former communist world, I began to see the historical parallels. The context is wildly different, of course, but in both Britain and, say, Kazakhstan, there are people who have suffered long histories of subjugation and oppression who must now see that celebrated in public spaces.

Why, then, the wildly different public reactions — especially when the Soviet nightmare happened so much more recently than the Atlantic slave trade, and when murderous despots like Hoxha and Ceauşescu ruled their countries deep into living memory? Perhaps the answer begins with all those Instagram accounts, and how they’ve helped turn communist art from a political symbol, whether good or bad, into a thoroughgoing cultural aesthetic. With the political messages gone, mosaics and murals — which Stalin intended to exude colorful utopian visions — have transformed into pure works of art to be enjoyed by everyone for free. And with communist architecture, its popularity appears to stem from its genuinely unique and alien appearance, which in turn has sparked curiosity over a historical period in which such aesthetics were prized and pursued.

As for an example of this trend in practice, few stand out better than @easternblocgirl, the Instagram account of a young Serbian woman who shares gloomy photographs and videos of Yugoslav architecture and communist memes, simultaneously questioning and reimagining ways in which the world might view these pieces and their history. She even has a Spomenik tattooed to her arm: referring to the futuristic monuments that sprung up across the former Yugoslavia from the Sixties through to the Eighties, and which commemorate victims of the Second World War.

The account is only one of several communist architecture accounts — @travelproof_tjark, @sovietvisuals, @socialistmodernism, @balkan.stories — which have well over a million followers between them. But even more striking is how this digital fame is increasingly jumping from screens into the real world. With online videos often showing crumbling monuments and damaged mosaics, a new generation of art lovers are working to save them, from Kazakhstan to Georgia, Poland to Azerbaijan.

There is perhaps no better example than the Buzludzha monument. Built in 1981, it’s an enormous saucer-like structure, sitting on a dynamited Bulgarian mountain peak of the same name. Inside, no less are no fewer than 937 square meters of mosaics, created by 60 artists using millions of cobalt tiles, each dedicated to the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party, with yet more venerating Marx and Lenin. In the ceremonial hall, you will find depictions of workers, peasants, soldiers and partisans alongside scenes of industrial and agricultural labor; the panoramic corridors retell episodes from Bulgarian social and political history.

When communism fell in 1989, so did the monument’s maintenance. But rather than letting the decay continue, Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova in 2015 launched the Buzludzha Project Foundation. She was aware that there was a structure on a mountain in central Bulgaria that resembled a UFO — but wasn’t entirely sure about what that thing was. After seeing photographs of the monument online, she became convinced that something beautiful lay beneath the ruins of Buzludzha, and embarked on a simple mission: to restore the relic to its former glory. “We believe that it is important to save Buzludzha not only because it is a masterpiece of architecture, engineering, and art,” she wrote after launching the project, “but because we should remember our past, especially if it is traumatic or difficult.”

The sentiment echoes far beyond Bulgaria’s artsy elite. When I visited the monument earlier this year, I found that many local people also wanted it protected. My taxi driver, who had grown up in the nearby town of Kazanlak, even told me about his hopes for it to become a museum for tourists to visit. As he put it: “Imagine how good that would be for Kazanlak.”

Polling shows that Bulgarians overwhelmingly support the preservation of their communist architectural legacy. As researchers at Cardiff University found, over two thirds of them regard such monuments as important to national identity, while 58% support EU involvement to help fund preservation efforts. Most interestingly, a majority of people, including those under the age of 34, recognize the monuments as being part of Bulgarian national identity, even if they didn’t experience the brutal realities of communism themselves.

It is a stark contrast with opinions in Britain, where a 2020 government poll found that only 16% of people aged 16-24 were interested in heritage and its importance. And while separate polling three years later found that 64% of Britons felt proud of Britain’s history, this was down from 86% just a decade earlier. Taken together, these numbers reflect a disturbing trend towards civic disengagement, reflected in growing distrust of other institutions like the police and, most worryingly, education.

There is no doubt that young people across the UK who came out to topple and vandalize statues were vigorously and actively engaging in history, vital for any functioning society. But their acts seemed rash and worlds away from the approaches seen across the former communist world. It is here where the people appear to be aware of the past in a way that escapes those in Britain.

The problem, then, may lie in a lack of historical awareness, or perhaps a lack of desire to be aware. History as a subject is only mandatory in UK schools up until the age of 14, while religious education is (by law, at least) compulsory up to the age of 18. Many young people now use alternative sources of historical education like YouTube (which in 2025 became the second-most watched service in the UK) and podcasts, which aren’t always factually watertight, not to mention dubious in their sources and potentially hidden agendas.

In fact, social media is a hotbed of ill-informed “takes” and eroded critical thinking. Many of the young people seen protesting on the UK’s streets wholeheartedly agreed with BLM statements that Britain had grown rich solely off the back of slavery, and of course, it is partly true. But none seemed to pay heed to the other ways in which the country grew into an imperial titan — not least through its indigenous natural resources and entrepreneurial culture. Viewing history through a single lens inevitably warps the whole world.

Polish journalist and cultural critic Agata Pyzik believes all this is clearing the ground for dangerously misconstrued historical understanding. Writing shortly after statues of Lenin were being pulled down in eastern Ukraine, in 2014, before Russia launched its first invasion of the country, she noted that more people were beginning to wrongly conflate dissatisfaction and anger with modern-day politics with historical monuments. To do so, she said, is to pair things from very “different historical orders”. Sometimes, this conflation has missed the mark entirely. Only this year, multiple statues in Parliament Square, including that of prominent suffragette Dame Millicent Fawcett, were vandalized with graffiti related to trans rights.

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The anger is misplaced. It is far easier to target statues than it is the real reasons behind the inadequacies of your present-day society, whether Britain or Bulgaria, or any post-communist country for that matter. Yes, these monuments represent periods in which historical ills occurred. But is it really Lenin’s fault that corruption in Hungary is at an all-time high? Or Colston’s fault that the UK government is failing to address systemic racism in 2025?

Germany is all too aware of how easy it is to blame the past, remove it, and blindly move on. The country is second only to Russia in the number of Red Army and communist memorials on its soil. Indeed, one sits just moments away from the Bundestag, the parliament building in Berlin. Yet rather than tear down public art erected by the communist German Democratic Republic (DDR), its democratic successor has actively protected over 4,000 such fixtures. Why? In the decades following the fall of the Nazi regime, Germany adopted “Erinnerungskultur” or a “Culture of Remembrance”: an unspoken, nationwide acknowledgment that it is the duty of citizens to remember and learn from their country’s past — not erase it.

Other countries have also navigated this difficult path successfully. In Tallinn, the Estonian capital, a plaque sits at the heart of the city’s Old Town celebrating Juhan Smuul, a Soviet-era writer whose works are loved in the 21st century. Only recently did Estonia discover that Smuul helped authorities in the mass deportation of Estonians to Siberia during the Stalinist terror. Many of Smuul’s countrymen were worked to death in gulags, never to see their families again.

Clearly, then, Smuul participated in evil, just as Colston happily destroyed the lives of the innocent. But rather than remove and destroy the plaque altogether, the city council installed a small QR code which, when I scanned it, linked to his sins and placed his historical role in context. It all suggests that, by balancing aesthetics with action, even the nastiest of people can be memorialized fairly. And while it may be said that monuments in the post-communist world are easier on the eye (an imposing and colorful Bulgarian mosaic commemorating Marx and Lenin is, I think, more impressive than a statue of a long-dead slaver), Britain’s architectural legacy is one that is beautiful in its own artistic right: the Royal Albert Hall, Wellington Arch, Marble Arch, Manchester Town Hall, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Belfast City Hall — the list goes on.

And so the same can be said of the “October” bas-relief in Almaty. The uninspiring and bleak road that runs parallel to it is in almost constant use by businessmen and students of the nearby university, elderly women heading to the market, and elderly men who sit idly in the adjacent square. People are forced to see and remember the violent past on a daily basis. But rather than rage and protest and call for its removal, they have chosen another path. A path of remembrance, recognition, reconciliation and, most importantly, reinterpretation. Perhaps it is time for the people of Britain to see the sense in this movement too.

It took only 12 months, the life-span of a shrew, for a Labour landslide to transmute itself into a struggling government barely able to contain social cataclysm. If a country’s stability can be measured in the longevity of its leaders, then Britain remains in a period of near-revolutionary ferment. Who can say with confidence that Starmer, Britain’s sixth Prime Minister in a decade, will see out his full term, or even that his party will?

At the time of writing, with the Chancellor weeping on the front bench, and Starmer’s authority within his own party having followed his welfare reforms down the drain, the Labour government reeks of approaching death. Already almost as unpopular as the Conservative Party at its terminal nadir in government, Labour is in office without power, in helpless possession of a historic majority it cannot use and is unlikely ever to repeat.

Yet for all that Starmer is simply a dud, the Government’s root problem is structural rather than personal: any Labour replacement would suffer the same fate. All the recent character portraits released to mark his dismal anniversary, peering behind the hollow mask, are thus an exercise in futility. The reason Britain is cycling through prime ministers at an ever-increasing rate is due to a crisis of state legitimacy. Like later 19th-century Ireland, the effective governance of the country has now become impossible. The state’s legitimacy and reach are contested, neither oppression nor mollification are practicable, an amorphous nationalist revolt is brewing, and strategic shocks are appreciable on the horizon.

In an attempt to borrow the legitimacy of existential threat, the state warns darkly of an approaching war it is not equipped to fight, in defence of a political order no one would willingly fight for. The country is simply in no state to fight a war. According to Westminster’s own newly announced commission on social cohesion, the UK is now a “tinderbox” of “creeping balkanisation and extremism” in which “the basis of our democracy is at risk”. Yet as the commission itself laments, “We do not have a national era-shaping presidential figure such as Lee Kuan Yew or Charles de Gaulle” to remake the faltering state. What we have, for now, is Keir Starmer.

One highly probable outcome of the current crisis, according to the New Statesman’s Tom McTague, is that Starmer “will be remembered as the last leader of the old normal, the final defender of the shaky post-2008 world before it was dragged into a new state by the figures now jockeying for mastery of the populist right”. Yet whatever the contours of the new state, the Westminster state, in its current ailing form, is also a very recent one: the proof of this is that even a return to the Britain of John Major would be experienced as a political revolution, condemned as fascism by clients of the Blairite state. Blair’s New Labour effectively erected a new UK polity on Britain’s territory, a “New Britain” in his own words, to entirely reshape what had by the Nineties become a normal European nation state for a new globalised world order. Yet now that global order has collapsed, and the British state reshaped in its image lives on borrowed time.

The unintentional effect of Blair’s demographic and constitutional tinkering was to set in train a second, later counterrevolution on the Right, understood by its opponents as a Right-wing populism of base urges, rather than a logical and entirely predictable political reaction. The current political trends on the Right are most closely analogous to the classical nationalisms of the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the essential stages of political modernity which Britain, through its possession of an early unified state and global empire, had previously sidestepped. Once you accept the analogy with classical nationalism, you see its hallmarks everywhere. The increasing co-option of the Conservative Party and its allied media and thinktanks by the New Right follows precisely the same process of “blocked mobility”, producing a revolutionary counter-elite among disaffected graduates that the scholar John Hutchinson traced in his works on cultural nationalism. In this regard, we may note that the current UK state’s proscription of “cultural nationalism” as a threat to its survival is entirely rational. Late 19th-century Ireland is one useful parallel, but others are available, as the relationship follows a well-worn historical path. In his 1994 book Modern Nationalism, Hutchinson summarised the process by which the ethnic Russians of the Soviet Union lost faith in their state, and by withdrawing its legitimacy, allowed it to collapse.

Like his contemporary Blair, Gorbachev aimed to reshape his ailing state for the brave new world of the Nineties. Instead, he accelerated its collapse. Following his failed reforms, ethnic Russians “came to believe themselves victims of a failed system… declining in world prestige and economically incompetent” in which the heterogenous state built around their ethnic core instead appeared to be the engine of their demographic decline. Relative birth rates, of ethnic Russians and minorities, assumed new political importance as “concerns were expressed about demographic trends which were transforming them into a minority in the Union”, while a new flowering of overt anti-Russian sentiment among minorities heightened their alienation from the Soviet state. The growing centrality of demographic and cultural anxieties in an atmosphere of economic decline and paralysed political leadership accelerated a Russian “ambivalence that made them prepared in the end to desert the USSR in order to build a better future in their homelands. Divisions paralysed the state, paving the way for full collapse.” In 1986, Hutchinson reminds us, the Soviet leadership had declared the “national question” to be finally resolved: five years later, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.

How relevant is this scenario to the UK? Each day’s headlines now throw up correspondences, yet what is remarkable, and tragic, is how new these dynamics are. Writing in 1994, Hutchinson observed that there are a few “other multinational states where the core nationality exercises power through a civic rather than an ethnic identification”, with Britain being the prime example. Yet the Britain of the Nineties differed from the Soviet Union in that “the core nationality is much more dominant than were the Russians in the USSR (who had declined to barely 50 per cent of the total population) and there are many fewer minority nationalities to control”. The takeaway lesson, for Hutchinson, is that “even universalistic ideologies such as communism, possessing all the machinery of a modern technological state to achieve its aims, have ultimately to operate through ethnic core populations.” Indeed, “for a state to achieve stability… these cores must be demographically dominant and strongly identified with the state and its territories.” This social-scientific truism is increasingly the pivot of British politics.

Just as Gorbachev’s failed reforms accelerated processes which “encouraged many Russians to redefine the Soviet territory as alien and to identify the Russian territory as their homeland,” we see a similar process on the rapidly evolving British Right in distinguishing between the Britain of recent memory and its UK replacement. When even Tory grandees such as Lord Frost borrow the disparaging term “Yookay” from the internet Right to disparage what he defines as Blair’s “new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain [but] distinct from it”, we see a similar, explicit distinction being made as that between Russia and the USSR. The counterpoint to Blair’s UK, or YooKay — the two are, now, more or less interchangeable — is, as Frost observes, simply Britain.

Whether you welcome this development or fear it, British politics in its current tumultuous form, with all its increasingly radicalised and existential debates on immigration and demographics, on its history, social housing and the welfare state, and on the nature and boundaries of Britishness or Englishness, is inexplicable without accepting that the country has now entered this phase of political development. Almost every daily headline or “culture war” controversy strengthens this thesis, which requires a wilful blindness to ignore: indeed, it is now more vigorously heard in ordinary life, or seen in the comments of local news stories than it in the Westminster press. In rushing towards visions of civil war, social democrats such as Marr, just like his increasingly mainstream apocalyptic analogues on the Right, have skipped the more common and plausible political outcome of political pressures leading towards a reinvigorated, more tightly-defined nation state, as historically distinct in its own way as Eastern Europe’s transition from communism.

McTague’s portrait of Starmer as “the last leader of the old normal” may be better applied to Farage, a flawed politician seemingly destined to take on a daunting and unenviable historical role. When Farage can declare that “Those who try to demonise me could be in for a terrible shock once I’m gone. That’s why we say we believe that we are the last chance to restore confidence in the democratic system, to change things”, he is probably correct. Whether he is up to the challenge is doubtful. As its name suggests, the Reform Party can be understood as one of the last attempts of the old system — the UK state in its post-Blair form — to save itself. If the analogies with classical nationalism are valid, then the political horizon of interest is what comes after Reform’s likely failure in government, as some on the political Right increasingly make explicit. Rupert Lowe’s new cross-party venture, Restore Britain, is a more perfect summation of nationalist thinking.

As the most intellectually interesting politician on the Right, Robert Jenrick, declares, “The old order is collapsing — and its architects like Tony Blair are yesterday’s men and women… We live in a political interregnum” in which “we have no choice but to go advance, and embrace the new order that is coming.” Cynically or not, consciously or not, Jenrick is tapping into the ferment of nationalist ideas on the younger Right, as is a growing cohort of the Conservative Party under Badenoch’s hands-off leadership. We have entered a well-established and predictable historical process which is likely to reshape the British state entirely before it is done. Indeed, it is notable that one eyewitness observer of the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia, Dominic Cummings, has already himself transitioned from reformer to accelerationist. Others will surely follow: adapting the old Irish nationalist maxim, we can say that the UK’s crisis is Britain’s opportunity.

Yet despite the weakness of lobby journalists for vapid gossip, the individual personalities of Westminster politicians thrown up by the moment are in a sense irrelevant, making Starmer, the empty cipher, the perfect figure of our time. Like Starmer, buffeted by winds he cannot control, their positions are structural, created by the logic of events. Like us mere voters, the politicians of today and of the near future have been dragged into the slipstream of history, in a process they may not fully perceive and cannot fully control. To accurately outline the contours of the current crisis is one thing: but where it all leads, no-one can yet say.

In an ironic reversal of the Gorbachev situation, Trump is trying to turn a globalized, free-market America into a more controlled and locally-based economy. Like Gorbachev, Trump has gone so far as to translate that demand into harsh economic reality: stop importing things right now, or get crushed by tariffs. But the companies now expected to do their patriotic duty for Uncle Sam have absolutely no support from the state.

When push came to shove, Gorbachev didn’t really want much in the way of actual markets; he wanted all the market efficiency while still maintaining Soviet top-down control of the economy. Not able to handle the pull from these radically two different directions, the USSR economy broke apart, and soon the USSR itself went with it.

If Trump were on course to make his program work, he would be mimicking the way the Chinese government supports businesses that are affected by changes of policy. If the CCP were to decide that aluminum imports were suddenly unacceptable, companies using aluminum would be told where a new mine would be opened, which banks would lend capital to that project, which company would be in charge of construction, and when these companies would have to switch to being entirely domestically sourced. If they do not perform their patriotic duty, or if they actively harm the social stability of China, companies can indeed be destroyed or taken over by the state.

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But there is still a social contract there: a deal in which both parties have duties and responsibilities. Trump has now suddenly and violently duplicated all the duties that companies in China might have toward their country, but he has done nothing to assume any of the responsibilities of the Chinese state. The result is a halfway house of sorts; one that is likely to simply destroy much of the American business community unless there is an immediate change of course.

America needs reform — who inside the country would even deny it at this point? On a purely abstract level, there are very few Americans who would oppose the idea of their country rebuilding its manufacturing capacity. But the current execution is akin to trying to do a sharp fighter jet turn while flying a slow and fully laden passenger plane. Whether due to a lack of time, energy, or care, Trump’s reforms are all being made with the chainsaw rather than the scalpel. Reforming the government bureaucracy has turned into firing tens of thousands of workers almost at random, leading to many mistakes and more inefficiency rather than less. Reforming America’s structural trade deficits, on the other hand, now looks like a Khmer Rouge death march for companies that are even partly reliant on components or raw materials from abroad. If you’re an American manufacturer, you should just buy American bauxite from an American bauxite mine, and then send it to an American aluminum smelter. If you cannot (the US currently has no operational bauxite mining) and your business collapses, then that’s not Trump’s fault, that’s your fault.

The practical details here — the fact that it takes 20 years to build a mine, but you’re somehow supposed to have it ready in 48 hours — are treated like they basically do not matter. In this way, Trump’s reforms clearly go way too far: the things he is asking American industry to do cannot be done. You can’t just impose huge penalty fees on a system of trade that America depends on to get its food and medicine and electronics and expect it to work out, and the end result of this policy is likely to be empty shelves and shortages: yet another parody of the late-stage Soviet Union. The systems we depend on have become too complex for us mere mortals to grasp; Trump seemingly neither has the patience or inclination to even try to understand them before transforming them utterly.

When asked what he thought of the ongoing stock market crash as a result of his tariff announcement, Trump recently said that, while he didn’t like the market going down, sometimes you simply had to take “medicine”. The Gorbachev years had its own, similar term: the USSR was to be saved through the application of “shock therapy”. Trump’s “medicine” here is just an inversion of Gorbachev’s own mix of totalizing reform and lethal indecisiveness. It’s an interesting choice of words, nevertheless: most kinds of medicine are just as capable of killing as they are of healing, if administered at the wrong dosage or the wrong time. The Soviet Union learned that lesson the hard way in the Eighties; now it may just be America’s turn.

But changing American industry is actually only a part of what Trump now wants to accomplish. His surrogates are starting to talk about the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency as a problem in and of itself. By tariffing everyone at the same time, and essentially taking a sledgehammer to the entire global trading system, Trump could conceivably end the dollar’s reserve status fairly quickly. But this is a truly monumental change that would touch upon the life of every person on the planet. What the effects of doing that would be, though, nobody really knows.

Even more stunningly, Trump is also planning on upending the infrastructure of trade itself, even as he’s declaring a tariff war on the rest of the planet. In just over a week, the US is now set to implement an incredibly radical change: ships that are made in China, or belong to companies who own a ship made in China, will now have to pay large penalty fees whenever they dock at a port in America. Ostensibly, this money will be used to re-create an American shipping industry. There’s just one problem: that industry simply doesn’t exist at present, and more than half of all the world’s ships are now made inside China.

None of what I’ve said is in any way an argument that America shouldn’t have tariffs, or that it cannot be reformed. It is only to say that these tariffs will not do what they’re supposed to do, and that these reforms will end up pushing America toward the very dissolution that people are trying to avoid. But America is now so hopelessly stuck in negative polarization that making such an argument is almost impossible. Right now, people are either for Trump or against Trump, and no more nuance than that is really in demand. To be against Trump but for tariffs, or for Trump but against these tariffs in particular, is to piss into the wind. Towards the end, the USSR was similarly polarized: the ability to discuss things across the social divide slowly dwindled, until all you could do was to simply pick a side.

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Unfortunately for America, the part where everyone simply starts picking sides has only just begun. If one considers the issue of Trump’s 2 April tariffs in terms of American domestic politics, it’s clear that the way in which they are being handled is a constitutional ticking time bomb. According to the constitution, issues of tariffs and taxation belong to Congress, not to the president. Congress has delegated power over tariffs to the president, but this delegation of power was meant to handle emergencies. Trump is of course claiming that the chronic trade deficits of America constitutes a sort of global emergency, but the critical point here is that this argument sits at the razor’s edge of what is even reasonable. One could easily make the argument that by deciding — as a single individual! — to change the entire world economic order and impose massive new de facto taxation on Americans, Trump has now taken the step from being a duly-elected president to being a sovereign and unaccountable king. Ominously, there’s probably quite a few Americans who would be fine with that idea.

Equally ominously, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, recently made noises about how his state might want to simply negotiate a separate trade arrangement with Asian economies rather than go along with Trump’s plans for American autarky. What Newsom is saying here is in fact openly seditious and completely unconstitutional, but to many opponents of Trump, his ideas are now far from unthinkable or even undesirable. It probably doesn’t even need to be said that the issue of tariff nullification played a significant part in the lead-up to the American Civil War. In fact, Newsom’s loose talk actually shows us that there now exists a viable, well-ordered path toward some sort of breakup of America. During the height of the Covid crisis, the federal government essentially lost control over the states, which ended up forming various ad-hoc regional organizations to coordinate their responses. These ad-hoc organizations at the regional level aren’t regulated in the constitution and are probably quite illegal, but in the heat of the Covid panic, none of that seemed to matter.

If the end result of these various dramatic Trump reforms is to break parts of the American economy, the pressure on Newsom and other blue state governors to do something will become increasingly urgent. If that happens, then it is not at all unlikely that blue states will once again come together into ad-hoc “confederacies”, which will then coordinate their policies, and even set their own trade policy vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Sure, this would be completely illegal; sure, the founders of America wouldn’t like it at all. But what does that even matter when you can say the same thing about the mad king trying to wreck the global economy? Nobody thought the Soviet Union could break up either, until one day it simply did.

Once a young nation, America is now old. Once the home of optimism, America is now despondent. The 250th anniversary of the great American Revolution is just a year away, but who knows whether there’ll be anyone left in the mood to celebrate. There is actually a non-zero chance the entire country might be in some form of bankruptcy or technical default on its debt before then; in fact, all of Trump’s reforms up until this point have only made the deficit situation worse, not better.

Given all this gloom, it is hard to fault Trump for flipping over the table. But in doing so, he’s not truly treading new ground. Today, just as happened a generation ago, a controversial man is suddenly upending an imperial system that has become too slow, too divided, and too indebted to survive for much longer. Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it — and Donald J. Trump has never been a man to care much about dusty old books.

Kandinsky styled himself as the champion of the “little man”, rebelling against such snobbish notions as harmony, which is to say against the consensus that ran from Raphael down to the Royal Academy. Yet it was, ironically, the “little man” himself who railed most against abstraction. And so, along with Klee, Feininger, and countless other radicals, Kandinsky’s works were tarred as Degenerate Art by the Nazis in 1937, in the infamous exhibition of that name.

But if Kandinsky was a victim of Right-wing cancel culture, he was also a victim of Left-wing cancel culture. This should surprise us. For Kandinsky was practically a communist. At Moscow University, where he read law and economics, he produced a sympathetic dissertation titled “On the Legality of Labourers’ Wages”. The Blue Rider collective — whose paintings are now on show at Tate Modern (25 April – 20 October) — he spearheaded was established in 1911 with a stirring call to arms that recalls the last line in Marx’s Manifesto. “Der Blaue Reiter will be the call that summons all artists of the new era and rouses the laymen,” declared Kandinsky and his mate Franz Marc.

On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky’s slim opuscule timed for the group’s first exhibition, likewise made clear that the true purpose of art was to defeat the vacuous materialism of modern man. All the same, as that title suggests, there was a decidedly romantic strain to Kandinsky’s leftism that left his more dogmatic comrades cold. In 1908, Kandinsky had been fired by the German translation of Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation, a nutty pamphlet by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater that preached the gospel of Theosophy, its esoteric message encased in the book’s frontispiece, a palette bearing the legend “Key to the Meaning of Colours”. The pair, it seems, believed in “auras”, essentially coloured emanations around human bodies that conveyed emotions. Today, we would call them vibes.

Proper, positivist Marxists, one imagines, would have impatiently clicked their tongues at this sort of claptrap, but not Kandinsky. All the stuff about the “vibrations of souls” somehow spoke to him. And so colours replaced objects in his painterly imagination. We may think, at first glance, that the Blue Rider pictures are no more than decorative wallpaper, but in fact, as Kandinsky’s writings show, many of them are essentially works of religious art, dealing with such premonitory themes as the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment.

As it was, though, Soviet Russia’s revolutionary bureaucrats were after depictions of Large Projects, whereas Kandinsky wanted to paint Small Pleasures. They were in the business of dreary instruction, not Dreamy Improvisation. What was needed, the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoli Lunacharsky felt, was “art of five kopeks”, not worthless art but art within the means of the masses. Accordingly, Kandinsky fell out of favour. He had been a bit player in the Revolution, and had done his bit curating provincial museums for the Bolsheviks, not to mention helped establish the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. Still, it was a tough racket being an Expressionist in a world of Social Realists. Routinely and puerilely assailed as bourgeois and boring, he leapt at the first chance to leave. In 1921, he moved to Dessau, throwing in his lot with Gropius’s Bauhaus, which remained a going concern until the Nazis shuttered it when they seized power. The remaining decade of his life was spent in Parisian wilderness. Kandinsky died an unhappy man in 1944.

That the Soviet Union effectively hounded out its most creative artistic talents, from Kandinsky in the Twenties to Neizvestny in the Seventies, was not inevitable. Indeed, there is nothing inherently authoritarian about communism. We would do well to remember the historical contingencies that led up to that outcome. The early Marx himself waxed eloquent about “the benefits of a liberal constitution, of a country where there is freedom of discussion, freedom of association, and where a humanitarian seed can flourish for the good of all Europe”. Here was a supremely convincing reconciliation of socialism and freedom. The proles were treated as intelligent grown-ups.

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In later works, it is true, he betrayed a regrettable preference for de haut en bas technocratic solutions, the kind befitting the worst kind of Brussels Eurocrat. Still, it was left to Lenin to turn an instrument of proletarian emancipation into a tool of authoritarian centralisation. As for Lunacharsky, he was not such a terrible killjoy, but rather a mondain character with a lively past simply obeying orders; before the revolution, he had moved in rather choice circles in Paris and Capri.

Needless to say, the upshot was most damaging. By the time high Stalinism took hold, the intellectual and artistic energies of Soviet communism had more or less completely fossilised. The baton passed to Western Marxism. From the Frankfurt School in the interwar period to structuralism in post-war France and operaismo in post-war Italy, some of the most arresting developments in Left-wing thought occurred in the free West. More so than Soviet Marxists, their British counterparts recognised — in the words of Perry Anderson — that “to take liberties with the signature of Marx” was to “enter into the freedom of Marxism”.

The new Expressionists show at Tate Modern underscores just how important the freedom of expression was to the development of art. Indeed, it was no accident that Kandinsky thrived not in his native land but in relatively free Munich. The young Wassily knew a thing or two about unfree societies. His parents, clamouring for liberal reform, had been exiled to the tea plantations of Kyakhta on the Mongolian border by Tsar Alexander II. It was only in the 1860s, that radical decade that also saw the abolition of serfdom, that they were rehabilitated along with other dissidents; Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866.

University life was dull. Some respite came from a research assignment that took him to Vologda, whose pagan peasants enchanted him. Throughout his life, Kandinsky maintained his fidelity to the Orthodox Church, though the colourful and exotic never failed to fascinate him. A staid, bourgeois life awaited him after his marriage to his bookish cousin — one of very few women at Moscow University at the time — when a professorship in Roman law came through at Tartu University. But then a midlife crisis intervened, provoked by Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in 1896. Kandinsky had a eureka moment of his own: academic life, he concluded, was bollocks. There was no certainty in the world. Thereafter, it was only the subjective world of art that mattered. Monet’s Haystacks and Wagner’s Lohengrin, both encountered in Moscow, further convinced him that art was his calling. More prosaically, a loaded uncle kicked the bucket that year. Aged 30, Kandinsky came into a sizeable inheritance that was his ticket out of the professions – and Tsarist Russia.

Munich could have been Mars. It certainly felt like another planet. This was a land where painters “had the status of generals”. So wrote the Irish painter John Lavery. It was also an oasis of tolerance, thanks to the urbanity of its ruling class. Jewish painters like Albert Bloch and Elisabeth Epstein, on the run from antisemitism, found a home there. So, too, did dissidents from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, and the promiscuous Russian bohemians Marianne Werefkin and Alexis von Jawlensky. Their favourite hangout spot was the famous pink salon owned by Werefkin — an “independently wealthy” polyglot noblewoman according to the catalogue — that doubled as an atelier.

It was in this cosmopolitan, permissive milieu that Expressionism was born. For too long, the movement has been both celebrated and denigrated as a singularly German graphic idiom. Even Pevsner, who evidently wasn’t terribly fond of the Expressionists, thought it fitting to summon up the rare word of praise for their Teutonic moral seriousness. Yet as this exhibition shows, it was a fundamentally international cast — led by the Russian Kandinsky — that conjured up the movement.

Munich artists had already laid the groundwork for Kandinsky. Four years prior to his arrival, the Munich Secession had parted ways with the academicism and conservatism of the Munich School; its leading light, Max Liebermann, made it a point to paint working-class subjects. Kandinsky’s move to Munich in 1896 coincided with the birth of the journal Jugend, the house organ of modernism to which we owe the German term for Art Nouveau, Jugendstil.

Five years later, Kandinsky founded Phalanx, seducing the dissatisfied spirits of the Secession to the new splinter group. One of them, his pupil Gabriele Münter, he seduced in more than one sense; not long after, the two were off to assignations in Sèvres (where they came in contact with Gauguin, Picasso, Cézanne, Rousseau, Munch, and van Gogh) and Murnau, where they had a love-nest in the foothills of the Alps.

In 1909, Kandinsky had an epiphany: “subject matter is detrimental to my paintings.” The upshot was Composition II, a mad riot of colour that a contemporary critic thought was the work of “someone under the effects of morphine or hashish” — now sadly lost. By then, another fan of Theosophy, Hilma af Klint, had independently reached the same conclusion as Kandinsky, though few took her admixture of Eastern piety and camp Christianity seriously. She may have painted the first abstract pictures in 1906, but thanks to his Münchner Rolodex and his inexhaustible capacity for self-publicity (“I painted the first abstract picture”), the world remembers Kandinsky’s Picture with a Circle of 1911 as the first ever abstract painting.

Whatever may have been the lineage of abstract painting, the fact is that the Blue Rider was the most visible expression of it. There were others involved, as the curators are at pains to remind us (two in five paintings here are by women, and Münter is — deservingly — given more prominent billing than Franz Marc, usually seen as the most important of the Blue Rider sidekicks), but it was incontrovertibly Kandinsky’s brainchild, as the very name of the collective suggested. He made a painting called Der Blaue Reiter in 1903; more generally, he thought blue was a “heavenly” colour and enjoyed painting riders, especially St Georges slaying dragons, as it were the spiritual triumphing over the material.

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All the same, it proved a short-lived affair. Two pop-up shows in 1911-12 and one almanac — more scrapbook than catalogue — was all it had to show for it. The cultural shadow it cast over 20th-century art, however, is another matter. Like J. D. Salinger and the Sex Pistols, the Blue Rider isn’t remembered for its output, but for revolutionising the field.

The curators of this exhibition have done a marvellous job reconstructing the eccentric, eclectic world of the Expressionists. They have, quite unjustifiably, received much pushback in the press for shoehorning “present preoccupations” and forcing a “woke” interpretation of their subject. But this is an historically illiterate view. Indeed, we tend to exaggerate the foreignness of the past. Depending on your politics, the past appears either more racist or less woke than the present. As the new Taylor Swift song goes, “My friends used to play a game where we would pick a decade we wished we could live in instead of this/I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists.” Risible nonsense, of course. The 19th century was, world-historically speaking, a lot less racist than the 20th. Likewise, it can hardly be denied Munich in the 1910s, and the interwar Weimar Republic, were a lot woker than our present, with their queers and queens. In the exhibition, we have a rather gamine Self-Portrait of Werefkin, who evidently was something of a gender bender: “I am not man, I am not woman, I am myself.” Then there is her portrait of the Dancer Alexander Sacharoff, noted for his “aesthetic hermaphroditism.”

Good for them. Or rather the going was good for them until the Nazis showed up. These days, the crackpots and would-be despots who have thanklessly tasked themselves with the policing of sumptuary, sartorial, and sexual habits would do well to remember which side of history they are on: the one applauding or censuring Degenerate Art. Britain in the Thirties evidently chose the latter. For the following year after the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, a show of the Blue Rider artists opened at the New Burlington Galleries in London. In the introduction of that catalogue, the curators declared “that art, as an expression of the human spirit in all its mutations, is only great in so far as it is free”. Hear, hear.

In many ways, they’re right. In any tangible, geographic sense, Eastern Europe does not exist as a single entity and never has done. And thanks to the expansive, if uneven, impact of European integration since the early 2000s, nations from the former Soviet bloc are becoming less and less outwardly distinguishable from their Western neighbours. But still, I’ve always had a sense that something changes when one moves east across the Oder and Danube Rivers, though it’s not something that’s immediately apparent.

The feeling has grown sharper since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, as eastern European nations have increasingly operated as a united bloc. Last week, a row over Ukrainian grain erupted, as Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria simultaneously imposed import bans to the dismay of Brussels. The week before, several eastern European leaders and diplomats, including Poland’s prime minister, directly challenged French President Emmanuel Macron’s suggestion that Europe should abandon its close ties with the United States.

But the region’s bonds run deeper than politics, which is why reflexive reactions against the term “Eastern Europe” are ultimately short-sighted. As a Pole, I am almost certainly in the minority in thinking that there is something deep within the collective memory of Eastern Europe that colours our understanding of the world, making it radically distinct from that of Western Europeans. With only a few outliers, eastern European nations have stood up to Russia and supported Ukraine’s war effort with great vigour. There’s a reason for this: it’s because we understand exactly what it’s like to be where Ukraine is today.

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As I see it, “Eastern Europe” is a historical experience — one that stems from the indignity of domination by foreign powers, sacrifices made to win national freedoms and personal liberties, and the traumatic legacies of ethnic conflicts that remind us that we remain beholden even now to the brutal vagaries of human history. Perhaps the most fundamental building block in the Eastern European edifice, forged in the fires of centuries of subjugation, is the sense that resistance in the face of foreign oppression is worthwhile even if failure seems all but guaranteed. This idea has long shaped Eastern Europeans’ views of much of their past. National myth-makers in Serbia, for instance, have interpreted events as far back as the 1389 Battle of Kosovo — in which Serbian defenders valiantly wore down Ottoman invaders but were unable to stop the Turks’ eventual conquest of their lands — through the lens of noble struggle.

For the same reason, the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against Nazi German occupiers during the Second World War has become a cornerstone of modern Polish nationalism, even though it ultimately failed to liberate the country’s capital. And in February of last year, despite near-universal predictions that Kyiv would fall to the overwhelming might of the Russian military in a matter of days, Ukrainians chose to stand and fight anyway. This act of renegade heroism may be difficult for someone to fully grasp if they aren’t from Eastern Europe.

Largely because of the post-war Soviet sphere of influence over the region, Eastern Europe has long been identified with Russia. However, the term “Eastern Europe” has constantly been redefined throughout the ages, and there is no reason why its negative association with a bygone era should stop us doing so again. In reclaiming “Eastern Europe” for the 21st century, we must conclusively divorce it from Moscow, whose cultural, linguistic, and political ties to Eastern Europe have long masked its distinct and often hostile relationship to the region. The invasion of Ukraine is as good an excuse as any to cast off this veil once and for all.

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As early as the Middle Ages, a delineation between East and West on the European continent existed in the form of medieval religious spheres of influence. The schism between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy created the first iteration of the idea of Eastern Europe, although its western boundary lay much further to the east than it does today, and its territory extended from Russia all the way down to Greece and Asia Minor.

By the 18th century, Moscow had transformed from an equal player in Eastern Europe to one of its overlords. Russia, alongside Prussia, the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Ottoman Empire, dominated the Eastern Europe we know today, and if one looks at a map of Europe in the year 1800, not a single country that exists today between the Oder and the Don Rivers was spared from imperial hegemony.

Around that time, Western European Enlightenment ideologues redefined “Eastern Europe” to suit their own ends and began to conceive of eastern territories as backward, unenlightened places. Western travellers to the region sent unflattering reports home: upon stepping into Poland, Marquis Louis-Philippe de Ségur, the French ambassador to Russia in the 1780s, said he felt like he had “moved back ten centuries”. Russia, despite being a great imperial power that had made a concerted effort to import French fashion, art, and culture, was not spared similar mockery.

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Whereas the Enlightenment looked down upon Eastern Europe, the Romantic Movement that followed cultivated anti-imperial nationalisms across the region, which in turn fuelled several uprisings in Poland, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, and the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. These revolts inaugurated a defining trope of popular struggle against powerful oppressors that would unite the Eastern European experience for years to come while notably excluding Russia, whose national narrative was complicated by its status as one of the very empires Eastern Europeans were fighting to shake off.

The victory of the Entente in the First World War catalysed the transformation of these national movements into states, largely due to US President Woodrow Wilson’s decisive role at Versailles. The regional response to this occasion was hardly unanimous — Hungary, which separated from Austria but lost territory in the process through the infamous 1920 Treaty of Trianon, felt short-changed after the war. But despite never stepping foot in the region, Wilson and his Fourteen Points decided its future for the next two decades, redefining Eastern Europe as a dynamic experiment in self-determination — at least on paper.

Wilson’s victory lap however was short-lived, as Eastern Europe’s brutal 20th century attests to. Almost immediately after the cessation of hostilities in 1918, aspiring independence efforts in Ukraine were squashed by the Bolsheviks. From the Baltics in the north to Romania and the Balkans in the south, Eastern European nations ripped up Wilson’s noble ideas and took up arms against each other. The Second World War not long afterwards once again exposed the region to the terrors of foreign occupation at the hands of either the Nazis, the Soviets, or the Italians, incentivising eastern Europeans to resist their oppressors with even greater ferocity than before. It was no mistake that Nazi Germany attacked Poland first — in addition to being home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, it was Hitler’s gateway to the savage, subhuman East he so wished to subjugate.

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Against this backdrop, genocide and ethnic cleansing reared its ugly head, most notably during the Holocaust, which was carried out primarily on Eastern European soil with varying degrees of complicity from local populations. Ukrainian UPA paramilitaries also waged ethnic cleansing campaigns against Poles during the war, as did Croat Ustaše forces against ethnic Serbs, and Serbian chetniks against Croats and Muslims. Decades later, genocide characterised the Yugoslav Wars of the Nineties and continues to this day to define Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine.

The Soviet-backed Cold War regimes established after the war came to define the idea of Eastern Europe we are most familiar with today. Yet, while the Iron Curtain’s scars remain visible across the region, the days when Communism could be considered synonymous with Eastern Europe are long gone, giving way instead to the economic dynamism and immense diversity that now shines through the former-Warsaw Pact veneer.

But the common historical threads that bind Eastern Europe’s countries and peoples can be appreciated without diminishing their distinct national characteristics, political orders, and cultures. A new definition of “Eastern Europe” is vital if we are to understand how this new epoch fits into our collective past. Yet it fulfils a function for Western Europeans too. Eastern Europe’s defiant attitudes can come across as stubborn and obstinate. But now that we have seen how the horrors of the past can consume the Continent once again, Eastern Europe’s wisdom and predilection for resistance could prove indispensable.

This winter, a combination of power cuts in energy-starved Ukraine, power shortages in Transnistria, and politically-motivated pressure from Russian gas giant Gazprom plunged Moldova into an energy crisis. Gas and energy prices skyrocketed as inflation soared, sparking widespread frustration over the cost of living. Ever since, the country has been in the throes of anti-government protests, which have been exacerbated by Moscow’s attempts to undermine Moldova’s pro-European Union, Western-aligned government.

And yet, Moldova is holding on. Russia is doing all it can to halt its Westward drift, but Moldova has so far managed to stay one step ahead of Russia’s powerful influence operation. In the same way that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine showed the world the limits of Moscow’s military power, his pressure campaign against Moldova may well show us the limits of Russian hybrid warfare in the 21st century.

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Last month, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov made a thinly veiled threat against Moldova, saying it could soon become the “next Ukraine”. Russia’s ambitions in Moldova have been clear from the start of the war in Ukraine, when Russia’s plan was to march its troops northward from Crimea through Kherson and Mykolaiv toward Odesa, and then onward to the borders of Transnistria to incorporate Moldova’s breakaway territory into its newly-conquered lands.

Clearly, this plan failed: Ukrainian forces instead pushed Russian troops back across the Dnipro River where they remain to this day. Meanwhile, Russia’s force in Transnistria numbers a mere 1,500 soldiers, too few to mount any kind of offensive against the Moldovan state, especially since reinforcing them would require flying over Nato or Ukrainian-controlled airspace. As a result, Russia is out of military options in Moldova and has resorted to a more covert but far less effective plan B: waging an information war and financing saboteurs to take down the state from the inside. While this approach is certainly menacing, it reeks of impotence. Unfortunately for Putin, the Moldovan government has so far proven to be highly competent in dealing with his threats.

Like Ukraine before it, Moldova had its own Maidan moment in 2020 when pro-EU candidate Maia Sandu was elected president, replacing pro-Russian leader Igor Dodon. Although much less dramatic than former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s ousting in 2014, Sandu’s election was no less significant. In snap elections in 2021, her party swept into power, and in 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moldova was granted candidate status to join the EU. In November, Sandu’s government took one step further toward European integration by securing a $250 million aid package from the EU aimed at helping the country mitigate its energy woes, demonstrating that it may one day be able to manage without Russia.

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As Moldova has continued to build stronger ties with the West and taken steps to demonstrate support for Ukraine, Russia has refused to let it go without a fight. Since February 24, 2022, Moldova has reportedly weathered 400 false bomb threats. Pro-Russian actors such as exiled oligarch Ilan Shor have escalated protests in the capital Chișinău while leveraging Facebook ads to drive online influence operations in the country on Russia’s behalf. Moldovan security forces said they recently detained alleged Russian FSB agents who were orchestrating destabilising protests, and barred a potential Wagner member from entering the country. Yet perhaps most dramatically, over the last few weeks, Ukrainian, American, and Moldovan intelligence have each confirmed that Russia is using the anti-government protests as cover to try to stage a coup against the Moldovan state. All the while, Russia has hammered the country with disinformation about Ukraine’s intentions to threaten Transnistria, whose leaders alleged this month that Ukraine had been preparing plans to assassinate several members of its government.

This litany of threats seems intimidating — until one realises that what Russian agents are relying on is the ability of ordinary people whom they’ve paid off to stage an insurrection that will be powerful enough to topple the government in Chișinău. According to documents obtained by Ukraine’s intelligence services, Russia has funnelled tens of millions of dollars to its representatives in Moldova to achieve this end, and Moldovan security forces have routinely confiscated cash being smuggled to Ilan Shor’s Șor Party over the last month. The party reportedly used some of this cash to send more than 80 young people to Turkey to be trained in, among other things, using smoke bombs and breaking police barricades.

A few dozen aggressive agitators are certainly a security risk, but hardly constitute the beginning of a revolution. “Shor is dangerous not because he can create unrest tomorrow and seize power, but because he destabilises Moldova politically, creating chaos,” says Armand Goșu, an associate professor in Political Science at the University of Bucharest. “I don’t think that at this moment the opposition parties want and have the strength to bring to power a Moscow-oriented government.”

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This wouldn’t be the first time Russia has tried such methods, but they have rarely proved successful. In 2016, Russia allegedly planned a similar coup in Montenegro ahead of a vote to join Nato, assembling a “powerful organisation” in the words of the country’s special state prosecutor. This organisation, however, was dismantled and its primary members arrested before any coup attempt could take place, and Montenegro went on to join Nato the following year.

Where Transnistria is concerned, officials and their backers in Moscow have been complaining about Ukraine’s malign intentions for almost a year, but have hardly acted on them. Any military confrontation between Transnistria and either Chișinău or Kyiv could have disastrous consequences for the breakaway territory’s fragile autonomy, and its leaders surely understand this. According to Goșu, Transnistrian leaders are likely only spreading such spurious claims to satisfy their backers in Moscow, who may also be hoping to use their hybrid war in Moldova to divert the Ukrainian military’s attention away from the ongoing battles in the Donbas.

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But perhaps the best guarantee of Moldova’s future is the Sandu government’s defiance in the face of Russian pressure. Over the past month, the country’s security services have proactively barred malignant Russian-aligned actors from entering Moldova, broken up a ring of Russian-backed saboteurs, and apprehended tens of thousands of dollars in illicit funds, all while maintaining airtight security at anti-government protests. In May 2022, a Moldovan court charged former president Dodon with corruption and treason offences, and Sandu’s government has sought to arrange Shor’s extradition from Israel, where he fled in 2019 after being charged with fraud.

No doubt the Sandu government has its work cut out for it; more powerful countries than Moldova have fallen victim to the scourge of Russian hybrid warfare. But having been given support on the international stage by both US President Joe Biden and Romanian President Klaus Iohannis last month, Moldova is in the best position possible to counter Russia’s ambitions. So long as Sandu continues to keep up the pressure against Russia’s collaborators in Chișinău while addressing quality-of-life concerns for all Moldovans, this too shall pass, and the Kremlin will have wasted millions of dollars in another Quixotic quest to keep its empire from falling apart.

Since the start of the Russian invasion, more than one Ukrainian official has described his nation’s struggle with reference to The Lord of the Rings.

It is perhaps peculiar that Tolkien’s trilogy resonates in this part of the world, given its troubled publication history in the Soviet Union. The first (unsuccessful) attempt saw it rewritten as a sci-fi book, in which the ring is a scientific instrument. Subsequent attempts were marginally more successful, but still only abridged versions. A full, authorised Russian translation appeared only in 1992, after the Soviet Union had collapsed. A Ukrainian one followed in 1993.

Why was the USSR so suspicious of Tolkien? From a Western perspective, his fantasy seems innocuous. But to Soviet eyes, it seemed dangerously close to a Cold War allegory: the good, individualistic, “free peoples” of the West versus the evil, industrial totalitarianism of the East. Tolkien certainly didn’t intend his novels to be interpreted this way, famously denouncing allegory “in all its manifestations”. But as those Ukrainian officials are showing today, finding allegories in familiar material can be used to powerful effect.

And they are not the only ones. In the late Nineties, years after the Soviet Union had collapsed, a Russian palaeontologist called Kirill Yeskov self-published a book that enshrines the Soviet interpretation of The Lord of the Rings. The Last Ringbearer assumes that Tolkien’s story is indeed a Cold War allegory, but tells it from the other side. “Lord of the Rings is the historiography of the victors,” Yeskov’s narrator reminds us towards the book’s end. He offers the Kremlin’s version of events.

In the face of a looming climate catastrophe, the peaceful eastern realm of Mordor, under His Majesty Sauron VIII, harnesses modern technology to embark upon an industrial revolution, aided by its elite class of scientists, the Nazgûl. A universal literacy law is passed, and thanks to an experienced diplomatic corps and powerful intelligence apparatus, the standing army is drastically reduced.

But the “bone-headed aggressive West”, led by the war-mongering imperialist Gandalf, feels threatened by Mordor’s achievements. Gandalf concocts a “final solution to the Mordorian problem”, in collusion with the racist elves from across the Western ocean. Using the puppet Aragorn, the elves have dominated the men of Middle Earth, leaving only Mordor a free country. But then Mordor is conquered, and in its place a “bad copy” of the West is erected.

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In sum: a great civilisation attempting to build a rational society based on science and technology (the Soviet Union) is met with irrational hatred from the so-called “free peoples” (the West) led by elves from across the sea (Americans). These elves conspire to destroy Mordor and divide the race of men (Europeans), who constantly push their influence eastwards (Nato expansion). It is left to heroic spies (Putin?) to save Mordor.

Yeskov’s retelling is unauthorised by the Tolkien estate and not considered a masterpiece. But it is popular with Tolkien fans — especially in Russia. The Last Ringbearer is more than just a simple Cold War allegory, however. It is also a window into the mind of the Soviet baby boomer generation (to which both Putin and Yeskov belong) — and how the end of the Cold War informs their view of international relations. The best example is the fate of the Elven ally, the nation of Umbar.

Umbar, a republic to the south of Middle Earth, used to balance relations between Mordor and the elves. But when it decided to abandon Mordor and team up with the West, disaster struck. “A fad for all things Elvish swept the Umbrian youth. The simpler ones made do with Elven music and symbols, whereas the more sophisticated were offered a comprehensive ideology” — a “concoction” of what sounds like Zen Buddhism, “anarchism” and environmentalism. Aimless Western individualism, in other words.

It gets worse. “It transpired that not sharing those views was unseemly and even dangerous, all persons who had the ill grace of expressing anything other than admiration and support for them were ostracised and persecuted.” Umbar’s folly was its naivete. The nation allowed itself to be turned into a “bad copy” of the West. It failed to notice that the elves’ interest in an alliance sprang from nothing more than cold national interest.

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When the USSR collapsed and Russia, under Yeltsin, embarked on a Westernising, capitalist course, the old Soviet certainties were thrown out. A fashion for all things Western swept the nation. For the older generation, this was difficult to come to terms with. Putin’s reign has seen a revival of Soviet nostalgia and neo-Soviet aesthetics for this very reason: Russian baby boomers have a deep and residing respect for the USSR, and a suspicion of all things Western.

Yeskov’s novel subverts the incredibly simplistic Western notion of the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil, by upending Tolkien’s tale of incredibly clear-cut morality and purely unsympathetic villains. In his version of Middle Earth, ideas such as “good” and “evil” are just ideological cloaks for the pursuit of national interests; they are the invention of the victors, like Tolkien, who chronicle events. Yeskov is not suggesting that Mordor and the orcs of Lord of the Rings are the good guys; he is suggesting that there are no good guys. Incidentally, the fact that we in the West can’t seem to understand this — that we apparently parrot idealism, while acting on realism — is one of Putin’s biggest gripes.

Yeskov’s playful reinterpretation of Tolkien’s work is not, however, the result of a nefarious Russian desire to identify with Mordor, as some commentators seem to suggest, and the Cold War parallels shouldn’t be stretched beyond their limits. Like The Lord of the Rings, The Last Ringbearer was not written as a straightforward allegory. Ultimately, it is a meditation on the nature of history written by the victors, and how it feels to be on the other side.

The question that drove Yeskov’s book is: what if Tolkien’s trilogy really were a historical chronicle? “One has to note that the public’s knowledge of these events is mostly derived from the adapted Western epos, The Lord of the Rings,” Yeskov’s narrator reminds us. It would make sense to wonder if the account is an exaggerated, romantic, simplified tale.

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That Yeskov’s retelling gives us some insight into Putin’s perspective on international relations is incidental rather than intentional. But it is nonetheless an important insight. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the fears and desires that drove it, and the justifications claimed by the Russian side, all bear the hallmarks of an intergenerational conflict as much as a national one. The Russian attempt to portray the war in Ukraine as a war with the US and Nato — a war defending the memory of the Soviet victory in Second World War — is an attempt, by a Soviet baby boomer, to avenge the defeat of the Cold War.

“After all, that’s what memoirs are for: to let veterans recast their losses as victories after the fact,” Yeskov’s narrator pointedly tells us at the end of The Last Ringbearer. In a sense, this is Putin’s ultimate goal in Ukraine: to recast the confrontation of East and West as a victory for the East, not the West. For Mordor to persist as its own civilisation, free of elven values. For most Ukrainians, Tolkien’s original provides a preferable framework. It’s not yet clear which history will turn out to be that of the victors.

“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.”

Indeed, the world has been turned upside down: liberal pundits bedeck their Twitter profiles with blue and yellow bunting, declaring the inviolability of Ukraine’s borders, while self-styled American nationalists make sympathetic excuses for the revanchist ambitions of Russia’s sprawling, multiethnic empire. So is nationalism acceptable again in polite society?

The belief that there is such a thing as a Ukrainian people, who speak a Ukrainian language and are the shared heirs to a common Ukrainian culture, and who therefore have the right to self-governance in an independent Ukrainian nation state is by definition a nationalist statement. That is what nationalism is: in the anthropologist and theorist of nationalism Ernest Gellner’s pithy definition, “nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent”.

Furthermore, for Gellner, “if the rulers of the political unit belong to a nation other than that of the majority of the ruled”, for example, “through the incorporation of the national territory in a larger empire” (as would be the case if Ukrainian-populated territories were absorbed by conquest into the Russian Federation), “this, for nationalists, constitutes a quite outstandingly intolerable breach of political propriety”. By this definition, most people reading this would be nationalists — or Ukrainian nationalists by proxy — and rightly so: it offends our basic moral sense of how things should be that Putin could decide otherwise.

Yet nationalism has become, in recent decades, an unfashionable doctrine. A product of 18th and 19th-century liberalism, which aimed to liberate the small peoples of Europe from the grip of sclerotic empires either unresponsive to their needs or directly oppressive, nationalism became taboo after the Second World War, following the destruction wrought by Nazi German and Italian imperialism on the European continent.

A meaningless folk distinction between “nationalism” and “patriotism” has become current among many non-academic pundits, in which “nationalism” is simply “patriotism, but bad” and “patriotism” merely the safely-neutered version of nationalism. This seemingly derives from Orwell’s essay Notes On Nationalism, in which the requirement of a jobbing journalist to churn out copy on time has been granted an afterlife far longer than it deserves. The fact that Orwell’s primary examples of “nationalism” in the essay are Communism and political Catholicism indicates the analytical uselessness of his definitions: then as now, “nationalism”, like “fascism”, is just a catch-all descriptor for things the writer happens to dislike.

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At a slightly higher level, much of the debate on nationalism — and the certainty that it is both a bad thing and a superseded relic of a destructive past — derives from the “Modernist thesis” of its origins. This was most notably put forward in the Seventies and Eighties by Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, the last of whose book, Imagined Communities, is probably only matched by Edward Said’s Orientalism for its deleterious effects on political discourse through skim-reading by lazy undergraduates.

There is not the space in this essay to adequately deconstruct the Modernist thesis on the origins of nationalism (interested readers should turn to Anthony D. Smith’s Nationalism and Modernism for that), but to summarise: rather than nationalism being a product of the political aspirations of pre-existing nations, nationalism creates nations, as social elites elevate aspects of peasant folk cultures into a never-before-existing high culture with political secession from a multiethnic imperium as their goal.

As the historian Richard Drayton notes in a recent essay historicising the Modernist turn: “Since around 1980 social constructionist views of nationalism have been predominant, seeing it as principally artificial, as invented tradition, a fictive relationship of ethnicity to culture to territory to political destiny propagated by manipulative elites who are the beneficiaries of imagined communities and the nation state.” This is the hegemonic understanding of nationalism among the educated classes of the West, through dissemination of the Modernist thesis through university education.

Yet as Smith notes sadly of Anderson’s reception, “the postmodernist reading, and its accompanying cultural analysis, can always be detached from its modernist moorings”. Anderson’s focused emphasis on print capitalism has been sidelined, and instead it is “the role of imagination, and the idea of the nation as a discourse to be interrogated and deconstructed, that have proved most influential… developed by the many theorists in the postmodernist traditions who have drawn their inspiration from a partial reading of Anderson’s work.”

The “imagined community” is thus misread as an imaginary one, an entirely fictional construct of political elites with little basis in reality. As Smith notes, both Gellner and Hobsbawm agreed, to differing degrees, that nationalism required some pre-existing sense of social or ethnic cohesion to work, and “with the exception of Hobsbawm, most modernists have in fact been reticent about the fate of the national state and the prospects of nationalism. It has been left to so-called ‘postmodernists’ to proclaim the demise of the ‘nation state’ through an overwhelming combination of political dependence, economic globalisation, mass communications and cultural hybridisation.”

This position reaches its most debased and vulgar downstream form in the iconoclastic glee with which, say, British Twitter liberals race to inform us each April 23 that actually St George was a Palestinian refugee or Turkish immigrant or whatever they deem most shocking to their notional English nationalist readers. Surely now, newly-armed with this brave puncturing of national-mythmaking, the backward old certainties must fall away, with the harrumphing major or knuckle-tattooed yob finally accepting, chastened, the borderless utopia of global liberalism? This is, sadly, the intellectual terminus of the Modernist thesis.

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Yet the Twitter liberals share a most unlikely ally in what they view as their iconoclastic deconstructing of the nation state, and its petty myths: Putin himself. In his rambling 2021 essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin adopted the tropes of the Modernist thesis to prove his contention that the Ukrainian nation has no rightful existence outside Russia’s embrace.

Putin begins by emphasising the diverse origins of the “Slavic and other tribes” across the ancient Rus state, united by shared dynastic rule and latterly a common language and faith. He emphasises the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the Ukrainian lands, noting that: “the south-western lands of the Russian Empire, Malorussia and Novorossiya, and the Crimea developed as ethnically and religiously diverse entities. Crimean Tatars, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Karaites, Krymchaks, Bulgarians, Poles, Serbs, Germans, and other peoples lived here.”

Yet over time, as in Gellner and Hobsbawm’s narrative of nationalist development, “the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis and could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions,” including elevating folk dialects into a standardised Ukrainian language. In Putin’s Modernist theory of Ukrainian nationalism, Ukrainian elites, through the logic of seeking their own advancement, created a Ukrainian nation where none had existed before, just as Gellner characterises the ideal nationalism of his fictional Ruritania.

Just like Hobsbawm, Putin blames Lenin’s Nationality Policy for invigorating nationalist sentiment among Russia’s subject peoples, claiming that the 1924 Constitution “planted in the foundation of our statehood the most dangerous time bomb”, while warning that Ukrainian nationalism is forcing “the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state” in “a country, as I have already noted, that is very complex in terms of its territorial, national and linguistic composition, and its history of formation”.

The Modernist thesis on nationalism, and on the fraudulent novelty of the nation state, is thus put to effective use for Russian imperialist purposes. We can argue further that the Modernist thesis is tacitly imperialist, in that it views nationalism as a destructive innovation with broadly deleterious effects, compared with the benign patchwork of faiths and languages in the empires that preceded it. Both Hobsbawm and Gellner were born in the wreckage of the multiethnic Habsburg Empire, and both preferred it to what followed, in their cases quite rationally: both fled the rise of the Nazis for England and academia (Anderson, from an aristocratic Anglo-Irish background like his brother Perry, also had a complicated family relationship with nationalism).

In Hobsbawm’s case — he would write to a friend that “I remain in the curious position of disliking, distrusting, disapproving and fearing nationalism wherever it exists” — the latent imperialism of the Modernist thesis in general (which by highlighting the novel, unnatural nature of nationalism makes its predecessor “natural” by default) was made explicit. He regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union, remained one of its last supporters in British intellectual life, and would inform an audience of Budapest students in 1993 that “although many of you will not welcome my saying so, that up to a point [the USSR] worked better than anything since the break-up of the monarchies in 1918. For the common citizens of the more backward countries in the region — say Slovakia and much of the Balkan peninsula — it was probably the best period in their history”.

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It’s worth noting here that Hobsbawm wrote in to the Daily Worker on the topic of the USSR’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising to say that “While approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as this is possible.” Perhaps we can therefore term him a moderate, even conservative imperialist. On the topic of Ukraine, he would note that “Ukraine remained relatively quiet while Baltic and Caucasian republics demanded secession, remained under the control of the local Communist Party leadership, and did not resign itself [my emphasis] to separation until after the failed coup of August 1991 destroyed the USSR”. As does Putin, Hobsbawm emphasises that “Russians, in the nineteenth century, regarded themselves as Russians, and this included many Ukrainians and Belorussians, today zealous defenders of their national identity.”

Observing Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he warned that “the eggs of Versailles and Brest-Litowsk are still hatching”. For Hobsbawm, “the permanent collapse of the Habsburg and Turkish empires and the short-lived collapse of the Tsarist Russian empire produced the same set of national successor-states with the same sort of problems” leading inexorably to “mass murder or forced mass migration… However, unlike the Habsburgs and the Ottoman empire, the multi-national Russian empire survived for another three generations”, while “Victory in the Civil War eliminated the possibility of Ukrainian separatism”.

As with Marx himself, a certain wistful conservatism can be glimpsed in the Modernist worldview, with Gellner observing sadly of capitalist modernity that “the old structures are dissipated and largely replaced by an internally random and fluid totality… There is very little in the way of any effective, binding organisation at any level between the individual and the total community”, paving the way for nationalism to fill the gap.

But then, as Drayton notes of the Modernists: “It is usually forgotten that these kinds of arguments about the fraudulence of nationalism first emerged on the Right of European politics. From Klemens von Metternich’s attempt with the Carlsbad Decrees to force the nationalist genie back into its bottle, to the reactionary Catholic and monarchist regionalist response of figures such as Charles Maurras to the Third Republic in France, the proposition was made that nationalism was artificial, a subversive project of sinister minorities.”

As nostalgic as any throne-and-altar Catholic Integralist for the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, Hobsbawm was as paradoxically conservative as only committed Marxists and genuine reactionaries can be, seeking a return to the polyglot imperium shattered by nationalism, under a new communist guise. A fierce critic of the Wilsonian liberalism that saw Europe’s great multi-ethnic empires divided into squabbling ethnostates, Hobsbawm takes the Modernist thesis to its conclusion. His conscious undermining of the symbolic narratives undergirding shared nationhood, and of the desire for political autonomy deriving from them, finds dark echoes in Putin’s claims today.

Where does all this leave us? As Gellner notes of nationalism, “if we are to understand the fate of these societies, we are sometimes obliged to look carefully at the words, doctrines and arguments of the thinkers who forged the faiths that dominate them”. As Hobsbawm observes, nationalism’s proponents were historically the educated classes: “the lower and middle professional, administrative and intellectual strata”, and “the people who formulate those myths and inventions are educated people: schoolteachers lay and clerical, professors (not many, I hope), journalists, television and radio producers. Today most of them will have gone to some university.”

But today of course, this stratum of society does not adhere to nationalist ideals: it has instead adopted a vulgar Postmodernist anti-nationalist ethos that ultimately derives much of its tropes from a cursory reading of Hobsbawm, Gellner, Anderson and others. How did this come to be the case?

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Smith notes that, through the work of writers such as Stuart Hall, a Postmodernist extrapolation of the modernist thesis creates “alternative discourses of peripheral ethnicity, newly constructed out of popular experiences, and predicated on the celebration of diversity”, a new, diverse Imagined Community for an era of mass immigration which “is the premise, and justification, of the politics of multiculturalism”.

Similarly, Drayton observes that “this rise of historiographical skepticism toward nationalism in the Seventies coincided with the attacks from the Right on the legitimacy of the Keynesian and the socialist developmental state, and on the claims of Third World states to a new international economic and political order… The secret sharers of the analysis of Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Fred Cooper” were the neoliberals “who through the Washington consensus and ‘structural adjustment’ sought to limit the postcolonial state’s power to intervene in its economy and social welfare” and the liberal imperialists “who sought to legitimise the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s intervention in Yugoslavia and the Iraq and ­Libyan wars”.

When the rising American state’s rivals in 1918 were sprawling, multinational empires, the official doctrine of the US was to break them up into self-determining nation states. Now that the US is itself a sprawling, multiethnic empire, whose long-term survival seems as questionable as that of Austria-Hungary at the turn of the last century, the emphasis is — perhaps we can now say was — on the fictitious backwardness of the nation-state ideal, and the progressive necessity of its dissolution, and incorporation into a globalised world. This is, as Smith observes, a globalised culture which “though it presents itself as universal, bears the imprint of its origins and flows from a single source, the United States”.

There is then an imperialist quality, at times latent, at other times overt, in the hostility to nationalism displayed by both the post-Marxist, progressive Left and by the nakedly imperialist reactionary Right. Has nationalism therefore returned to the liberal fold, and will liberals, enraptured by Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination, fall back in love with nationalism? That is perhaps unlikely: yet analysis of the intellectual origins of the discourse shaping our world provides hints as to the future directions of our politics, in all their contradictions and ambiguity.

Writing in 1990 just before the collapse of his beloved Soviet Union, Hobsbawm would claim that “the very fact that historians are at least beginning to make some progress in the study and analysis of nations and nationalism suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak. The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism.” The willingness of younger historians to place the Modernist thesis itself in historical context as an ideological construct of intellectual elites at a very specific, vanished political moment suggests the same could more accurately be said of the post-national era.

As Smith warns, “Nationalism will not be easily tamed and categorised to fit the prescriptions of moral and political philosophers”. Without returning to an idealistic faith in the progressive certainties of Communism or capitalist globalisation, or subsuming ourselves in a revived imperial polity, it is doubtful there is any alternative to the nation state, for the love of which ordinary Ukrainians, of all political persuasions, are fighting and dying right now.

Built amid London’s squalid slums or ragged suburbs, both Anglican churches remind you that the Anglo-Catholic clerics and artists of their time believed that nothing was too good for the people they aimed to serve. They plundered the high-medieval styles of France, Italy and Germany to plant islands of awe and majesty in the midst of urban grime. The toiling masses needed sacred beauty as much as they needed bread. Indeed, these neo-Gothic visions and missionary Christian Socialism often went hand-in-hand. Such retro grandeur also gave voice in brick and stone to another powerful yearning: a wish that the Protestant Reformation had either never happened, or else had not led to a permanent schism — and that the English church had stayed firmly within the fold of undivided Christendom.

Such Romish nostalgia might now look like a niche interest. But its secular legacy lives on: for instance, in the attraction of a variety of home-grown Europeanism that pines for a profound connection not so much with some suited bureaucracy in Brussels as a continental mainstream of art, thought and culture, without which England will wither into petty provincialism and insularity. Much of the time I share that longing, although I know it has tangled roots. And, surprising as it may seem, an outlier work by the foremost English comic novelist of the later 20th century expresses and dissects it with enormous empathy, mischief and wit. That work is Kingsley Amis’s 1976 novel The Alteration.

Amis was born a century ago, on 16 April 1922. The eclipse of his reputation means that any anniversary jubilations will have been muted at best. According to a now-standard version of his life, the maverick outsider satirist of Lucky Jim subsided fast into grumpily reactionary provocations spiced with heavy-duty boozing, serial adultery and (in his later fiction) spasms of venomous misogyny. Others can draw up the charge-sheet or plead for mitigations. I’m convinced merely that The Alteration — mid-period Amis, written when his decline into blowhard cynicism had supposedly taken hold — deserves to endure. It succeeds not only as a wildly imaginative, vastly entertaining, fictional dystopia, but as an acute exploration of the emotional dynamics behind cultural, political or religious faith. Like complementary panels of some medieval diptych, it merits study alongside Margaret Atwood’s oddly comparable The Handmaid’s Tale — published in 1985. Though I doubt that any university today would twin the pair.

Amis read, admired and analysed science fiction (or speculative fiction, as the buffs prefer). The Alteration bears witness to his long immersion in its formats and protocols. He creates an alternative 1976 in which, four centuries before, the Reformation in Europe had failed. England never split from Rome. The Tudor Prince Arthur did not die but went on to father a dynasty with the Blessed Catherine of Aragon. A revolt by the villainous Prince Henry (“the Abominable”) led to the “Holy Victory” and the entrenchment of Papal power. Luther himself reconciled with Rome and became pope; so, next in line, did Thomas More.

Amis sidesteps the dangers of the dreary “info-dump” — an endemic sin of science fiction — as he scatters teasing morsels of this alternative reality throughout the story rather than bombarding the reader with tedious expositions. When his American editor objected to this piece-by-piece illumination, Amis insisted in a letter that “one direct and complete tip-off instead of hundreds of indirect and partial tip-offs would impose a disastrously simplistic strategy on the book”. He was right: his approach intrigues, and satisfies. As in our world, England and other European nations have colonised much of the globe: Dahnang Station, south of the Thames, commemorates the English seizure of Indo-China from the French in 1815. But Church always trumps State and no power can rival, or question, the overarching authority of the papacy.

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However, two important non-papal polities exist. One is the mighty Muslim empire of the Sultan-Calif in Istanbul, antagonist in an endless cold (and sporadic hot) war with Christendom; recently, Islamic forces have reached Brussels before being driven back. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, expelled Protestant heretics formed the schismatic state of New England. It covers much of the eastern seaboard, but not the American west or south, which are still in European hands. In this Republic of New England, speculative thought and experimental science can flourish. However, the Native Americans who serve the European elite remain inferiors kept down by a doctrine of “separateness” — apartheid, in our world’s terms.

In Europe, a superstitious horror of electricity and its destructive power has stalled progress on many fronts and limited the population of London to one million (far too many, people grumble). Forests still swathe much of Middlesex. Some breakthroughs have occurred: Amis gleefully devises a steampunk techno-sphere in which a kind of Diesel engine powers fast mechanical carriages for the elite. Trains may move at 21st-century speeds. The “Eternal City Rapid”, for instance, makes the London-Rome run in seven hours as it thunders at 195mph over the Channel Bridge. Luxurious airships float serenely across the Atlantic. Technology, though, counts for less than the marvels of religious art: in the English capital of Coverley (once Cowley, outside Oxford), Wren’s Cathedral-Basilica of St George is a dazzling treasure-house adorned with pious works by devout artists such as William Blake, William Morris and young David Hockney.

For all its rigid hierarchy, Amis’s holy England can beguile with its grace and beauty. Music, art and architecture — the sensory arts sidelined in the Reformation and mourned by English aesthetes ever since — have flourished at world-beating levels of excellence. This England is confidently European, cosmopolitan, not remotely philistine — and utterly unfree. Amis’s glimpses of the musical and visual grandeur cultivated in the place of independent thought have a jewel-like, pre-Raphaelite brilliance. We can almost feel why, lapped in such a plush despotism, many people might opt to swap liberty for loveliness. Clever upholders of the system think that “tyranny alone can let men be safe and serene”.

Amis’s plot turns on the efforts of a fabulously gifted ten-year-old chorister, Hubert Anvil, to escape the “alteration” — ie, castration — that will preserve his God-given soprano voice into maturity. One minor, safe, painless operation (medicine has advanced, at least for the rich) can guarantee a lifetime’s fame and wealth. Art, and faith, demand such a sacrifice from “the best boy singer in living memory”. Or so his elders insist.

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Hubert has other ideas. A zigzagging plot sends him in flight from his “alteration” across the landscape of Amis’s unreformed, historically altered country. A totalitarian theocracy, savage but clumsy, directs every aspect of daily life and punishes heresy with brutal swiftness. The mass of the people (like Orwell’s proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four) suffer a lighter yoke so long as they obediently work, pray and drink; they go on foot or horseback while misnamed Diesel “publics” carry their betters. Amis might have had Soviet Russia in mind during the mid-Seventies, but his antennae proved acute: soon, fundamentalist clerics spearheaded Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

From the Tower of London, Lord Stansgate runs the secret police of the Holy Office (one of Amis’s perishable gags: Tony Benn’s title was Viscount Stansgate, but the jibe requires a footnote now). In Rome, the bluff but ruthless Yorkshireman Pope John XXIV (apparently modelled on the novelist John Braine, but with distinct touches of the then prime minister Harold Wilson) governs Christendom with a Machiavellian hand that often grasps a mug of imported bitter ale. Amis piles up the history-switching jokes: Himmler and Beria survive as top Roman bureaucrats; the fiercely secular logician A.J. Ayer becomes Professor of Dogmatic Theology; Jean-Paul Sartre is an orthodox Jesuit monsignor. Rudyard Kipling was “First Citizen” of the heretical RNE, and General Edgar Allan Poe the military genius who defeated the Catholic armies of Louisiana and Mexico.

For all its witty arabesques, Amis’s counterfactual schema has an underlying coherence and consistency. We see how faith-led social control seeks to dominate lives and minds — and why it may falter. In England, “careless, bumptious, over-liberal”, the Pope’s rule has softened a little. A fornicating monk got away with a flogging, for instance, but stupidly repeated the offence — and so “went to the pulley” to be torn limb from limb. As in any totalitarian order, smart, ambitious operators — priests, monks, students — do their duty, hold their tongues, and think forbidden thoughts. “In our world, a man does what he’s told, goes where he’s sent, answers what he’s asked. And, after seeing that, one is free.”

What, though, if a quest for freedom has to break the prudent silence of the sceptical conscience? Hubert’s act of rebellion can hardly be disguised. Abetted by his medical-student brother Anthony and a dissident priest, Father Lyall, who is conducting an affair with Hubert’s mother, the star treble learns about the value of the sexual love the Church will force him to relinquish. In their ecstasy, Hubert hears, lovers may grow “closer to each other than they can ever be to God”. In this regard, Amis sounds like a bloke of his own time. He treats the absence of testicles as irreparable exile from bliss, though the record shows that 18th century celebrity castrati were much sought after as lovers by society ladies. Anthony explains the allure of sexual congress to his little brother by comparing it to Hubert’s favourite treat: chocolate ice-cream. Whereas Amis’s erotic ideal appears to be strictly vanilla.

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Hubert’s plans to avoid alteration come to depend on the sympathetic stratagems of the New England ambassador, Cornelius van den Haag. Amis’s portrait of the lone schismatic republic has a fertile ambivalence. On the one hand, the New Englanders do stand for liberty, free enquiry and resistance to autocracy. Yet not only does Amis stress the racial inequality that builds these virtues on a bedrock of subjugated Indian labour (plantation slavery seems not to have taken root in New England territory). He hints that the upright Puritans reserve vicious punishments for social miscreants, and that “alteration” itself may be imposed on sexual transgressors. Here Planet Amis and Planet Atwood, perhaps unexpectedly, start to align.

If the sole free republic has its downsides, then the Pope’s domains — England included — are allowed their charms. With its magnificent basilicas, august ecclesiastical palaces and first-rate music-makers in comely, compact towns surrounded by unspoiled woods and meadows, the country its higher ranks enjoy does resemble the bucolic blueprint of some Anglo-Catholic architect steeped in Ruskin and Morris. But Amis lets us see that the mutilated — “altered” — mind will always be too high a price to pay for this.

Remember, though, that when he wrote the chief real-world models of a totalising system took the form of Soviet or Chinese communism. Although the Bolshoi ballet or Kirov opera might excel, neither regime much appealed on artistic grounds. Re-read The Alteration in the 21st century, and other kinds of gilded prison might suggest themselves. Think, for instance, not of Iran but the orderly, courteous and cultivated spirit of Abu Dhabi. In that emirate (not in brasher, franker Dubai) I have enjoyed the company of gracious, refined servants of the state, with all the subtlety and sophistication of an ancient aesthetic culture at their command. Never mind that Emirati society rests on ruthlessly enforced conformity, obedience to unaccountable power, and an unbridgeable chasm between a favoured elite and a vast servant class. Sink a little into the fragrant pillow of temptation that system offers and the cry for freedom begins to sound like sheer bad manners above all. In The Alteration, Amis conjures a sort of English Catholic equivalent of such a velvet cage — remarkably, since in the Seventies Sheikh Zayed had only just begun to build his fief.

Pluralist liberty, as Amis intuited, must always be rough, messy and discordant. (Young Hubert also excels as a composer, and shocks his tutors with rule-breaking harmonic shifts.) And any beautiful, euphonious society will cast a bloody shadow. Amis hints at secret plague-spreading experiments, masterminded by the Pope, designed to curb population growth. He’s too good a novelist, though, to preach for very long. The Alteration climaxes in a final, startling, twist.

Although dystopian fictions like to warn us against the formulaic reduction of reality, their plots often succumb to an oppressive tidiness. Not so Amis: we leave an older Hubert still lost in a confusing world with “nothing ever measured or settled”. If The Alteration admits the spangly attractions of top-down harmony and unanimity, it underlines the bill that always comes attached. A return visit to its seductive, sinister domain showed me why those gorgeous Gothic Revival churches in my neighbourhood may have such a magnetic allure. And why I’ll never linger in their pews for long.

Well, with the gift of hindsight, the collapse of a vast, ideologically-driven nuclear superpower into social, economic and moral anarchy might have concentrated more western minds than it did. “Nyebyezopasnost” is the word Russians (and Ukrainians, Georgians, Kazakhs, etc…) often use to describe their Nineties, usually translated as “insecurity” — though “never-without-danger” is closer to its actual sense. For the ordinary Russians whose voices were collected by the Belarussian writer, Svetlana Alexievich in Second-hand Time (2015), her remarkable oral history of the Soviet collapse, it was a period of chaos, anger and despair. Through her polyphony of voices, Alexievich sounds the void that is left when both security and meaning are removed from a society overnight.

This is pretty much what happened in the Russia of the Boris Yeltsin era, as “Capitalist Shock Therapy” was imposed under the Washington Consensus, criminals flourished, savings evaporated with hyper-inflations, as many as seven million people died what would later be termed “Deaths of Despair“, and the Economics Minister, Yegor Gaidar, appeared on Russian TV, trying to teach a dazed nation how to sell mineral water. Nothing that counted before counted anymore. “For twenty, thirty years, people were on the waiting list for an apartment,” complains Marina, a 63-year-old Belarusian woman, interviewed by Alexievich. “Then, one day, Gaidar comes and laughs in our faces: Go ahead and buy one! With what money?…We spent our whole lives believing that one day, we would all live well. It was a lie! A great big lie!”

Notwithstanding the evils in the Soviet experiment and the cynicism and dysfunction that characterised its Eighties iteration, it is just never a good idea to leave such a void untended. You don’t know what will come to fill it, though in retrospect, Putin’s construction of a “military Disneyland” for children; his Orthodox-Death Star Cathedral of the Armed Forces; his “Eternal Regiment” marching at the annual Victory Parade day parade — all this should really have rung a few alarm bells. In her introduction, Alexievich gives plenty of warning. “Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great idea,” she writes:

“This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else — hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarised. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognise their own slavery — they even liked being slaves.”

Alexievich, born in Ukraine in 1948, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for her “documentary novels”, which occupy a contested zone between journalism and artistic endeavour. Her 1985 book The Unwomanly Face of War, which related the Great Patriotic War (as Russians label World War Two) through the voices of women, sold over two million copies in the USSR. She has also written about the Soviet-Afghan war, Chernobyl, and the epidemic of suicide in the former USSR — and, inevitably, incurred the displeasure of the Alexander Lukashenko regime in Belarus, though she remains in Minsk, where she has spoken out against the war. “Those people who were brought up by their Soviet parents, taught by Soviet teachers on Soviet textbooks, are now Soviet people…The romanticism of slavery is still living in the people who do not have anything, who are victims themselves, talk about the pain they are in, but still are confident that ‘we used to be great’. That is what lives in them.” It will take a long time “to squeeze the Soviet slave” from the national character.

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Alexievich would know: she is, self-confessedly, a sovok. This is a disparaging term both for the USSR itself (it literally means “dustpan”) and for the individuals shaped by it. Alexievich is interested in how history plays out within this “miniature expense” of the human individual. “It’s where everything really happens,” she writes. Of course, it’s where it happens for presidents and his siloviki too — and Putin (born 1952) would also be a sovok. In fact, you can almost imagine the Nineties Putin among the anonymous chorus of voices in Second-hand Time, complaining that he now has to drive a taxi, his secret service income isn’t enough to live by, muttering darkly about the great betrayal.

Alexievich’s subjects range across the former USSR and across the decades. There are dissidents and true believers, exiles, émigrés, victims of sectarian violence in Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and Tajikistan, and ordinary consumers, too, sincerely delighted at finally being able to get hold of western appliances, as colourful as possible, as everything used to be so grey. (“There’s loads of everything. You want to spoil yourself, indulge. It’s therapeutic. We’re all so sick”.)

But almost everyone is bewildered. “The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb,” says one interviewee. The idea of being poor didn’t really exist in the USSR; the common man had status, however theoretical it might have been. An unrepentant communist laments the fact that in the Soviet era, the streets had names like Metallurgists Avenue and Proletariat Street. Now, everything is being renamed Noble Street and Merchants Quarter. “Not everyone is capable of stopping at nothing to tear a piece of the pie out of somebody else’s mouth,” she says. She sincerely believed she was striving for freedom.

And yet, those who opposed communism were also at a loss — especially the intelligentsia who gathered in kitchens to discuss banned literature and tell jokes about the party. One describes the pleasure of “external migration of the mind” that was possible under communism. He managed to secure a demotion from engineer to janitor, which meant 30 less roubles a month but who cares? There was nothing to buy anyway and more time to read. One of the first things that happened, post-1991 was that the second hand shops began to fill with books — now utterly useless.

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But curiously, it is those who had suffered the cruellest excesses of Soviet ideology who appear the most anguished. The Nineties was the decade of realising that any sacrifices made in the name of the Motherland had been meaningless. If there is anything worse than spending years performing hard labour in Siberia, using your fist for a pillow, feeling your teeth come loose with scurvy, it is discovering that you did all that for nothing. “I spent my life building a great nation. That’s what they told us,” laments Marina the Belarussian, recalling her years working on the Abakan-Taishet railway (singing komsomolsongs all the while). “I don’t want any German biscuits or sweets. Where are my just desserts? The fruits of my labour?” Her neighbour, Sashenka, has recently covered his head in acetate and set himself on fire on the plot that he had defended from the Nazis decades earlier.

Amid the crime, disorder, murder, terrorism, despair, suicide, pornography and paranoia there is a sense, above all, of promise unfulfilled. “What did we want?” says one who had cheered on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. “Gentle socialism, humane socialism.” And what did we get?…Bloodthirsty capitalism.” Time and again, people complain that they weren’t consulted. History was something that was done to them. What they wanted was equality and freedom. Not this.

As a westerner, it is hard to read all this without squirming. Was no one aware what would happen? Where the hell was everyone looking?

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There are omissions in Alexievich’s narrative. She has, it becomes clear, her own version of events. I suspect much of this is, in fact, crafted for western ears (there are surprisingly few criticisms of the West) and I can’t help wonder about the voices she omitted or embroidered. More concerning: some of the accounts in Second-hand Time have appeared in earlier books, with certain details migrating from one story to another. However, the same accusations could be levelled at Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago — which is no less forceful for being a bit unscrupulously sourced.

My deeper criticism is that it tends to reinforce the idea of Russia as some great live, literary epic — a stage for tragic, meaningful suffering. This is an idea that is at once sentimental and incredibly dangerous. (All those deaths have to mean something.) But then again, one of Alexievich’s repeated themes, actually, is how you can’t really trust books. “We lived in a world of mirages,” says the anguished dissident whose reading has proved useless. “The Russia of our books and kitchens never existed. It was all in our heads.”

Did our leaders really expect that a functioning civil society could grow out of these ruins? Was Russia left to its fate through naïveté — or cruelty? Was it “just desserts” for what Ronald Regan termed the “evil empire”? But think: after the Second World War, the Allies pumped money into West Germany, and held its hand as it came to terms with its past. No American president went to Russia and declared: “I am a Muscovite!” There was no Nuremberg for those who upheld Stalin’s many Terrors. Only a vast avant-garde neoliberal experiment, which produced accelerated versions of all the rampant inequalities, deaths of despair, and information wars that would soon consume the West.

Ultimately, Second-hand Time leaves an impression of two monsters co-habiting the Kremlin. There was the grey monolith of communism itself — a drab, totalising creature that smothered lives and yet which did, in some important respects, impart meaning and free people from other tyrannies. But there was also the dark monster of Russian autocracy, resident since the days of Ivan the Terrible. Inscrutable. Cruel. Unpredictable. Even as it changes form. “Our country has a Tsarist mentality,” says a former secret-service agent in one of the most telling interviews. “Everyone needs a Tsar. The Czechs can have their Vaclav Havel…we need a Tsar. The Tsar, the Father of the Russian people! Whether it’s a general secretary or a president it has to be a Tsar!”

The mistake was assuming that killing the first monster would smother the former. They killed the wrong monster. Whatever Russia emerges from this nightmare, we can’t make that mistake again.

Indeed I only found that out last week, when word got out that North Lanarkshire Council had agreed to purchase Cumbernauld’s town centre, but only in order to raze it to the ground. The responses adhered to a familiar script. Architectural historians, of course, were appalled; they argued that, as Britain’s first shopping centre and a radical experiment in building a town centre that went up instead of down, the eight storey “megastructure” was an important part of our cultural legacy. But there was no popular outrage at the news that the rotting eyesore in the centre of the town might soon be gone.

In fact, the destruction of The Centre Cumbernauld (to give it its proper name), which was erected on concrete stilts over a dual carriageway in 1967, has been a dream of many people for a long time. In 2005 it topped a poll of 10,000 people in the UK as the building in Britain that people most wanted to see demolished. Cumbernauld itself, like many of the 27 New Towns that were built in the UK after the war, does not have a great reputation. The comedian Craig Ferguson (who grew up there) once derided it as a “modernist experiment”, where “clueless” town planners had provided “soulless housing for ground-down workers”, before adding that the houses looked like “German machine gun turrets”. My cousins on the west coast of Scotland were pithier: they called it “Scumbernauld”.

Yet for a brief moment in the Sixties and Seventies, Cumbernauld represented an exciting vision of the future, in which a projected population of 70,000 workers and their families would move through the town via a network of pavements, underpasses and bridges. They would never have to cross a road, and never have to spend more than 20 minutes walking to reach the “brilliantly logical” town centre, which housed shops, a library, offices, apartments and even a few penthouses.

When Princess Margaret visited The Centre Cumbernauld in 1967, she pronounced it “fabulous”; that same year it won the Reynolds Memorial Award from the American Institute of Architects. My grandparents lived there in the last years of their lives and greatly preferred their Cumbernauld flat to the one they had lived in on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow; likewise my Aunt Janet, who lived there between 1972 and 1982, still remembers how novel it was to go shopping without being rained on.

Indeed, even if it had been pouring when I paid a visit last week, I would have remained dry: when I stepped off the bus, I was already inside the centre, confronted with its “brilliant logic”. Is it possible, I wondered, that the architectural historians are right: does Cumbernauld’s town centre deserve to be preserved for future generations? I followed a ramp (there were no stairs or lifts) to the first floor, where I entered the retail complex which had so impressed Princess Margaret 55 years earlier.

The years have not been kind to the place. Where once it featured well-known retailers, such as Halford’s, M & Co. and the supermarket chain Presto, now it is clearly the part of the complex where rents are cheapest (an additional shopping centre, the Antonine, was grafted onto the original building in 2007; that one was opened by Princess Anne); it is here that the eyebrow threaders, tattoo artists, “vintage” shops and suicide prevention centres set up shop. The interior had been remodelled so all traces of its late Sixties utopia-lite origins were gone: bizarrely, the enormous clock from St Enoch’s train station in Glasgow had been embedded in the wall of a mezzanine in the new section, where it kept the time at a permanent 8:20.

After about ten minutes, a security guard informed me that it is forbidden to take pictures in the centre, because it is private property. I moved to the next level, which contains the library and a children’s day-care. This section has not been remodelled; it is very close to the original: lots of brick and tile and concrete, the pipes and wires were exposed. The corridors had names, as if they were streets, but the doors granting entry to them were locked. A service lift was out of order; a weird bench was moulded into the concrete; the glass overhead was filthy. Through it, I could make out the windows of the penthouses, long since abandoned. At the far end, a roof garden for toddlers hung suspended in the air over the dual carriageway beneath.

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The library itself was cheerful enough, but overall, I felt as though I had stumbled upon a vision of Logan’s Run as reimagined by Seventies British trade unionists, only the death squads that were supposed to kill you after you turned 30 had all gone, and everyone had long since taken the opportunity to run away, or simply grow older. It was pretty grim.

But if it was grim on the inside, then it was much worse from the outside. Glimpses of Cumbernauld’s town centre from the window of the bus over the years had not done justice to the scale of the architectural catastrophe. It reminded me of the vast Izhmash plant in Udmurtia, Russia, where they pump out AK 47s and other weapons. But Izhmash at least had a decorative historical entrance; with the general absence of windows and the abundance of pipes and wires in the town centre, everything looked like the back of something. The only feature the eye was drawn towards was the long rectangular section with porthole windows suspended on stilts that hung over the road. Locals call it “the alien’s head”.

From there I took a stroll over the bridges and through the underpasses of the town. Certainly it was convenient, though obviously the planners had not thought about the canvas that endless concrete represents to bored teenagers and the threatening atmosphere it can present at night. I was passing through a particularly luminous underpass when I was accosted by a man with a hammer and sickle tattoo on his arm. “They paint it and then it gets graffitied the next day,” he said.

When I asked him how long he had lived in the town, he replied: “Most of my life, on and off. Cumbernauld is a social experiment: it’s driven me doolally. Have you seen the centre? It’s full of people like that.”

Returning, I felt a sense of coercion: the ghostly hand of the planners had arranged everything so that I was more or less obliged to follow the same route through extremely functional housing. Obviously the working classes had no need of freedom, beauty, or variety: they could get by with a few trees. Behold, Le Corbusier’s “machine for living in”, in the Lanarkshire hills.

When I arrived in Cumbernauld, I was open to the idea that the town centre might be worth saving. Now, not so much. It was not the brutalism; having spent a lot of time in the former USSR I have developed a taste for brutalism when done right. In Central Asia, in particular, architects took eastern motifs and incorporated them into their concrete structures, giving a character to blocks of flats, universities and national libraries that is entirely lacking in Cumbernauld. Those structures are worth preserving, though the cheapness of the materials likely means that one day those buildings too will disappear. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the USSR embraced brutalism in the Seventies, after “communism” had withered to mean a fridge and a TV in every house, and an annual beach holiday. In the end, the ideology was not that dissimilar to the modest utopianism of Britain’s post-war town planners.

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Cumbernauld’s town centre was pioneering, but it was also a failure. There is no disgrace in that failure, however: the first generation of occupants, like my grandparents, found these homes a huge improvement on the Glasgow tenements they had grown up in; indeed, New Towns across the country were an improvement on conditions in the slums they were designed to replace. Instead of a single room, kitchen and shared toilet, families now had extra bedrooms, bathrooms and a living room. Later generations did not have this point of comparison, however, and lived in the town once it was already decaying.

The problem with preserving architectural experiments is that they are not like novels lacking the letter “e” or repurposed urinals that live unobtrusively on bookshelves and in museums; they are infrastructure, and it is very hard to persuade people that they should pass their lives in crumbling buildings that they hate because of the interesting ideas that inspired them.

It would be nice, of course, if you could take all those decaying brutalist buildings from around Britain and move them to an open-air park where architectural historians could admire these daring visions, while others could reflect on the dangers of falling for ideas that look good on paper. But that isn’t going to happen: some of these buildings will be preserved, but most of them are going to disappear, just as most of everything has disappeared.

The truth is, we often judge New Towns too harshly: it takes centuries for a city to become interesting, and even then, many old places are also quite boring and squalid. And as it turns out, many New Towns were simply a step in a broader evolutionary process. Just as Milton Keynes has realised its destiny as a sleeper town for middle class people priced out of London and Oxford, so Cumbernauld is discovering its destiny. It was never to be a self-contained social unit built around an eight-storey mixed use retail, office and residential complex — but rather a bedroom community on the edge of the larger metropolis of Glasgow.

This faceless collection of houses and shops and retail parks, without any particular centre or identity, will ultimately surrender to a vast urban sprawl: that’s progress. In time, other New Towns will see that this too is their best option; or, if they are not located close enough to a major city, continue to crumble, until one day they vanish and are forgotten forever.

But the answer is not so simple. Nuclear bombs have been dropped in conflict just once, in August 1945, by the United States. The horrific scenes of destruction and human suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and a death toll estimated to be about 200,000 civilians — provoked widespread condemnation. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in the New York Times that the bombings were “morally indefensible”. Even hardened military figures were aghast. “We had adopted the ethical stand common to the barbarians in the Dark Ages,” grieved Admiral William Leahy, the US’s highest-ranking military commander.

Years later, the former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower told Newsweek: “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”. It was a comment that alluded to the military tactics behind the decision, which are separate from the more emotive philosophical debate over the morality of dropping the bomb. What does it mean for it to be “necessary” to drop a nuclear weapon? If it wasn’t necessary, then why did the US government — indeed, why would any government — willingly inflict such pain and suffering on civilians if there was a legitimate alternative path to peace?

The man who made the decision, Harry Truman, gave a lecture in 1959 to Columbia University students about the powers of the presidency. The talk was described as “earnest, good-humoured, and sometimes salty”, and was well-received by the 1,200-strong audience. But during the question and answer session, things took a more serious turn. A student thought it was odd that Truman had skirted over the nuclear question. When confronted with it, the usually good-natured Truman became a touch defensive:

“It was used in the war, and for your information, there were more people killed by the fire bombs in Tokyo than dropping of the atomic bombs accounted for. It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness. The dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives”.

This is the orthodox view: dropping nuclear bombs saved lives. In this telling, the Japanese were not prepared to surrender, meaning the US and Soviet Union had two choices. They could either launch a land invasion, something on the scale of the D-Day landings in France, in which an estimated million US soldiers alone would be lost. Or they could prevent such a bloody undertaking by shocking the Japanese leadership into capitulation.

Death was not enough. The fire bombings of Tokyo, in which 100,000 people died in one night, had not proved sufficient. Something beyond conventional warfare was needed. Nuclear warfare was, as Truman’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson put it, the “least abhorrent choice”; though the bombs killed hundreds of thousands, even more would have died had they not been dropped.

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The orthodox account depends on a number of key claims, including that the Japanese were unwilling to surrender in the summer of 1945. These claims have since been challenged by “revisionist” historians, who argue that Japan was in fact on the verge of surrender when the bombs were dropped.

The previous summer, Japan had lost Saipan, an island in the South Pacific, to America, meaning its mainland was within range of USAF B-29 bombers. This made Japan highly vulnerable to sustained US attacks from the air. On the night of 9 March 1945, over 300 B-29 bombers descended on Tokyo, inflicting the deadliest bombing raid in world history. After that, the revisionist account goes, the question was not whether Japan would surrender but on what terms.

The revisionists place heavy emphasis on contemporary reports that suggest the Emperor and some (but not all) of his advisers were inclined to surrender, so long as his position could be guaranteed. A month before Hiroshima, Navy Secretary James Forrestal wrote in his diary: “The first real evidence of a Japanese desire to get out of the war came today… [indicating] the Emperor’s strong desire to secure a termination of the war”. A 1946 report by the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: “in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 [the planned invasion date], Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”

The revisionists believe that the US rushed to use nuclear weapons not because of Japanese intransigence, but because of the Soviet Union. Throughout the war, the USSR and Japan had honoured a neutrality pact. Stalin, however, assured Truman’s predecessor Franklin Roosevelt that three months after victory in Europe was achieved, the Soviet Union would turn its attention to the Pacific and declare war on Japan. Truman and his closest advisers believed that Roosevelt had already conceded far too much to Stalin at Yalta, effectively giving the USSR free rein to dominate eastern Europe. They were not keen for the same thing to happen in Japan.

The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. On August 8, exactly three months after the surrender of Germany, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The following day, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The day after, the Japanese government offered its surrender. The revisionists look at this timeline and intuit that the nuclear bombs were dropped primarily for political rather than military reasons. The US wished to deny the USSR credit for ending the war, which would have given Stalin greater leverage in the post-war settlement.

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These two accounts — the orthodox and the revisionist — are the dominant explanations offered by historians, but they are not the only ones. Some scholars focus on the internal politics of Japan, arguing that the key figures who were ready for peace, not least the Emperor, were poor at communicating their wishes. They were, perhaps, drowned out by the powerful voices who wanted to continue the war. Many in the rank and file of the military were believed to be prepared to fight at all costs. US propaganda, which was racially inflected, tended to exploit the perception of Japan as a “warrior culture”, in which people would choose death over the shame of defeat. It was hard for Americans to discern Japan’s true intentions.

Other accounts suggest Truman was locked into decisions made by his predecessor. It was Roosevelt who had pushed for “unconditional surrender” at the Cairo conference in 1943. And the idea of dropping nuclear bombs on Japan was one Roosevelt had first dreamed up. In September 1944, he and Churchill met at FDR’s estate in Hyde Park, New York and agreed that “when a bomb is finally available, it might perhaps, after mutual consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender”. Once Truman became president after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, only one thing could apparently bring about “unconditional surrender”, and that was the bomb.

All of these interpretations offer important lessons to today’s leaders, but that last one is particularly chilling. If dropping the nuclear bomb was not militarily necessary to bring about an end to the war, then Truman opted for a decision that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in part to save face. Once the US was committed to demanding “unconditional surrender” — for which there was enormous public support — Truman could hardly change his mind and say he wanted a negotiated peace. The new president, who had no political mandate of his own, would risk tanking his own domestic popularity before his term had even begun.

In other words, leaders must avoid making dangerous commitments from which either they or their successors will struggle to back down. Fortunately, in today’s conflict, no one has rashly insisted on “unconditional surrender”. A negotiated settlement is still possible.

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With that in mind, it’s worth considering the vital role of intermediaries in such high-powered conflicts. With the help of a neutral party, could the Japanese peace camp have communicated its position more clearly, so as to assist those within the US administration who might have urged caution? The Japanese saw the Soviets as possible intermediaries, a view that was shattered when Stalin declared war on them. Today, Israel seems to be the go-between, though the nation has been criticised by Western commentators for not condemning Putin.

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At Columbia University, Truman was asked, “With the development of nuclear weapons, do you think the United States would be willing to risk entering a third world war if a small European country in the Nato pact were to be involved in an act of aggression?” His answer was tepid: “I don’t know”. On consideration, he explained that the circumstances were now different, because unlike in 1945, the US was no longer the sole possessor of nuclear weapons: “I don’t think there’s any possible chance of doing what I tried to begin with, when we had absolute control of them, of nuclear weapons”.

This, strangely enough, is cause for optimism. When the US dropped its bombs on Japan, there was no other nuclear power to retaliate. In the intervening years, the threat of mutually assured destruction has seemingly prevented any other country from using such dangerous force.

It’s also worth observing that, while Ukrainians have shown an admirable fighting spirit in defending their nation from Russia, in the eyes of their people the two nations have a lot more in common than the Japanese did with the Americans. There has been no real attempt to use racial differences to demonise the enemy.

There is still a chance, then, that this war can be resolved through conventional methods. Putin is not in the same place Truman found himself in. Putin does not view it as “necessary” to drop a nuclear bomb. It has not yet become Putin’s “least abhorrent choice”. Let us hope it never does.

Like many post-Soviet states, upon becoming independent in 1991, Ukraine faced a serious challenge of nation-building. Ukraine is a multinational, multireligious and multilingual country with little historical experience of independent statehood. Its major ethno-linguistic groups include Ukrainians in the west and Russians in the east. Many speak both languages and their histories and cultural practices are deeply intertwined.

An atavistic nationalism that bases political authority on supposed ancient traditions of ethnic-Ukrainians alone is neither consistent with reality, nor capable of uniting the whole Ukrainian people. The challenge of post-Soviet nation-building was, therefore, to craft a civic nationalism, based around a shared commitment to democratic self-government.

Sadly, Ukrainian elites failed in this task. Indeed, as Yuliya Yurchenko documents in her compelling but depressing book, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, they were too busy plundering the remnants of the Soviet economy, with officials and their criminal-business networks transforming themselves into powerful, predatory oligarchs while the rest of their society fell into penury.

From 1990 to 2000, Ukraine’s GDP fell from $81.4bn to just $31.2bn. Hyperinflation, peaking at 10,155% in 1993, destroyed people’s living standards, creating long-term unemployment, especially among the young. The oligarchs had little to offer citizens, relying increasingly on fraud, corruption and intimidation to stay in power.

In this context, reformers — who took power after the 2004 “orange revolution” — looked to EU and Nato membership as a way to transform their society. This attempt to move “from Brezhnev to Brussels” occurred widely in post-communist Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, reformers hoped that EU rules would discipline or destroy the oligarchs and root out corruption by imposing free-market reforms.

But this was a very dangerous strategy. As Yurchenko observes, the EU-Ukraine Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) signed in 2008 would, if fully implemented, devastate small businesses and workers by exposing them to continental competition. Meanwhile, many oligarchs have found ways to exploit the opening of markets and limit measures that would damage their interests.

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Other oligarchs resisted liberalisation by rallying the people of eastern Ukraine into thinking that pro-Western elites were not heeding their interests. Donetsk, where many oligarchic businesses are based, has deeper economic, linguistic and cultural ties to Russia, and people there have often complained of being neglected and sneered at by the West, despite constituting a substantial share of Ukraine’s GDP and population.

The oligarchs began harnessing this resentment, fostering a growing east/west split in Ukrainian politics. The “East” — led by Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions — retook national power following the 2010 presidential election. Yanukovych’s subsequent persecution of his opponents drew the ire of Washington and Brussels, but this only reinforced his preference for stronger ties with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), reflecting the economic needs of his eastern base.

This growing internationalisation of Ukraine’s domestic struggles was perilous, given the geopolitical context. Russia had stridently opposed Nato’s eastward expansion since the Nineties. Gorbachev had asked Washington to disband Nato in exchange for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, while Yeltsin had asked for a new, inclusive security architecture that incorporated Russia into Europe, only to be rebuffed. The latter later warned the West that a Cold War was giving way to a cold peace, with Nato expansion entailing “nothing but humiliation for Russia”.

When the West proceeded anyway, Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, made it clear that Moscow saw Nato expansion as directed at Russia. In April 2008, a Nato summit welcomed Georgia and Ukraine’s aspiration to join the alliance. Putin invaded Georgia a few months later, rather than see it join this anti-Russian bloc. Many analysts, from the Cold Warrior George Kennan to the realist professor John Mearsheimer, predicted disaster if Nato continued to expand towards Russia’s borders.

The same, to a lesser extent, applied to EU expansion. Putin described the DCFTA as a “big threat” to Russia, as it would allow EU exports to enter tariff-free, via Ukraine, and “choke” the Russian economy. EU officials insisted their cooperation with Ukraine was merely technical, refusing to recognise the geopolitical implications.

The 2014 “Euromaidan” crisis saw the culmination of this toxic fracturing of the Ukrainian nation. In 2013, President Yanukovych rejected the DCFTA, opting for closer ties with the EEU. This prompted widespread protests, which were egged on by senior EU and American politicians, despite the growing involvement of far-Right nationalists. Eventually, amid escalating unrest and violence, Yanukovych fled to Russia. But while his opponents in western Ukraine celebrated, his eastern supporters perceived a “fascist” coup against their democratically-elected president. The Ukrainian state’s authority collapsed in the east, allowing opportunistic pro-Russian separatists to seize power in many areas, while Russia reacted by invading Crimea.

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Instead of moving to reassure their fellow citizens and build an inclusive national project, Ukraine’s pro-Western faction instead doubled down. Under the new president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko, the Government purged eastern politicians and officials from the state, sending many fleeing into exile, and banned Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, intensifying the crisis of representation in the east. It also launched military offensives against the separatists, triggering further Russian intervention, producing heavy casualties and a grinding stalemate.

Neither Poroshenko, nor his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have implemented the Minsk accords agreed with Russia in 2014-15, which proposed to settle the conflict by granting autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk. Instead, the new government loudly sought full membership of Nato and the EU — measures that could only undermine Ukraine’s national sovereignty. Yet the EU has not — and will not — actually admit Ukraine, as it is still reeling from the divisions induced by the last round of enlargement into post-communist Eastern Europe and does not want to take responsibility for a war-torn country. But it was happy to pretend otherwise, flattering Ukrainian elites while pushing neoliberal reforms on them.

The Poroshenko government enacted the EU DCFTA, rapidly introducing structural reforms to comply with EU rules. Facing rising debt amid economic decline, the Ukrainian state became economically dependent on the EU and IMF. Foreigners were brought in to run three ministries and IMF advisors were embedded with the central bank, entailing further losses of sovereignty. Austerity, neoliberalism and further privatisation benefited well-positioned oligarchs but did nothing to alleviate mounting poverty.

Far from reaching out to Ukraine’s ethnic Russians, Kyiv has actively promoted a narrowly Ukrainian, anti-Russian form of nationalism, reflected in language policy, “de-communisation”, and the secession of the Ukrainian Orthodox church from its Russian “mother” church. As Yurchenko observes, instead of reconsolidating Ukraine, these measures only “further divided the broken nation”.

This failure of Ukrainian politicians to represent the whole nation has led both sides to turn to foreigners to bolster their domestic position. The pro-Russian faction appears backwards and corrupt, offering little to inspire and unite the country, and ultimately relies on Russian intervention to prevent Ukraine slipping from its grasp. But nor can the pro-Western faction command the consent of the whole nation. It was prepared to overthrow a democratically-elected president to get its own way, and has persistently sought to lock in its preferences against internal opposition by sacrificing Ukrainian national sovereignty to supranational organisations.

Russia’s role in this disaster is obvious. It is hardly surprising that Ukrainian nationalism has taken a sharply anti-Russian turn given the annexation of Crimea, Russian support for separatist fighters, and Putin’s open contempt for Ukrainian independence and sovereignty — let alone the recent invasion.

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But the West has also been reckless and irresponsible. Russia has made perfectly clear that it will not tolerate the expansion of the Western sphere of influence up to its borders. It wants at least a neutral buffer zone between itself and Nato, and ideally a friendly sphere of influence among its post-Soviet neighbours. We might wish this were not so, but it is a geopolitical fact. Russia’s willingness to use force to achieve its goals — at great reputational and economic cost — has been beyond doubt since 2008. To put this into perspective, we can imagine how the US might react if Canada sought to join a Russian-led military alliance — or merely recall Washington’s reaction when Cuba did so.

The West had two strategic options. Either it could acknowledge and accommodate Russian interests, or it could defy them, ushering Ukraine into Nato and deploying overwhelming military power to deter Russia from using force. Instead, it did neither. It allowed its Ukrainian allies falsely to believe that they could rely on the EU and Nato, yet did not nearly enough to deter Putin militarily. This has encouraged the Ukrainian government to prioritise integration with Russia’s enemies over rapprochement with its own citizens, while fanning Russian anxieties. Had Nato been clearer, Ukrainian elites might have come to their senses and pursued a less reckless course of action.

The only solution to this crisis, aside from war and devastation, is for Ukraine to become a neutral state, as Finland was during the Cold War. The sovereignty of the Ukrainian people — their capacity to work out their differences and collectively determine their life together in a peaceful and democratic manner — can only be enhanced if all sides renounce their external ties, and foreign powers cease meddling in Ukrainian politics.

To be truly sovereign, the Ukrainian state must be seen to represent the whole national population. The push towards Nato and EU membership — only intensified by Russia’s aggressive reaction — has fragmented the Ukrainian nation. It is hard to see how it can be reunited if this continues; bloody partition seems more likely.

Sovereignty does not imply total control over the state’s internal or external environment; it only entails self-rule, and this requires political realism. This was a source of some confusion in the Brexit debate. Many Thatcherite Eurosceptics foolishly believed that the UK could restore its sovereignty — its capacity to make laws and adopt policies inconsistent with EU rules — while retaining full access to the EU’s single market. The EU had no interest in agreeing such attractive terms; on the contrary, its interest lay in making Brexit as painful as possible.

Today, the Ukrainians clearly have no more “sovereign right” to join the EU or Nato than Brexit Britain had a “sovereign right” to full access to EU markets. Reflecting their own interests, these organisations will not admit Ukraine. This is the geopolitical reality that any truly sovereign Ukrainian government must reckon with.

Of course, Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. But the only way for the Ukrainian people to achieve national sovereignty is for all sides within Ukraine to cease internationalising their political conflict, and for foreign powers to cease their meddling. Neutrality offers the only context in which Ukraine can restore its territorial integrity and secure peace. It also provides the only context in which pro-Western forces will be forced to reckon with their pro-Russian counterparts, and find a more consensual way to exist.

First imprisoned, then internally exiled from 1945 to 1956, and finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Solzhenitsyn seemed a living testament to the injustices he exposed. But while Western intellectuals and politicians acclaimed this aspect of his message, they largely ignored another side of it. Solzhenitsyn warned that a Russia free of Communism would not become Western. Russia would continue to oppose liberalism, and pursue geopolitical ambitions that would bring it into conflict with other powers.

In his famous 1978 commencement address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn warned that Westerners, with a combination of naïveté and arrogance, assumed that the world was moving towards a standard set by its capitalist liberal democracies. They could not understand that Russia, although currently “in Communist captivity”, was the heir to an “autonomous world” that would never be assimilated to the West. Indeed, the problem with Communism was that it, too, was a cosmopolitan ideology with ambitions for remaking the world, destroying Russia’s autonomous cultural traditions in the process.

Solzhenitsyn’s speech is fondly remembered by conservatives in the West as a stinging critique of cultural liberalism. With his call for a return to traditional values, he appeals to the contemporary Western Right as a useful figure in our own culture wars. But his conjoining of liberalism and Communism as two aspects of a common assault on traditional non-Western cultures goes much further than a repudiation of ‘political correctness’. Asserting that the world is divided into distinct cultural zones, and opposing any ideology that on whatever premises puts our common humanity before their preservation, Solzhenitsyn implied that liberals would have little to look forward to from a post-Communist Russia.

Most Western observers at the time were too taken with Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the Soviet system to pay adequate attention to his views on the Russian past and warnings about the Russian future. However, some of his fellow dissidents and Western critics observed saw that Solzhenitsyn — and the Russian nationalism that he represented — represented a dark cloud on the horizon.

In 1974 the dissident Russian scientist Andrei Sakharov noted that Solzhenitsyn argued against Communism less out of a desire for freedom at home and peace with the West. He believed that the author wanted more than to promote supposedly traditional values; Solzhenitsyn wanted to focus Russian energies on the military threat (which he took to be existential) posed by China, entering a new Cold War with its neighbour. The future Russian regime, for Solzhenitsyn, could not be a liberal democratic one imported from the West, but one shaped by an understanding of Russia’s dangerous geopolitical situation and particular history. The latter, Sakharov bitterly summarised, seemed to have taught Solzhenitsyn that “when accompanied by respect for law and by Orthodoxy the authoritarian system was not all that bad.”

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It was on this heading that, in a 1980 issue of Foreign Affairs, a group of American scholars criticised Solzhenitsyn for his rosy image of pre-revolutionary Russia — a vision that elided, or falsified, many historical facts. Where he had argued that the Tsars tolerated dissident intellectuals and religious minorities (including Jews), historians observed that this was a fantasy.

The Russian empire under the Tsars organised massive surveillance programmes, and routinely imprisoned and executed suspects without trial. Far from tolerating minorities, it subjected Jews to humiliating restrictions and implicitly sanctioned pogroms. In the year 1905 alone, there were 690 documented pogroms (with over 3,000 reported murders) during the two weeks following the declaration of the October Manifesto. Nicholas II, according to one historian, regarded this violence as a form of “justified revenge” against subjects he considered to be politically suspect. The Russian revolution, although intended to overturn the old regime, perpetuated many of its signature domestic policies, from secret policing to anti-Semitism.

Solzhenitsyn was also criticised for exaggerating the differences between Tsarist and Soviet foreign policy. Eugen Loebl argued that he downplayed the continuities between the imperialist policy of the Tsars and that of the Soviet leadership, which both sought, under the pretext of Christianity or Communism, to extend Russian power over subject nations. Loebl had a personal stake in this critique. He had been a member of Czechoslovak Communist government in the Sixties, an era of liberalising reform — cut short when the Soviets invaded the country to restore Communist orthodoxy and obedience to Moscow. From Loebl’s perspective, this invasion was continuous with Russia’s nineteenth-century expansion into Eastern Europe and violent suppression of nationalist and democratic movements throughout the region. The Tsars and Communists justified their policies in terms of apparently opposite ideologies, but their common aim was Russian power.

Countering Loebl, Solzhenitsyn argued that Communism was an “international or even metaphysical entity”. To understand it as something akin to Nazism — an ideology of national self-aggrandisement — would lead to disaster. In the West, opponents of Communism, especially on the centre and Right, often linked the Soviet regime and the Third Reich as examples of ‘totalitarianism’, a concept popularised by Hannah Arendt. Solzhenitsyn, however, stressed that there were important differences between the Nazis and the Communists.

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After the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, many in the Soviet Union had believed German rule might be preferable to Communism — particularly to the murderous purges, famines, and population transfers that characterised Stalin’s reign in the Thirties. Soldiers deserted the Red Army in huge numbers during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa. It was not only oppressed peoples, such as Balts and Ukrainians, who did so, but Russians as well.

In spite of sympathy from Russians and non-Russians alike, Nazi policy towards the region was openly genocidal, founded on a project of eliminating local populations to make room for future German colonisation. Hitler, Solzhenitsyn argued, “had declared war on the Russian people as such, leaving them no way out”. Russians thus rallied to the Soviet regime not out of any loyalty to Communism, or sense that it represented their ‘national’ interests, but because they had no other choice.

There was an important lesson for the West in Germany’s defeat, Solzhenitsyn argued. The Nazis had conflated Russia and the Soviet Union, and thus forced Russians who would have accepted German rule to rally around Stalin. Advised by figures such as Loebl, the West risked making the same mistake of seeing “the threat now looming over the world as Russian rather than as Communist”. This would have a “devastating outcome”. While Russians despised their Communist government and yearned for liberation, they would oppose any power that threatened their existence as a people.

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Solzhenitsyn was warning the West that if it hoped for friendly relations with a future, post-Communist Russia, it would have to accept Russian nationalism — and attendant demands for ‘security,’ often understood in expansionist terms by successive Russian governments. Loebl, meanwhile, warned that Russian nationalism, whether it disguised itself as Communist or anti-Communist, would inevitably mean Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe. Both warnings, perhaps, were true.

Already in 1980 Western leaders reading the exchange between Solzhenitsyn and Loebl might have foreseen that there was a dangerous tension at the heart of their hopes for the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. If Russian anti-Communists like Solzhenitsyn sympathised with their ideological opposition to the Soviet regime, they did not agree with Eastern European dissidents such as Loebl that Russian power was an inherent danger to peace. A common hostility to Communism, however, could conceal for a time fundamentally different geopolitical visions — which have been brought into terrible clarity in recent weeks, as Russia began its assault on Ukraine.

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The West’s enthusiasm for Solzhenitsyn, celebrating his anti-Communist resistance while ignoring his rehabilitation of Tsarist illiberalism and imperialism, is of a piece with two signal failures of our collective political understanding during the last decades of the twentieth century. First, the United States supported Islamic terror networks to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the Eighties, only to find itself their target after the collapse of the USSR. Still more to its detriment, the West pursued in those years, and since, a strategy of economic engagement with China, in the hope that integration in the global capitalist economy would lead to political reform in Beijing.

As with Solzhenitsyn, Western leaders failed to perceive that sharing temporary tactical goals with non-Western intellectuals, militants, and regimes was only a short-lived suspension of the always-present possibility of renewed enmity, based on enduring, and perhaps irreconcilable, visions of the world. Liberal democracy, based as it is on a cosmopolitan understanding of human rights, often misperceives a world which does not share its assumptions about those rights. For the duration of the present crisis in Ukraine, at least, such misperceptions will be impossible to sustain — and their resumption will make a disastrous situation even worse.

Truman was nobody’s idea of a great man of history. A small, trim man with neatly parted grey hair, his hazel eyes framed behind thick spectacles, he had a flat, Midwestern twang and a complete lack of stage presence. When Harry Truman walked into a room, nobody looked up. Even if you did notice him, you might mistake him for the man he had once been — not the President of the United States, but a Kansas City haberdasher whose store had gone bust after just two years. A little man, then. A modest man, with much to be modest about. As everybody knew, the S. literally stood for nothing.

What was Truman doing there? The short answer is that he had been extraordinarily lucky. After serving as a captain in the First World War, he had gone into politics, a Democratic party hack working for the corrupt Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast. But when, in the last year of the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran out of potential vice presidents, he was persuaded to consider Truman as a compromise candidate. Roosevelt barely knew him — who did? — but he picked him anyway. Truman could barely believe it. He, Harry S. Truman, the farmer’s son from Independence, Missouri, Vice President of the United States!

Then fate took another twist. On 12 April 1945, with his forces fighting their way into Nazi Germany, Roosevelt dropped dead of a massive stroke. Suddenly, unbelievably, Truman was President. When he got the news — he was, naturally, having a drink with his old Senate pals — the colour drained from his cheeks. Immediately he went to see Roosevelt’s widow Eleanor and asked if there was anything he could do to help. Her response spoke volumes. “Is there anything we can do for you?” she said. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

That was two years ago. Now it was 12 March 1947, and the American political elite were looking up at him, and Truman was peering through his glasses at his typewritten text. His voice was as flat and characterless as ever, and as he launched into a detailed description of the political situation in divided, bleeding Greece, the soaring oratory of his charismatic predecessor seemed like ancient history. The haberdasher was in the house, and it was only a matter of time before people started snoring.

But they didn’t. For what Truman said that day was so electric, so momentous, that it arguably had more impact on history than almost any other speech by any other president since Abraham Lincoln. The United States, he told his listeners, was in a new world war — an undeclared war, not of armies but of ideologies. “At the present moment in world history”, he said, “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life”. One was based on individual liberty, free speech and democratic elections. The other, Communism, relied upon “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms”.

They all knew that. But what followed was the real surprise.

Truman wanted Congress to give $400 million immediately in aid to Greece and Turkey. It was essential, he said, that neither fell to Communism, and the United States must ensure that they didn’t. And he went further. This would not be a one-off; it must be a general rule. “I believe”, Truman said, “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid”.

It would be expensive, he admitted. But it was an “investment in world freedom and world peace” — the kind of investment that only the United States could afford. That was their historic challenge, and Harry Truman was not afraid to meet it.

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Today that speech is remembered as the genesis of the Truman Doctrine, when the United States committed itself to the defence of democracy against the advance of Communism. The usual word for this campaign, which never appears in the speech, is “containment”, and that sums it up pretty well. Truman had no intention of going to war against Stalin’s Soviet Union, and was careful to avoid any overtly military provocations. But he was in absolutely no doubt that there were such things as right and wrong; that Soviet Communism was wrong; and that it was his patriotic and moral duty to contain it.

You can probably guess where I’m heading with this. First, though, an illuminating historical side-note. The man who coined the word “containment” was an American diplomat called George F. Kennan, who had studied Russia’s language and history as a young man. In February 1946, Kennan, then deputy head of mission in Moscow, had sent a long telegram to Washington urging his bosses to ditch any idealistic assumptions about reaching a modus vivendi with Stalin.

“At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs”, he argued, was a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity”. And though Kennan took Stalin’s Marxism seriously, he thought it was mixed up with something else, something older, perhaps even darker. For in some ways, he wrote, Marxism was simply the “justification for the Soviet Union’s instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand”.

What Kennan also recognised, though, was that for all Stalin’s purges and persecutions, even his imposition of puppet governments in the brutalised capitals of central and eastern Europe, the Americans could not just fight him. Even with their nuclear monopoly, they would probably incur hundreds of thousands of casualties as they tuned their guns on the Red Army. Europe would be utterly devastated; the total death toll would probably run into millions. There was right, and there was wrong; but doing the right thing was complicated.

So as Kennan argued in a subsequent article, the West really only had two options. They could sit back and let Stalin get away with it, playing the part of appeasers once again, and allowing him to erode democratic freedoms in one European country after another. Or they could draw a line and say: “This far, and no further”, and do all in their power to undermine those regimes that flew the red flag. Their strategy, wrote Kennan, “must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”. They would corral the Eastern monster and defend Western freedom by “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world”.

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As Kennan and Truman both knew, containment would take time. Not months, not years, but decades. There was nothing very romantic about it, nothing swashbuckling. It condemned millions of people to continue living under totalitarian rule. If you were 17 in 1947, and living in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or East Germany, you would be very close to retirement when the Berlin Wall came down. You would have spent almost your entire adult working life under a system you probably despised, with Russian troops occupying your country. All that potential wasted; all those chances for travel and self-expression denied you; all those lies, all those betrayals. But you would still be alive — and with luck, you would see your grandchildren grow up in freedom. Those were the upsides.

So let’s turn to the present. With the headlines full of the atrocity at the Mariupol maternity hospital, the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians and the looming siege of Kyiv, as well as Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rousing Churchillian rhetoric, it’s easy to dismiss containment as a kind of appeasement, an acceptance of defeat. Most of us would love to see Russia defeated, its troops streaming back home to launch a revolution and Vladimir Putin on trial in the Hague — just as most decent people in the late 1940s and early 1950s dreamed of seeing Stalin toppled and Communism overthrown from Trieste to the Baltic.

But in truth this feels depressingly unlikely. For the time being, the Putin regime seems entrenched. And of course Putin has something Stalin didn’t in the spring of 1947 — nuclear weapons. That’s why most Western politicians have ruled out a no-fly zone over western Ukraine. It’s entirely understandable that people think we should “do something”. But there’s no point in doing something if the firestorm kills the very people you were hoping to save.

Containment was precisely the kind of policy you would expect from a man who had run a gentlemen’s outfitters in Kansas City. But you can tell that story in two different ways. Yes, it was unglamorous, gradualist, boringly undramatic. Yes, there was nothing obviously heroic about it.

Yet at the same time it reflected a very Middle American confidence in the Western way of life. Like his British counterpart, Clement Attlee, Truman was a modest man, the incarnation of patriotic ordinariness. He believed, without the slightest shadow of doubt, that one day democratic capitalism would beat Communist repression. But he also knew it would take years of effort, and he had no intention of blowing up the world in the meantime.

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There’s part of me, I admit, that feels wretched in urging a policy of Cold War containment on the leaders of the Western world. Against the background of so much Ukrainian suffering, the thought of Vladimir Putin’s regime enduring for years — and not just surviving but glorying in slaughter — seems almost intolerable. But what are the alternatives? Appeasement, as recommended by certain so-called realist professors of international relations, strikes me as not merely morally contemptible but stupidly self-defeating. As for NATO intervention, how many Ukrainians would die in even the most limited nuclear exchange? Millions? Tens of millions?

Truman didn’t live to see the success of his policy. In very basic terms, though, containment underpinned the Western world for the next 40 years. The Cold War was a hard slog, involving a lot of false steps as well as some dreadful mistakes. But it worked. That was the important thing. I sometimes read that we should never return to the Cold War. But why not? It was the right thing to do, and the right side won.

And remember: Soviet Communism was a much more formidable adversary than Putinism. The latter offers nothing but a nihilistic celebration of warmongering nationalism, but Communism held out the promise of a better world, illusory as that was. Containment beat it, all the same.

I think it will beat Putin, too, given time. It may take years of unrelenting political, economic and cultural pressure, but we should have no doubt about the outcome. The little man from Missouri has already beaten Lenin and Stalin. Even in death, he can wipe the floor with Vladimir Putin.

Making colleagues nod and bootlick when they have no desire to do so is the essence of power. But the despot feels the need for this sham acknowledgment not to demonstrate strength. At root he is irritable, morbid, totally oversensitive. Watching sycophants crawl along marble floors confirms his deep suspicion: human beings are low creatures. This confirmation makes him feel better.

Imagine we are allowed to send one writer into the Kremlin, with the intention of translating its walls and turrets and atavisms into literature. I’d choose Ryszard Kapuściński for the assignment. Nobody ever captured despotism with such vividness; no other witness, and no other stylist comes close. He would have seen the table, and known.

For much of his professional life Kapuściński was communist Poland’s lone foreign correspondent. He was always broke, being shot at, sneaking on to planes, and taking notes. Reporting for PAP, the Polish news agency, he made the brokenness of the world his subject. In Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and eventually with Imperium (1993), in the ashes of the USSR.

“I was an envoy,” he wrote, “engaged to render an account, to transmit, relate.” As envoy, Kapuściński witnessed 27 revolutions. Bolivia, Mozambique, Sudan, Benin, Iran… Rulers changed; governments fell. Surfing the roar and the blood, the only thing Kapuściński thought constant was “helplessness”. A revolution like Iran’s “demolishes so ruthlessly that in the end it annihilates the ideals that called it into being”. Experience taught him to fear desperate crowds chanting slogans.

Three elements combine frictionlessly in his work. There is Kapuściński the reporter, who hangs out everywhere with anyone, observing perpetually, a world-class noticer. Insanely brave and desperately lonely, he is nearly killed by snakes and bullets. He bypasses high politics and slums it in the places where maggots wriggle under people’s skin. This is the Kapuściński who said: “I don’t want to stop at observation. I want to take part.” Then there is Kapuściński the excursive essayist, the expert on anything, who can explain the tragedy of Shi’ism, or the history of the Iranian oil industry. Finally there is Kapuściński the poet, the imaginative genius, armed with metaphor, simile, and a subtle Aesopian language that can hold the universe in a rain drop.

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Wonderfully, vast areas of Kapuściński’s life and work turned out to be lies. The envoy was an occasional spy and willing informer for Poland’s communists. The supposedly journalistic accounts he rendered were exposed: tattered and hole-ridden. His transmissions were deceptions. Kapuściński, often described late in life as the “greatest war correspondent in the world” and “the reporter’s reporter”, had been spinning fantasies for decades. Serious journalists hated this. They were ashen, and felt cheated. They shouldn’t have been shocked. You only needed to read a sentence of Kapuściński to know he was more than a journalist: he was an artist. He had to allow himself more. His ultimate creation was himself.

The character was mottled with fictions. Had he really awaited execution by Belgian mercenaries at Usumba airfield in the Sixties? Did he genuinely witness a massacre in Mexico City in 1968? Was he actually in Santiago for the Pinochet Coup in 1973? Nope: lie, lie, lie. He did not meet Che Guevara before his death in a seething Bolivian jungle. Nor did he meet Patrice Lumumba, nor did he watch fish deflesh the corpses of Idi Amin’s opponents that bobbed on the waters of Lake Victoria. Did his father escape the Katyn massacre, when Stalin murdered 20,000 Polish soldiers, as Kapuściński said he did? Oh, you better believe it’s a lie.

When a friend confronted him with the truth that a Tanzanian riot he wrote about was, in fact, utterly different to his account of it, Kapuściński shouted at her: “You don’t understand a thing! I’m not writing so the details add up: the point is the essence of the matter.” He maintained that formal objectivity was the real lie. Nobody was impartial. Trying to be was the fantasy.

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Adam Hochschild called Kapuściński’s work “magic journalism”. A genre all of his own. And like every good magician Kapuściński was a con artist. Since the full reveal of his lies in 2010 many have chosen to place the emphasis on the con, not the art. But I’d forgive almost anything to read a good paragraph. Kapuściński tuned more of those than most. Many truths are less profound — and frankly, less entertaining — than most of Kapuściński’s lies. The world suffers from a deficit of good paragraphs. It has more than enough facts.

And they’re not straightforward lies either. He liked to make wild literary images stand place for the facts of whole empires. In Imperium he states the simple data of the USSR’s size, twenty-two million square kilometres, with continental borders longer than the equator. So far, so factual. Then he goes further. Kapuściński says that he has never seen these borders without “thick coils of barbed wire.” In the constant snows, heats, and sand storms of the Imperium, the wire quickly deteriorates. The wire must be replaced — “one can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire.” (Can one assume?) But then he goes even further.

What about the prison camps? They must need wire too! What about the wiring for atomic ranges, barracks, warehouses!? Multiply, he demands, the amount of wire needed by the number of years the USSR existed for… That’s why nobody could buy a spoon or a hammer in Smolensk or Omsk in 1987! All the raw materials were “used up in the manufacture of barbed wire.” He imagines the most important telephone call one imperial official could make to another being: “Are you all properly wired in?” The whole flight of fancy is daft. Completely untrue. But does it express the “essence” of the USSR — that it was inefficient, wasteful, cruel, essentially an enormous open-air prison — yes. Like Tony Montana, Kapuściński always tells the truth, even when he lies.

So we parachute Kapuściński into the Kremlin to uncover the “essence” of the place, and of Putin. His credentials for the task, though faked, are peerless. Kapuściński planned, though did not complete, a trilogy on absolute power, its consequences, and its downfall. The two books he did produce, The Emperor (1978) and Shah of Shahs (1982), describe the rule and overthrow of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie and Iran’s Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The third, clinching book would have been about Idi Amin; for some time Kapuściński kept a hand-drawn diagram of the Ugandan despot’s brain in his Warsaw flat. As soon as the USSR began to tremble during the Gorbachev era, Kapuściński realised he had other things to describe.

The Shah and the Emperor are different but the same. Kapuściński plays the surreal medievalism of the Ethiopian court for laughs. After the Emperor’s undoing he claims to have tracked down every flunkey: the pillow-bearer, who slipped the appropriate cushion under Selassie’s feet when he sat on thrones built for taller emperors; the servant who followed the Selassie’s dog around with a satin cloth, ready to wipe away the urine it habitually sprayed on visiting dignitaries; the Minister of the Pen, and the Keeper of the Third Door, and the Servants of the Bed Chamber… Like the Shah’s poets, generals, and economists, the Emperor’s lackeys cringe, push, and jostle.

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Despots seek abjectly loyal men. Their inner circles are composed of galley slaves, without any autonomy. Their property and their lives are always at risk. This is Putin’s world too. “The smart oligarchs get how things work here and the dumb ones aren’t oligarchs any more,” a senior Kremlin official told the Financial Times this week. “Everyone who doesn’t like it is out, or in prison.”

In Kapuściński’s imagination despotism is a guise. He depicts the Shah and the Emperor as actors, with Iran and Ethiopia as tragic stages. The Shah performed “a one character play, and the actor was also a director. Everyone else was an extra.” The aged Selassie weighs a mere fifty kilograms. His knees are stiff and he can barely walk. But he understands his role; he is a “theatrical paternalist”. When watched “he forced a certain elasticity into his muscles, with great effort, so that he moved with dignity”. Everyone, despot included, is forced to pretend. Think of Putin’s “gunslinger gait”. Farcical dissimulation flows from the top down.

Society under the despot is fatalistic and paranoid. Iran and Ethiopia are choked and immobile places. The people exist largely to be spied on. The Emperor’s courtiers are embarrassed that there even are Ethiopians. They lament “provinces where the people are depressingly savage, pagan and naked; without instructions from the police they might do something that might offend His Majesty’s dignity”.

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Iran’s difference with Ethiopia is oil. The Shah gets drunk on it. Like Putin, he confuses petro-billions for strength, wisdom and authority. Kapuściński sees oil as “a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts”. The filthy liquid, and all the billions, poison the Iranians who control it. Western operators scramble — as they have done in Russia for decades — to pick scraps from the table. They ignore the secret police, and the vanished journalists, because the pickings are so sweet.

The Westerners ingratiate themselves with a new class: “the petro-bourgeoisie”. They produce nothing but consume restlessly. The only thing Kapuściński’s Iranian oligarchs don’t buy are English football clubs. In the sight of cramped towns and the sullen majority, the new class “mounts an exhibition of the Iranian dolce vita, knowing no measure in its dissoluteness, rapacity, and cynicism.” Do the upper echelons realise their elegant lives are being played out on a volcano’s edge?

In both cases the mixture of ever more isolated courts and rulers with an ever more immiserated population, eventually produces the explosion that destroys the regime. Though never made explicit, that was Kapuściński’s lesson for the communists who ruled Poland for most his life, and for today’s despots: you will miscalculate in the end. The despot pursues unpopular military adventures, he promises too much, and he is no longer able to see himself from the outside. Their tables stretch longer, and longer still. His people become conscious of the “subjugation, barrenness, vagueness, and the emptiness of existence”. The moment they snap — and Kapuściński calls the timing of such moments “the greatest riddle known to history” — it ends.

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The Shah tries everything. He shoots protestors, and promises democracy. His prisons overflow and they empty out. Repression and liberalisation do an ugly, jolting dance. The despot does not know which partner to choose. In Ethiopia, the Emperor begins to give up; “He was too old to stop the impending avalanche.” All is in vain. In Iran the people “simply did not want a Shah any more”. The performance ends, the lights go out, and the despot trudges off stage.

Despotisms, like great art, linger after they finish. Kapuściński lied about many things, but he was under no illusions about the fate of the despot’s audience. If life was a film they would achieve catharsis. They kill the despot. Their flags fly above the capitol’s square. Flowers are pushed down gun barrels. Kapuściński knew this was wrong. In the real world real damage cannot be undone.

His exiled Shah jets forlornly between five star ski resorts. His senile Emperor is left under house arrest. Endings that are minimal, not maximal. But the audience, their peoples? You can remove the despot, you can use his table for firewood, except he has already salted the earth. Psychologically and socially despotism lives on. What is left behind in Kapuściński’s fables of Ethiopia and Iran is “an empty sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly”.

His fable of today’s Kremlin would end this way if he were alive to write it. There are 144 million Russians. Putin may be assassinated by one of them during a palace coup. They may fill the streets until the pressure scuttles him. He will be removed somehow, one day. But if Kapuściński is right, Putin will live through what he’s done to his people for decades yet.

Putin has admirers and apologists in many countries, from Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson in the United States to Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. He bought the German political establishment with gas pipelines and part of the British Conservative Party with roubles.

In France, however, the self-proclaimed, patriotic forces of anti-elite politics — on both the far-Right and the hard-left — admired Putin for free (give or take a Russian bank loan to Marine Le Pen in 2017). There is no equivalent degree of overt Putin worship in any other large, Western country — except possibly the United States.

When he held a peace summit with Emmanuel Macron just before he sent his tanks into Ukraine, Vladimir Putin humiliated the French president. But he also did him an unwanted favour: war in Ukraine has raised Emmanuel Macron’s chances of re-election in April from “pretty good” to “near-certain”.

After the first bombs fell, the Moscowteers  scrambled to distance themselves from the Russian president. Now, with scarcely a mea culpa, they have reverted to blaming the West for not giving in to Moscow on Nato expansion, and have resumed their mockery of Macron for his ill-fated peace missions to Putin last month.

This approach will appeal to part of their core support, which is viscerally anti-European, anti-American, and anti-Nato. But it is unlikely to impress the wider electorate.

Last Friday, Zemmour gave a strangely incoherent speech to a cheering and flag-waving rally of his faithful supporters in Chambéry in the French Alps: he both criticised Putin and defended him, appealing for peace and glorified war. “We know the Russians and the Russians know us. Putin’s Russia exists in the 19th century and regards war as a way of defending its strategic vision,” Zemmour said. “But the countries of the West no longer have the stomach for war… We need to consider the consequences of that.” The West, he implied, should actually be fighting “wars of civilisation” which “our elites will not accept”. In other words, he meant wars against Islam.

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Perhaps more surprising is what Zemmour didn’t say: he made no mention in Chambéry of Putin’s repeated threat to use nuclear weapons. The man who presents himself as the saviour of his nation now finds himself aligned with a man threatening to destroy it. So does Marine Le Pen and so does Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

As a result, I believe that the presidential election is all but over. President Macron has until Friday to enter the race formally. Despite the failure of his peace mission, the war will freeze the campaign and swing many moderate, non-ideological voters behind him.

Macron may or may not have been too indulgent with Putin last month. But three of his main adversaries have praised or idolised him for years. Even the centre-Right challenger Valérie Pécresse — no Putin fan — represents a party whose last Prime Minister, François Fillon, was until last week a salaried Moscow ally. After enormous pressure from Pécresse, Fillon finally resigned last week from the board of the Russian petro-chemical giant, Sibur.

Of course, Macron’s opponents still have a couple of straws to cling to: most damagingly, the confrontation with Russia will worsen fuel and food inflation, which was already threatening a Macron second term. It will, however, also give the President political cover to take action, such as temporary tax cuts, to ease price rises — steps that would normally have been impossible just before a presidential vote.

Meanwhile, Moscow will doubtless turn several armoured divisions of online trolls and fake social media accounts on the French campaign. Yet a Moscow blitz of fake news against Macron was expected anyway. Its effect will also be limited: it will mostly be seen by the anti-European, anti-Nato, Macron-detesting portion of the electorate, which would never have voted for him in any case.

This raises a more fundamental question: why was Putin so popular in France in the first place?

The 2022 election may be over, but the fellow-travelling of the three leading election candidates is a stark reminder of the fragility of the French political status quo. Disaffected French cultural figures, from Gérard Dépardieu to Michel Houellebecq, are also long-standing Putin fans, infected by a variant of the pro-Soviet virus which swept through much of French intellectual life in the Fifties.

Will the surge of nationalism in French politics be damaged by its association with Vladimir Putin? In the short term, yes. In the longer term, however, the same problems will produce the same resentments and the same arguments. The key man here is Éric Zemmour.

On the Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a Jurassic politician, fighting his last election. For him, defending Putin was part of the unthinking baggage of being anti-American, anti-Nato and anti-European. Ditto for Marine Le Pen. In any case, her political star is waning. Moscow certainly thinks so; she was refused Russian loans this time around.

Of the Three Moscowteers, Zemmour has the most to lose. He represents — or represented — a rising power in French politics, if not for 2022 then for 2027.

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For Mélenchon and Le Pen, Putin was their “enemy’s enemy”. Their thinking went no deeper than that. Zemmour epitomises something else: the strange attraction that Putin has come to hold on parts of the intellectual hard-Right in France and elsewhere. Zemmour admires Putin not despite what he is but because of what he is. Although Jewish himself, he has long idolised Putin as a defender of “Christian values” and “male values” against the onslaught of liberalism, feminism and gay rights.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that a new hashtag has appeared on French Twitter in recent days: #VladimirZemmour. French media and political opponents have started to trace the many links and similarities between Putinism and Zemmourism. Both men exploit tendentious narratives of national decline and national betrayal. Both shamelessly rewrite their country’s history to exaggerate past glories and nurse grudges against rival nations or the forces of “internationalism”.

For Putin, the indivisible Russian people and Russia’s natural right to be one of the world’s great powers have been betrayed by his weak or foolish predecessors and by the anti-Russian aggression of the West. For Zemmour, France’s natural superiority and right to cultural domination have been eroded over the centuries by foreign and internationalist conspiracies and by the betrayals of its own political classes. The latest betrayal is “le grand remplacement” — an allegedly deliberate plan by “international finance” and “the elites” to replace the white race by brown and black people.

In 2016, Zemmour wrote that the Russian President was “the last bastion against the hurricane of the politically correct which, starting in America, has destroyed all the traditional structures of family, religion and nation”. He is “the only European leader to defend traditional society, rooted in its own history and culture. All other Western leaders have turned the rootless, self-empowered individual into a jealous and demanding God.”

Two years later, he added: “I dream of a French Putin emerging but there is none…” Three years after that, Zemmour stopped being an essayist and TV pundit and decided to run for the role of “French Putin” himself.

In the large back-library of Zemmour’s Putin panegyrics, you will find scarce mention of the dismantlement of any semblance of democracy in Russia, and the imprisonment and poisoning of opponents. But while Western governments and businesses have ignored or chosen to live with these crimes. Zemmour has implicitly endorsed them. As recently as last September, Zemmour said that France should abandon Nato and the EU and enter a “Russian alliance…that would be far more reliable”.

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Until now, Zemmourist converts from the centre-Right — mostly very young or retired, well-educated and well-off — have brushed off such excesses. They prefer to focus on Zemmour’s energy and his eloquence in skewering the failures and evasions of the liberal, pro-European consensus. Yet they are now confronted with facts that they preferred to ignore: Zemmour’s gut instincts are authoritarian and undemocratic. His Putin-worship is not a tangential flirtation to annoy “the elites”. It is the core of Zemmourism.

As I have argued before, Zemmour’s political project was always long-term. It hoped to succeed over two election campaigns, not one. But I believe that Zemmour has been lastingly discredited by his Putin worship. In his place, another figure will doubtless emerge to pursue his vision of a strong, nationalist anti-European Right into the 2027 campaign (when Macron, if re-elected, cannot run again).

One of the likely candidates for that role is Marine Le Pen’s estranged niece, Marion Maréchal — although she is another long-standing Putin-fellow-traveller. Yet the New Right will not go away in France any more than it will in the United States. Memories fade. The core issues of identity, fear of Islamism and the need for better-shared prosperity will remain.

Part of the identity of the New Right is to mock international and European institutions, even the very idea of human rights or international law. No doubt the muddles and compromises of Nato and the EU will be mocked again and again in the coming months or even years as those flawed organisations struggle to support Ukraine without firing a shot and risking nuclear war.

It would, all the same, be pleasant to imagine that some on the new, nationalist Right — and not just in France — might start to reconsider and regret some of the Strange Gods they have worshipped in recent years. Vladimir Putin — a corrupt, violent, anti-democratic man who detests the values of the West — has been recruited as a poster-boy for French and American ultra-patriotism. Many people who, like Eric Zemmour, are sincerely devoted to the values of the past, now find themselves trapped on the wrong side of history.

I kept thinking about this idea last week, as I was trying to make sense of Vladimir Putin’s paranoid new essay, “On the Historical Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian Peoples,” which the Russian President published on the Kremlin’s website (so, essentially, self-published). Putin fancies himself as something of a historian, and the gist of the 5000-word ramble — so poorly-composed it’s unlikely to be entirely ghost-written — is that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”, cruelly separated by scheming foreign powers who want to turn Ukraine into the “anti-Russia”. Kiev, known as “the mother of Russian cities”, has been split from Moscow over the centuries by dark forces: the Tatar Mongols, the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, Austro-Hungary, the Nazis, and now “the West”, who turn the “mother” into a weapon against Moscow.

It’s rare for Putin to publish something so long, and historians, Kremlinologists and cultural critics have all been working out what it can tell us about the Russian President’s ideology and geopolitical intent. The BBC Russian service pulled together comments from eminent Russian and Ukrainian scholars, who accused the President of “school boy errors”.  Putin claims, for example, that Russians and Ukrainians are all descendants of a single medieval kingdom from Finland to Kiev that was unified by one language, one Orthodox Christian faith and one royal family. The early Kiev Kings supposedly adopted Christianity and then moved to Moscow. In Putin’s simplistic vision the identity is stable, the lineage unbroken. In fact, Medieval Rus was multilingual, has always been multi-confessional, and the descendants of Kiev kings ruled over areas outside of Moscow.

The Russian President also dismisses Ukrainian efforts (and huge sacrifices) for statehood over the centuries. The mother could not possibly be an autonomous subject. Putin claims the first Ukrainian republic of 1917 was just a German “construct.” Stalin’s enforced famine of Ukrainian peasants and slaughter of Ukrainian intelligentsia, he says, had nothing to do with the Generalissimo’s fears about Ukrainian nationalism undermining the Soviet project. Indeed, independent Ukraine, “is entirely the brainchild of the Soviet era, and was to a large extent created at the expense of historical Russian lands.” Putin’s take utterly ignores the Soviet rationale for formalising a Ukrainian Soviet republic completely controlled from Moscow. It was a way to control nationalist energies.

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Sergey Radchenko, Professor of Cold War History and International Relations at Johns Hopkins University dismissed the essay as “deranged” — but frightening all the same. Rather than a serious scholarly account, its aim is to give a rationale for continued aggression. After all, if Ukraine and Russia are “one”, then invasion and other forms of colonial subjugation are just an internal matter. Putin often invokes “history” when he needs propaganda cover to send in the tanks. To justify his annexation of Crimea and invasion of East Ukraine, Putin argued in 2014 that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, there’s been something disturbed about the way Kremlin propaganda has conceptualised Ukraine: either deifying it as “the mother” or castigating it as a whore who has sold itself to the West. There’s the good breast and the bad breast, and nothing in between. This latest essay, too, circles around metaphors of family relations, identity and possession; that’s why it’s so tempting to read it through the framework of psychoanalysis.

Because Ukraine isn’t just another political issue for Putin: it cuts to the quick of how he, and many of his compatriots, make sense of Russia’s sense of self. One of the tragedies of post-Soviet Russia is that its rulers have never surrendered their vision of the nation as an Empire, intrinsically destined to be a Great Power, a force around which the world revolves. And historically this identity has always been formulated via Ukraine. In the 16th century the tsars of Muscovy grandly declared their kingdom to be the “third Rome”: the inheritor of the divine mission of Rome and then Constantinople; the next city destined to unite politics and Christianity and establish God’s Empire on earth. But this claim was always based on Muscovy’s connections to Kyiv: it was the Kings of Kyiv who brought Christianity to the region, and married into the Byzantine royal family. As descendants of the Kyivan kings, Moscow’s rulers now claimed to be the epiphany of that lineage. Russia can’t quite live up to serious Empire billing if it doesn’t control cities like Odessa, Kharkov and Kyiv, the jewels of the old Russian Empire.

Internalising the idea that the “mother of Russian cities” is autonomous would mean Russia having to grow out of its self-perception as an Empire. That’s something that Putin and his clique refuse to do. Part of the protest movement against the President that swelled dramatically in 2011-12, demanded that Russia become a “normal”, modern European nation state. It called for economic and political reforms, and relations with neighbouring countries that recognised their rights as independent actors. Such a mature Russian nation would not need a tsar-like figure to rule it. Putin’s response was to stoke Imperial nostalgia and a grandiose sense of identity by annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine — and to elevate himself to de facto monarch. He just can’t let go.

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“Growing up is realising that not everything, good and bad, revolves around you,” says the literature professor and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, who introduced me to Klein’s theories. Infants who receive enough care and love should start to recognise the mother as an actual person, and so enter what Klein calls the “depressive position”: “the belated perception of the mother as whole object,” to quote Cohen; “the realisation that the good and the bad breast are actually the same breast.” Ukraine is neither Madonna nor whore. “Ultimately that’s how you get to complexity and nuance and beyond facile splitting between the idealised and demonised object.”

Unable to come to terms with the complexity of the real world — unable to separate from the mother — some infants become increasingly disturbed. Putin is stuck in what Klein would call the “paranoid-schizoid” position, in which the infant becomes resentful, full of suspicion about the world, and can compensate with over-weaning ambition and sadism. The feelings towards the mother, both the obsession with and the hate towards her, can be displaced onto all sorts of things. Many people have some sort of residual resentment of such nature. The skilful propagandist will use it. Conspiratorial propaganda feeds the screaming infant inside all of us, allowing us to retreat back to before we had to grow up.

The irony is, no one has done more to alienate Ukrainians from Russia than Putin. There is a self-destructive, irrational streak in his politics. His invasion re-orientated Ukraine towards the West to a previously unimaginable extent. His need for the mother country could be the death of her. When, in his latest essay, he likens post-Soviet Ukraine to a weapon of mass destruction aimed at subverting Russia, he is laying the groundwork for a violent response. Lashing out, like holding on too tight, can’t ultimate succeed in keeping another close.

First published on 20 July, 2021

At the time, exactly 50 years ago, the US was deeply divided by the Vietnam war. Congress was refusing to fund both that increasingly unpopular war and also the broad build-up needed to match the Soviet Union’s huge military upsurge. It would ruin the Soviet economy a decade later, but in the meantime, the US was being outmatched — until, that is, Nixon went to China and secured a diplomatic revolution that would open up a “second front” for the USSR. Among other diversions of Soviet energies, by 1976 at least 45 Soviet tank and motor rifle divisions were deployed towards Beijing, thousands of miles from Nato’s front in Germany.

Whatever else may be said against Nixon or Kissinger, their decision to open up to communist China at its worst — in 1972, the murderous cultural revolution was still in full swing — was a clever idea that many might have thought of only to dismiss it out of hand. All President Nixon had to do was embrace the malodorous Mao (his doctor would reveal that he never brushed his teeth, or bathed, unless he was in merry company).

But for Nixon the politician, the sacrifice was much greater, although he did not know it until the Watergate scandal drove him from office on August 9, 1974, two years after he had triumphantly landed in Beijing. The connection was straightforward: the centre-Right core of the Republic Party coincided with the “Taiwan Lobby”, which in turn encompassed the anti-Communist bloc, and which formed the hard core of Nixon’s supporters from the start of his political career. When Nixon betrayed the cause by embracing the very worst communist on the planet — altogether more extreme than the Soviets when it came to abolishing private property — and when he turned his back on Taiwan, the Republican Right did the same to him as he pleaded for help to fight off the Watergate charges.

A strange man in many ways — who else would think of himself as an absolute underdog while sitting in the White House’s Oval Office? — Nixon was also a real patriot: in 1942, assigned to the safest of Navy billets in Iowa, he strove very hard to manoeuvre himself into a combat zone. But had he known that his Beijing foray would leave him unprotected before his enemies and cost him the White House, he might have stayed well away from Mao.

Neither the American nor the Chinese media misrepresented that momentous strategic encounter, but they did join hands in utterly concealing the reality of China itself. For example, none of the admiring descriptions of Beijing and its imperial monuments in the New York Times prepared me for the stomach-turning stench that pervaded the city, and reached indoors as one tried to eat in the Beijing Hotel dining room. Throughout the city, human waste was not flushed away but carefully collected as precious “night soil” fertiliser, and then ladled into handcarts that were slowly pulled through the city to the surrounding vegetable fields.

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Nor did I read in 1972 about how the crowds in Beijing’s streets trudged from place to place in various states of clinical depression, understandably enough given the deep misery in which they were living — from their one-room-per-family, courtyard houses with no hot water to everyone’s shabby Mao suits and grey faces that evidenced border-line malnutrition. All this stood out even more because of the ubiquitous posters depicting ecstatically happy, rosy-cheeked enthusiasts applauding Mao.

Nor did anyone in 1972 care to mention that the officials they encountered — as I did four years later — were all suffering from intense sleep-deprivation: they had to reach their offices soon after dawn for lengthy pre-work “struggle sessions”, with the janitors and junior staff who run their ministry’s Revolutionary Committee playing Red Guards to upbraid them. The topsy-turvy rituals of the Cultural Revolution persisted until Mao died.

Instead of any criticism, the US press praised everything, including the health-giving virtues of riding a bicycle to and from work, even though Beijing’s summer air was full of faecal dust, with carbon monoxide added in the freezing winters of the coal-heated city.

A journalist of great fame at the time, James Reston, had already recounted his own marvellous experience of Beijing when he suddenly needed emergency surgery there in July 1971. His acute appendicitis could have killed him, but it turned out that the nearest hospital was fully equipped, and the surgery went well. It was only many years later, when Mao’s doctor defected and wrote his memoirs, that it emerged that Reston was taken to the hospital reserved for the top party leaders — the only one in Beijing fully equipped to treat him, or anybody who needed surgery.

The smell went away in later years as chemical fertilisers arrived, but many of the misrepresentations of that 1972 trip linger till this day — of which the most important by far is the legend of China’s strategic statecraft, superior by virtue of its very long-range perspective, then personified by Zhou Enlai. Because Kissinger negotiated primarily with Zhou, he elevated that servile toady — who never once tried to save life-long colleagues from Mao’s murderous intrigues — into a statesman of transcendental wisdom, fully endowed in the long-view department.

This was exemplified by Zhou’s answer to Kissinger’s fawning request for his retrospective view of the French Revolution. Indeed, Kissinger never tired of relaying the Great Man’s answer: “Too early to tell”. You see, you see, Kissinger would add, China’s greatest minds look ahead 200 years. Today, authors and publishers still use “playing the long game” in the subtitles of books about China.

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They should not. Chas W. Freeman, the interpreter, immediately told Kissinger that Zhou was referring to the 1968 student uprising that overthrew De Gaulle, whose final outcome was indeed still unclear in 1972. But Kissinger refused to give up his two centuries for a mere four years, and continued to repeat the story when gracing the dinner tables of the extremely rich in subsequent decades. It was one of the simpler Kissinger mystifications: by turning Zhou into a great statesman, he qualified himself as one — unnecessarily, it would later transpire, because he had so little competition until Reagan arrived to deflate the balloon of Soviet power.

Kissinger’s lie about Zhou was only the tail of a much bigger rat: the historical falsification that ignores China’s stupendous record of strategic incompetence down the ages, in order to attribute profound strategic wisdom to the Han — a wisdom also embodied in China’s classic strategic manuals, with Sun Tzu’s the most famous.

To believe that legend, the most basic fact about Chinese history had to be ignored: again and again, after the downfall of the Tang — conventionally dated 618 to 907 — the Han were defeated, conquered and long-ruled by much less advanced invaders whom they hugely outnumbered. One can visualise how it went: a few steppe warriors in rags and furs would arrive, the Chinese generals in silks and shiny armour facing them would exchange oh-so-clever Sun Tzu citations, their army would be overrun, the country conquered, and then ruled for decades or centuries.

Over the thousand years down to the fall of the Jurchen-speaking Manchus in 1912, it was only during the Ming dynasty 1368–1644 that the Chinese were ruled by Chinese — very likely because the founder Zhu Yuanzhang started off as a monastery servant and could not have read Sun Tzu or any other of the delusional manuals that reduce warfare to clever tricks. Their uselessness was proved right into the 20th century, when the Japanese became the last of the badly outnumbered foreign conquerors to conquer Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Canton and as much of China’s territory as they wanted, with both Communist and Kuomintang forces equally incapable of fighting them successfully.

At present no steppe warriors threaten Beijing, but the strategic incompetence of its rulers persists. Exactly at a time when the deeply divided United States needs allies to contain China, Beijing’s erratic aggressions since 2009 have overcome the neutralist preference of India (attacked in Ladakh and provoked over Arunachal state), the neutralist temptations of Japan (during the three-year ascendancy of the Democratic Party of Japan now extinct), the neutralist ambitions of Indonesia, and the pro-China tendency in the Philippines (just when many in the Philippines were inclined to slide into Beijing’s sphere, the Chinese responded by stealing islets and shoals).

Collectively, America’s new allies add enough mass to Vietnam and Australia — the first country to understand the China malady, in 2009 — to outnumber the Chinese, outweigh their economic achievements, and wholly overtake their less-than-stellar technological attainments. (Pentagon hyping of hypersonic FOBS missiles is shameless budget-pumping: they have no discernible purpose in the absence of ballistic-missile defences to underfly.)

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As for quantum computing and artificial intelligence, only the severely ill-informed think that the Chinese are ahead. As late as 2020, Huawei’s boasts about its supposedly superior Kirin 980 microprocessors were widely believed; they even deceived poor Xi Jinping. Yes, they were indeed quite good but the technology was not Huawei’s — it belonged to the UK and US, which meant that Trump’s National Security Council could and did shut down Kirin production and much of Huawei’s as a whole with a couple of phone calls.

But Kissinger, who is still going strong, rated Chinese statecraft very highly when he published his China book in 2012. He believed, correctly, that the Chinese would continue to work hard, expand their economy and overtake slow US growth. He also thought, incorrectly, that Chinese leaders would transcend their zero-sum mentality, thereby allowing Washington and Beijing to arrange the affairs of a “G-2” world, in which — as he wrote — countries like India and Japan would have to find their places.

Always improbable, G-2 became impossible when Xi Jinping arrived. For him only G-1 is good enough. Not because he is a megalomaniac but the opposite: he thinks, accurately, that unless the Party establishes an unchallenged global hegemony, with its rule is deemed superior to democratic governance, Communist China will collapse just as Soviet rule did. He is right.

On September 9, 1976, while visiting a military unit near Beijing — I was the number-two in the delegation of J.R. Schlesinger, the just-fired Secretary of Defence — everything suddenly ground to a halt. Mao had just died. What followed was a series of bizarre events that would transform China forever.

First, there was the lying-in-state, in the shabby immensity of the Great Hall of the People in front of the imperial palace compound. The diplomats already in Beijing formed a long queue going up the steps — not in order of precedence, as is the custom, but in order of preference: Romania was then Number One because the Chinese had quarrelled with Albania while the “revisionist” Soviet Union was way in the back.

When we entered the hall where a very green Mao was lying dead, we saw that we were alone with China’s absolute rulers, “The Gang of Four”, were standing there: Jiang Qing Mao’s half-mad, super extremist, last wife; (he had long preferred sex with his very young “nurses”), Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan (two shabby Party bureaucrats), and Wang Hongwen (Shanghai’s tall, good-looking absolute boss, who had even transferred tanks from the border to strengthen his own huge workers’ militia).

He was the only one who greeted us with a nod while the others seemed… terrorised. They knew, as we did not, that they would be locked up very soon. Next, after I had made quite sure that Mao was dead, we were ushered into another room to mourn with the selected “best friends” of China: the North Vietnamese and North Korean ambassadors, with whom we could not speak given the absence of diplomatic relations, two Khmer Rouge envoys who looked like  murderous dwarfs, and the Romanian ambassador who walked around saying what a really, really sad day it was, frantically trying to generate a minimum of civility between people determined to ignore each other.

Nor was I of any help: born in Romania’s Arad, I answered nu sunt sigur (“I am not sure”) to his “sad day” incantation. Utterly startled to hear me speak in his language, and totally embarrassed by my remark, he went to Schlesinger to be reassured that we were not all Romanians sent to catch him out.

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I had left Beijing when the Gang of Four were arrested, but was back again when Deng Xiaoping announced that it was all over: the Cultural Revolution, the closure of China, Maoism. After that, it all went smoothly until the 2009 financial crisis when the Party bosses thought it was all over for democratic capitalism. Their reaction was perfectly predictable: since 2010, the PRC has behaved as if it were a cheap wind-up toy car, rolling straight ahead to collide with its neighbours, provoking increasingly adversarial reactions, and persisting regardless.

One example is enough for all: just when the Japanese government was sliding into neutralism, the PRC leadership turned a banal, drunken fishing-boat skipper episode just off the Senkakus (absurdly claimed by China) into an all-out attack on all things Japanese, from embassies and consulates that were besieged by hostile mobs to attacks against Japanese corporate offices, car dealerships, and even against individual Japanese — all provoked by incessant calls for revenge from hysterical officials. The final outcome was the election of Abe Shinzo’s LDP, which squarely took on China as an adversary.

Meanwhile, the US elite, both with Nixon at the start and then after Deng Xiaoping’s opening of China’s economy, was more than content to preside over the de-industrialisation of the United States, uncaring of the ultimate political consequences of replacing many millions of $30 per hour factory jobs with $10 an hour “service economy” jobs, with the incoming flood of cheap consumer goods supposedly alleviating the impoverishment.

Now, of course, China presses against all its neighbours, endowing the United States with new alliances, some overt and official, others overt but without any formal treaty, and others emerging — a process destined to continue until Xi Jinping, who, with his talk of “war readiness”, is now in his Mussolini phase, triggers an armed affray serious enough to stop the arrival of tankers and bulk carriers into Chinese ports.

When that happens, malnutrition will not be far behind, because of China’s critical dependence on imported animal feed. In 1976, rice, sorghum, cabbage and rare slivers of chicken were enough. Not today. If Xi Jinping falls, pork prices could be the cause.

They weren’t very good. The poor kid had to pretend his can of Mojito was a hand grenade because they didn’t have any real ones. Tanya, a 38-year-old graphic designer who was also there “training”, told me they were there to learn “the basics” so they wouldn’t be killed in the first minute of a war. “Maybe with what we’ve learned we might last one or two days,” she speculated.

Frankly, I thought she was being optimistic. But what struck me most was what she said to me later: “We want to build something like the Swiss or Israeli army—a people’s army,” she concluded. “That’s the long-term goal.”

It was startling for me as a Brit to hear someone from a country battling a far larger enemy, which was, moreover, occupying it with military force, hold Israel up as a model. Back in London, New York and Brussels, ensconced within the uterine comforts of human rights dogma and the language of supranational institutions, Israel was something that almost all right-thinking people considered anathema.

But, as I discovered, it wasn’t just Tanya who felt differently. Friends in Kyiv and in the occupied East told me that the Russian invasion had made them understand who exactly they were: citizens of a state who, despite supportive talk from allies, would always have to fight alone against Russia, a far larger enemy perpetually menacing their border. Now when they looked at Israelis, they felt kinship with these people who would always have to fight alone against the Arab world.

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Even then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko seemed to see Israel as the model. Later that year, he declared: “Just like Israel, Ukraine has the right to defend her territory — and it will do so, with all the courage of her heart and dedication of her soul.”

Once again, Ukraine is menaced by Russia, which recently stuck a decent chunk of its army on the border. And not just men and guns: all the supporting infrastructure for an invasion is being deployed. Recently, they even moved in blood supplies. As one analyst has observed, “if it’s a bluff, then hands [sic] off to the Russians for making sure they get every tiny detail right”.

Once again, the supportive talk flows. In fact, the UK and US have been almost unprecedentedly forceful. Earlier this month, the UK Foreign Office announced that it had “information that the Russian government is looking to install a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv as it considers whether to invade and occupy Ukraine”. It even named politicians inside the country that the Kremlin still had links with.

I don’t remember the British government saying anything as blunt as this in 2014-15, when there was an actual war going on. It’s also now flying arms to Ukraine. Last Thursday, US President Joe Biden had a call with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky during which Biden told him that a Russian invasion could happen as soon as February, when the ground in the East freezes over and Russian track vehicles can move. Biden apparently got so worked up that Zelensky had to ask him to “calm down the messaging”.

But while Biden may get emotional down the phone, he won’t send Americans to fight Russians on behalf of Ukrainians. And it’s not like we’re going to send a substantial British force. Kyiv is not in Nato, and it has no allies it can call upon here. It’s on its own, which is, of course, nothing new. For years, Ukraine desperately needed javelin anti-tank guided missile systems to defend from Russian attack in the East; the Obama administration refused. Kyiv had to wait several years until Trump finally agreed to help. Who knows how many deaths could have been prevented had the systems been delivered earlier.

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During 1948 War of Independence, the Israelis desperately needed arms; the world said no (and indeed doled out lectures on international law). So they went out and illegally bought a load of Czech arms. They refused to take lectures when facing the literal extinction of the nascent Jewish state. I’m not saying Ukraine should start scouting the black market, but the broader principle should be internalised.

And widely. These sentiments are not just confined to Ukraine. When I reported from Greece just before the pandemic, I noticed that Israel, for so long a bogeyman for a country steeped in leftist ideology of the most reductive kind — “Free, Free Palestine!” roar the protestors who march each November in remembrance of the 1973 student uprising against the Greek Junta — had become a friend to be courted. The culmination was an April 2021 defence deal worth around £1.2 billion between the two. And why not? After all, what is Greece if not a small country perpetually menaced by Turkey, a much larger enemy on its border?

As my friend Constantine Lerounis, once an adviser to the former President of Greece, Prokopios Pavlopoulos, told me recently: “Both Greece and Israel are facing states or potential coalitions of states with far greater resources and larger military forces. When Greece looks to Israel now, it sees not a colonial oppressor but a state that has little choice but to maintain a disproportionately large military and a high state of readiness. And it understands why. The Greek-Israeli rapprochement has been in the making for some time now. What was unfathomable a decade ago is now merely common sense.”

Over the years, I’ve listened to people in Moldova and Belarus and in the Baltic States tell me more or less the same thing: Israel is a model for small countries in an increasingly unforgiving world. And it’s not just about an accretion of individual beefs between neighbours, either. Something has changed.

In 1806 the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw Napoleon ride onto the German city of Jena on horseback and thought he had, loosely speaking, witnessed the final manifestation of progress. Almost two centuries later, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama picked up on this image to declare “the end of history” following the victory of liberal democracy in the Cold War.

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Everyone now pretty much agrees that this idea is dead. Napoleon’s horse has bolted back out of the Jena gates. History has returned with ferocity and, as Damir Marusic Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, observes: “Ukraine learned a hard lesson in 2014 that many countries outside of the heart of the so-called liberal world order take for granted: you can only count on yourself.”

The problem is that Fukuyama-like triumphalism swept through governments and created a generation of what Marusic calls “activist policymakers steeped in a progressive vision of the world” whose best intentions and half-baked promises brought about so much pain. At the 2008 Nato summit in Bucharest, the United States’ desire to extend Membership Action Plans to Georgia and Ukraine was thwarted by the vetoes of France and Germany. To compromise, Nato offered “an explicit promise to join the bloc, but no specific timeline for membership.” Ukraine and Georgia were left to fend for themselves — with predictable results.

Meanwhile, the EU was delighted to “welcome” the  “European choice” of Moldova and several other countries in Europe’s East without making any commitment to EU accession. The door was not open, but neither was it shut. The Kremlin, though, now knew the US and Nato would never fight for these countries. The results are painfully inevitable.

Here in the West, the world of Brussels and the UN dominated the post-war settlement. We could afford the luxury of finger-wagging at Israelis for having to use old-fashioned means to repel old-fashioned threats; we sneered at their atavism.

But out on the edges of Europe, and across the former USSR, geopolitics and history is returning; indeed, they probably never left. No one is coming to save Ukrainians or Georgians. Their only chance is self-reliance; and they have neither the time nor luxury to grandstand. Now the world of Moscow and Ankara and Beijing is rising — and the only way many countries can effectively respond is to adopt the principles and behaviour of a world that runs not through Brussels but Jerusalem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Who knows, perhaps there are as yet some true believers out there, shaking their heads more in sorrow than in anger each time Putin, Erdogan or Xi Jinping do something a bit dictatorial, as if they just don’t get it. Yet the success of China in particular at getting very rich while remaining a one-party state suggests that, as with belief in Marduk, patron god of Babylon, it is time to let that faith go.

Embracing capitalism is not without risk, of course, and the degree of control exercised when China was a Maoist dictatorship is no longer feasible. That said, the technologies developed in Silicon Valley have enabled all kinds of fun opportunities for surveillance and repression, and China’s conformity-inducing social credit has blazed a trail that others will follow to one degree or another. But it would seem that those regular, faintly terrifying nudges are no longer sufficient for Xi Jinping’s party, which now seeks to exert still more direct influence over people’s lives, and specifically over the culture they consume.

For instance, at the start of August an article appeared in China’s biggest state-run news agency comparing video games with “electronic drugs” and “spiritual opium”. A few weeks later, online lists ranking celebrities by popularity were banned to “rectify chaos in the fan community” . Before the month was out online gaming companies were barred from providing services to minors except on Fridays, weekends and holidays, and even then only between 8pm and 9pm.

Next, reality TV shows with “abnormal aesthetics” featuring “sissy men” were forbidden, with viewers encouraged to “love the party, love the country, advocate morality and art”, and instructed to “consciously abandon vulgar and kitsch inferior tastes, and consciously oppose the decadent ideas of money worship, hedonism and extreme individualism”.

What is going on? Many in the media have speculated that we may be witnessing the birth of Cultural Revolution 2.0, but given that Xi himself was denounced by his own mother, imprisoned and then exiled to a rural village for seven years during Cultural Revolution 1.0, it seems unlikely that this is a model that would appeal to him. Besides, that was not an orderly top-down set of mandates, but rather war waged on the Party hierarchy by Mao, who encouraged the youth to rise up against their elders under the slogan “to rebel is justified”.

Xi Jinping’s view is the opposite: to rebel is very much unjustified. The “kids these days” energy is strong: there is too much freedom, too much fun. Rather, his approach recalls the approach to culture that was standard among all 20^th century totalitarians, who were much concerned with the state of their subjects’ souls (as opposed to mere authoritarians who accepted lip service in exchange for obeisance).

Take the clampdown on “sissy men”, for instance. Among the many things banned by Saparmurat Niyazov, the late despot of Turkmenistan, was ballet. The media, always on the lookout for a quirky dictator story, reported on this as something eccentric and amusing. However, I once interviewed a former regime apparatchik who recalled watching the dictator humiliate a male ballet dancer on TV, berating him along the lines of “what kind of man prances about in tights?”

Niyazov was not randomly banning a style of dance on a whim; rather he was suppressing what he regarded as a feminising influence which had entered the country via Russian colonialism. The models of manhood he highlighted in his book The Ruhnama were Noah (in his Islamic incarnation) and stern Turkic warriors from a legendary past — and himself, of course.

Think also of Mussolini, stripping down to dig ditches with workers, seizing every opportunity to model virile masculinity. Or think of just about every single monument or painting in every dictatorship ever, whether they be Right-wing or Left-wing, all of them depicting men as hard, tough, resolved, stoic. All totalitarian regimes take a strong interest in enforcing specific ideas of gender (although it should be noted that communist iconography frequently depicted strong, stoic women working alongside their men) to demonstrate the behaviours their subjects are expected to perform.

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Likewise, we should not be surprised that Xi Jinping’s party is instructing artists and performers to behave themselves and promote specific ideas. Totalitarians take culture very seriously. Mao was a poet and bibliophile, as was Stalin, whose quip that writers were “engineers of the human soul” was repeated by Deng Xiao Ping half a century later. Xi Jinping has authored a few tomes himself. To take culture seriously means that you fear the consequences when culture goes wrong. Little wonder, then, that the Party is instructing its most influential creators as to what they can and cannot do; it would be strange if it didn’t.

The culture favored by impressionable young people, meanwhile, is all the more to be watched. Totalitarians are obsessed with childhood; in Hitler’s Germany toddlers received puzzles featuring stirring scenes of the Wehrmacht in action, while dolls had the correct kind of (Aryan) features. Sergei Mikhalkov, author of the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem, was a celebrated children’s author.

In Mao’s China you couldn’t listen to The Beatles but you could hear the Chairman’s slogans rendered in song, while as late as 1985 Soviet Komsomol officials, concerned about the spread of bourgeois culture via the new medium of taped music, circulated a list of Western artists and their ideological crimes to provincial authorities in the name of “intensifying control over the activities of discoteques.” Thus was Donna Summer blacklisted for “eroticism”, Sparks condemned for “neofascism and racism”, Pink Floyd denounced for “distortion of Soviet foreign policy” while The Village People, bizarrely, were found guilty of “violence”.

And, of course, all regimes sought to control children’s time, in ways that are far more invasive than restricting access to video games. Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the USSR and Mao’s China all had official youth organisations (China’s Young Pioneers exist to this day), ostensibly similar to the Boy Scouts; only whereas that organisation was founded by a man keen to encourage clean thoughts and camping skills, the totalitarian versions were run by the state and mixed the fun and games with political indoctrination. In the USSR, you could start young in the Pioneers, graduate as a teenager to the Young Communist League before eventually make your way into the Party.

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However, as much as Xi’s recent spate of mandates has parallels in totalitarian regimes of the past, many of the things he is banning or restricting trouble people in Western countries, too, and are also often addressed with repressive measures, albeit usually by means other than government fiat.

A concern with “sissy men” might seem remote to us now, but the idea that males should model specific, positive forms of behaviour is hardly alien. The #MeToo movement saw the downfall of many a powerful man whose behaviour was exposed and then amplified by journalists on a mission to bring down the most egregious abusers. “Toxic masculinity” was suddenly a ubiquitous term, and while bad (as opposed to illegal) behaviour was not banned, the social costs of acting in a certain way increased dramatically, ending careers with the same finality as any government intervention. But those men had at least done something wrong; boys who are guilty of nothing at all may these days simply be medicated with drugs such as Ritalin to ensure that they behave in a socially desired fashion.

The idea that popular culture itself is subversive is likewise not unknown to us; the Catholic Church was appalled by Hollywood in the 1930s, while parents burned horror comics in the 1950s, and MPs debated whether Alice Cooper ought to be allowed to enter the UK in the 1970s, and the tabloids were disgusted by video nasties in the 1980s, and so on, ad infinitum. Even if governments are reluctant to enact bans or mandates, sufficient social pressure can and has led to self-censorship and voluntary submission before standards enforced by industry bodies. It’s not that long since something as innocuous as Michael Jackson’s Thriller video was forbidden to be shown before the watershed. Today, meanwhile, the panopticon of social media guarantees that few celebrities will deviate from the same approved set of doctrines.

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Nor is the concern for what children do with their time unique. The days of kids roaming about on abandoned building sites and lobbing rocks at each other for laughs are long gone. Today’s helicopter parents loathe the idea of unstructured time and are constantly looking for productive activities to ensure that their children grow up into the “right” kind of person, i.e. a version of themselves, but even better. However, whereas in the bourgeois West it is left to parents with sufficient means to ensure that their offspring can experience the joys of a rigorously managed childhood, in China all kids can benefit from being told exactly how long they can spend on the things they enjoy, regardless of social status.

Totalitarians everywhere dream of a world of virtue, where everyone shares the same, correct opinions (theirs). Xi Jinping has the advantage of being able to rule from the top down, whereas in the West those who would seek to instrumentalise culture and engineer our souls have to advance in a messier way, via peer pressure or through a gradual process of institutional capture.

These two approaches are not equivalent; I would much rather live in that messy world, where it is a lot harder to gain dominion. Even so, regardless of whatever short-term victories are achieved by those who dream of total control, the history of the 20^th century teaches us more than simply what their techniques look like: it also shows us that our would-be masters are always ultimately frustrated — though not before considerable damage is done first, of course.

As Biden observed, entirely correctly, “there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan”. Instead, he asserted, “this decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” Whatever the howls of outrage from America’s prestige opinion pages, the age of liberal imperialism is over: the time of nakedly realist great power competition has begun.

Yet Biden’s worldview, so outrageous for an American commentariat as recklessly jingoistic as John Bull magazine in its Edwardian prime, is supported by analysis from an unexpected quarter: that of the architect himself of both America’s War on Terror, and of the great slaughter in New York that precipitated it, Osama bin Laden.

Piecing together the themes of bin Laden’s various statements to the outside world in the years immediately before and after 9/11, a specific, concrete plan emerges, by which the “slave of God” — as the billionaire son of a Yemen-born construction magnate styled himself — would accelerate the collapse of the American empire through embroiling it in long, unwinnable and expensive ground wars in the Islamic world. This plan, bin Laden claimed, had formulated itself through his experience of the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, whose ignominious withdrawal from the country had shortly preceded their imperial collapse, events in which he himself had played a relatively undistinguished part.

In an interview conducted a month and a half after 9/11, bin Laden observed that:

“the Soviet Empire has become — with God’s grace — a figment of the imagination. Today, there is no more Soviet Empire; it split into smaller states and only Russia is left… So we believe that the defeat of America is something achievable — with the permission of God — and it is easier for us — with the permission of God — than the defeat of the Soviet Empire previously.”

Why would it be easier, asked the journalist, al Jazeera’s then-star reporter Taysir Alluni incredulously? Because, bin Laden replied, “we have already fought them — like our brothers who have engaged in battle with the Americans, as in Somalia. We have not yet found a significant force of note. There is a great aura about America, which it uses to scare people before it engages in battle.”

But, he claimed, the brief and inglorious American episode in Somalia showed that American power could not stretch to imposing order on insurgent forces far from home: “America left, dragging behind it tails of humiliation, defeat, and loss, without looking back; it retreated unexpectedly, and it forgot all that great media enthusiasm about the New World Order, and how it was the master of that order, and could do whatever it pleased.”

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This was not the first time bin Laden had used the example of Somalia to persuade sceptics of the logic underlying his plan. In his first interview with al-Jazeera three years earlier, after al-Qaeda’s twin bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which had killed more than 200 people, bin Laden noted that:

“We believe that America is much weaker than Russia, and we have learned from our brothers who fought in the jihad in Somalia of the incredible weakness and cowardice of the American soldier. Not even eighty of them had been killed and they fled in total darkness in the middle of the night, unable to see a thing.”

Even before then, in a 1997 interview with CNN journalist Peter Arnett, bin Laden noted that in Somalia, “after a little resistance, the American troops left after achieving nothing. They left after claiming that they were the largest power on earth. They left after some resistance from powerless, poor, unarmed people whose only weapon is the belief in God Almighty, and who do not fear the fabricated American media lies.”

Indeed, he added, claiming dubiously that veterans of the Afghan jihad had fought against the Americans in Somalia, “We learned from those who fought there, that they were surprised to see the low spiritual morale of the American fighters in comparison with the experience they had with the Russian fighters. The Americans ran away from those fighters who fought and killed them, while the latter stayed.”

In choosing Afghanistan as the location for the war with the United States which would, he believed, bring about its decline, bin Laden embroiled the Afghan people in a conflict not of their choosing, doubling the length of their civil war by another twenty years and inflating its butchers’ bill by 46,000 civilian deaths alone. And yet, with the easy confidence of a billionaire, he told Afghans in a video message that their sacrifice was worth it — and that “whoever doubts this should learn from the Russians how the blessed jihad destroyed their myth.” Because, bin Laden claimed, “the struggle is both financial and physical” so that even as the Taliban reeled under American bombing, “it is possible to strike the economic base that is the foundation of the military base, so when their economy is depleted they will be too busy with each other to be able to enslave poor peoples.”

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This emphasis on the War on Terror as a giant, entrapping money pit for the American empire runs throughout bin Laden’s messages. In his 2002 Letter to the American People, bin Laden taunted the inhabitants of “the worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind” that “it was easy for us to provoke this administration and lure it into perdition. All we had to do was send two mujahidin to the Far East to raise up a rag on which “al-Qaeda” was written, and the generals came running. This inflicted human, financial, and political losses on America without them even achieving anything worth mentioning, apart from providing business for their private corporations.”

Indeed, in his critique of America’s conversion of the War on Terror into a vast and lucrative wealth-creation scheme for the military-industrial complex, bin Laden either echoes or prefigures the identical critiques of American anti-interventionists of both Left and Right, from Bernie Sanders to Trump’s previous, anti-interventionist incarnation.

As bin Laden boasted, the massive borrowing needed to finance the wars “truly shows that al-Qaeda has made gains, but on the other hand it also shows that the Bush administration has likewise profited. Anyone seeing the enormity of the contracts won by dubious large corporations, like Halliburton and others connected to Bush and his administration, can be certain of that. But the reality is that it is you, the American people and your economy, who are losing.” For “we are continuing to make America bleed to the point of bankruptcy, by God’s will,” he asserted.

Yet it was only the presence of America’s then-Republican government, surely a gift from God, which enabled this situation: “the White House leadership, which is so keen to open up war fronts for its various corporations, whether in the field of arms, oil, or construction, has also contributed to these remarkable results for al-Qaeda.” Indeed, he mocked, “to some analysts and diplomats, it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’s own goal, despite our different intentions.”

No wonder, then, that Biden has similarly invoked the vast cost of the wars — two trillion dollars in his estimate — in bringing about their end. But even this colossal sum may be an understatement. As Fortune noted recently, this figure does not include the interest payments on the loans taken out to prosecute the war, nor the benefits paid to the survivors of the more than 7,000 American dead. Nor does it include perhaps the greatest single expense: the medical bills for the war’s more than 50,000 wounded veterans, which may alone total $2.3 trillion by 2050.

All told, claims Fortune, citing Brown University’s Costs of War project, the real bill of the War on Terror, including the lesser engagements in Yemen and Syria, may end up closer to eight trillion dollars, the effect of which American taxpayers have not yet faced, as “almost the entire cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars has come from borrowed money, much of which has yet to be repaid”.

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Among America’s creditors is, of course, China, which made use of the West’s overriding distraction with winning over mountain village chieftains in the wilds of Afghanistan, with trying and failing to install a functioning liberal democracy in Iraq and then with destroying the Islamic State caliphate the invasion spawned to accelerate its rise to global industrial dominance. It is surely no accident that only now that the War on Terror is winding down, competition with China has finally intruded into the American foreign policy consciousness, despite being mocked as eccentric or even racist when expressed by then-presidential candidate Trump as the empire’s overriding challenge.

Even in the new Cold War over infrastructure and state capacity, perhaps the battleground on which wavering nations will be competed for, the money wasted on the failed wars in Asia could, as the Institute of Policy Studies thinktank observes, “have solved multiple problems in the U.S., like erasing all student debt for $1.7 trillion [or] decarbonizing the entire electricity grid for $4.5 trillion.”

But we are where we are. The twenty failed years of war, debt and distraction may not yet have led to America’s collapse in the manner bin Laden eagerly anticipated, but it certainly set the then-sole superpower at a disadvantage in preparing for the coming competition over its right to global hegemony. As Biden noted in his speech announcing the withdrawal, abandoning the Afghan adventure was necessary because “we need to focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China and other nations that is really going to determine our future.” Returning to this theme in his speech justifying the chaotic scenes in Kabul, he reiterated that “the world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China… We have to shore up America’s competitiveness to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century,” and “as we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades, we’ve got to learn from our mistakes.”

But can America do so? Their foreign policy establishment certainly seems averse to learning any lessons from two decades of failure, even if ordinary voters overwhelmingly support Biden’s diminution of America’s historical mission. It is not obvious that a GOP establishment responsible for the manifold strategic disasters of the twenty-year war can legitimately criticise Biden’s decision to end it, especially not when its last president rode to power partly on the same platform.

Yet even bin Laden’s purported killer, a SEAL operative-turned conservative talkshow celebrity and anti-masking activist, maintains his brand by asserting that “It baffles me right now that we’re even considering negotiating with the Taliban … Why don’t we just go kill them?” — to the applause of American conservatives who applauded Trump’s anti-interventionism just as passionately when the random spinning wheel of America’s culture war was calibrated to reward different incentives.

For al-Qaeda itself, America’s endless internal political conflict, its deepest malaise, is nothing but a cause for crowing celebration. In a recent propaganda video, America Burns, an adaptation of a previous magazine article, al-Qaeda surveyed the American political scene, crowing at the internal divisions of a “decaying polity” on the “verge of collapse”. In al-Qaeda’s framing, America is teetering on the edge of civil war. Its vast security apparatus has increasingly been directed onto American voters themselves as the combination of crude populism and the reactive collusion between the security state and “the liberal press that controls the American media industry” raised the country’s tensions to boiling point. As a consequence, America’s “usury-based economy” is merely “an inflated balloon ready to implode”, serving only “the corporate robber barons” and “Communist China.” Indeed, they boast, “It was Allah’s wisdom that the fourth plane whose downing was ordered by Dick Cheney on the 11th of September did not reach its target, and Americans were left to destroy the edifice of their democracy with their own hands.”

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So what can be said of America’s standing twenty years after 9/11? Strategically, the hegemon appears a strange oxymoron, a global military empire which cannot win wars. It can kill hundreds of thousands of people and cause untold destruction — generally with the very best and noblest of intentions — but is seemingly unable to deploy the overwhelming military force on which its global position depends in a way that advances its interests. Given its military caste was unable even to manage a bloodless withdrawal from an airfield it controlled under a timetable it itself set, who can bet confidently that they would emerge the victor from a struggle against a competent and prepared near-peer adversary like China?

Only a reckless gambler, or the British government, would be happy with such a high-stakes throw of the dice. Politically, America’s divisions are a cautionary tale rather than an example to the world it still claims to lead; if the US still retains its status as the global standard-bearer for liberal democracy, then liberal democracy is not as enticing a prospect as it once appeared.

Yet America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, like the withdrawal from Iraq — which, after a decent interval to avoid the appearance of being pushed out by the Iranian-backed militias the war empowered, seems certain to follow — does not herald the end of American power. It was the wars themselves that were the trap, as bin Laden made clear time and time again, and their ending is a necessary moment of rebalancing to focus on the far greater challenge ahead. In this, we can say Biden was the president the American empire needed, even if his supporters didn’t realise that was what they were getting: a cautious realist brought to power by a liberal-imperialist establishment, and a broadly competent manager of retrenchment, and objective decline.

It is therefore wrong to claim — as Tom Tugendhat and others have — that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is America’s Suez moment, not least because Suez was a military victory for Britain. It would be more apt to view it as America’s Singapore, a failure of planning and overconfidence which heralded the collapse of imperial power in vast swathes of Asia, yet a moral and psychological defeat more than a terminal strategic one. The Suez moment, if it comes, still lies over the horizon.

The lustre of the American empire has been tarnished, but the core underlying structure may hold good for decades yet; if America has lost its claims to global leadership, it has also lost its desire to press them. In abandoning America’s failing wars to focus on its decaying infrastructure and the great power competition that will now define its future, Biden has, perhaps, twenty years after the carnage of 9/11, finally exorcised bin Laden’s ghost.

The experience hardened his belief that European colonialism was out of date. In August 1941, in discussions on the Atlantic Charter  —  which laid out the Allied goals for a post-WWII order  —  FDR stressed the inclusion of an article on self-determination, much to Winston Churchill’s anxiety. Roosevelt insisted that a precondition for a peaceful world was the development of “backward countries”, but that one-sided colonial trade agreements — like those of the British Empire — were why those countries “are still as backward as they are”.

American leaders have long liked to position themselves as opponents of European colonialism. John F. Kennedy, during the 1960 Presidential election, declared that the US should side with third world nationalist movements. After all, America itself is the product of thirteen colonies emancipating themselves from the British Empire and building a democratic republic. That revolution, which took place 245 years ago, has since been a model for movements worldwide. Vietnam’s nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, for instance, explicitly invoked the American Declaration of Independence as inspiration.

America, then, claims to stand for a liberal international order composed of independent nations, dedicated to promoting peace, prosperity and freedom. In theory, anyway. In practice, America did not become a benign superpower after the Second World War; it became an empire in its own right. It did not liberate European colonies; it inherited them and made them American.

In Indochina, the US supported the French colonial regime, before replacing it as the occupying force — leading to the original forever war. In the Middle East, the US replaced Britain as well as France as the imperial power ne plus ultra — a project that, as recent front pages graphically demonstrate, hasn’t ended well. But American interventionism in Africa is less widely understood. A revelatory, meticulous new book by Susan Williams — based on declassified documents and new testimony — has done a lot to correct this.

Africa, Williams suggests in White Malice, has long been of “central importance” in the vision of American foreign policy planners. During the second world war, in response to Hitler’s armies conquering most of North Africa, the US built a number of air bases on the continent  — in Liberia, for instance  —  to prevent its enemies using West Africa as a platform to attack the Americas. The OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) established an Africa service with three field bases in Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia. And the Manhattan Project — the secret program to develop the first nuclear weapons — made the Congo, with all its natural resources, central to American foreign policy.

The Uranium used to create the first atomic bombs originated from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province in Southern Congo. In 1942, a band of OSS agents were assigned to secure the mine, holding the richest Uranium in the world, to stop it falling into Nazi hands. They were also tasked with covertly transporting the Uranium  —  disguised as “diamonds” —  to the US, via airports in Elizabethville and Leopoldville designed by the Americans to ensure reliable transport. Shinkolobwe’s role in the Manhattan Project, as Williams notes, “was shrouded in secrecy”. Journalists were not allowed any information about the mine — let alone to visit it. It’s name and location was wiped off the map in 1942 and security was akin to a “fortress”, with armed guards patrolling 24/7.

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The Congolese miners were hyper-exploited. They were paid terribly, were frequently whipped by overseers and had little protection as they handled high-grade Uranium — which caused many to suffer long term health conditions. In other words, they were no better off than they had been under the Belgian colonisers.

After the war, the withdrawal of European empires left a void. And so most of America’s military bases in Africa remained. Pan-Africanism, on the ascendancy, was influencing civil rights and black radical movements among black Americans. The Soviet enemy was threatening to gain influence over the newly independent African nations. America, Williams writes, had to “recapture Africa”, putting it back into Western hands “by any means necessary”.

The CIA was anxious to get a foothold in these newly independent nations early to contain any possible spread of Communism. In the 1950s, the CIA’s African division developed an elaborate network of front organisations to acquire information and intelligence from across Africa. It funded journals and concerts, and established contacts with journalists, writers and businessmen who would become informants. For instance, Maurice Tempelsman (known for his relationship with Jackie Kennedy), who had big financial interests in Africa, sat on the board of the African-American Institute, a CIA front group. His business associate, George Wittman — whose company operated in a dozen African countries — was recruited into the agency in 1951, and helped produce a massive study of Ghana. The CIA also developed a close relationship with the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was they who informed the South African police as the whereabouts of Nelson Mandela.

Meanwhile American policymakers, like the European colonisers before them, believed that Africans weren’t quite ready for “orderly development” and “progress towards self-determination”. Williams quotes the vice-President Richard Nixon advocating that the US side with the “strong men of Africa”  —  the tyrants, in other words  —  to maintain stability and cultivate military regimes. This would counter the Communist threat. President Eisenhower agreed. Despite grandiloquent rhetoric in support of democracy, then, US foreign policy actively supported anti-democratic movements in Africa.

Because of this, the US was perpetually irritated by the two main heroes of Williams’ book: Kwame Nkrumah, who became the first leader of independent Ghana in 1957, and Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the DRC. Both were huge icons of anti-colonialism. And both were Pan Africanists, who believed in the dream of a united, strong and sovereign African continent  —  one that would be an influential power bloc on the world stage independent of both the West and the Soviet Union.

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Nkrumah was initially well-disposed to the US; immediately after Ghana’s independence, relations were relatively “friendly and fruitful”. But by 1960, Accra was promoting an “African centric” foreign policy and Ghana was becoming the HQ for anti-colonial insurgents from all across Africa. With his quest for an atomic reactor, and his close relationship with Lumumba, Nkrumah was now seen as a “subversive”. His “tendency to support extremist elements in neighbouring African countries”, as a State Department document put it, troubled America.

The motivation behind Nkrumah’s nuclear program was the aim to modernise Ghana within a generation. According to Williams, Nkrumah got support from Canada to build a reactor, but US pressure ceased this collaboration, so he decided to appeal to the Soviet Union instead — raising US suspicions. It is worth noting here that the US gave a nuclear reactor to Congo in 1958, when it was still a Belgian colony, and also supplied enriched Uranium to apartheid South Africa for its nuclear program. It seems that, for the US, “a necessary qualification in Africa for access to a reactor”, as Williams notes, “was colonial occupation or white minority rule”. In other words, atomic energy was only appropriate in white hands, not sovereign black hands.

Throughout the 1960s, relations between Accra and Washington would deteriorate. Nkrumah publicly called the US a “neo-colonial” power in a book titled Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. He became paranoid and more dictatorial in his rule. The state monopolised the media; critics who “disrespected” the President were jailed. Economic mismanagement was rife; many state-run companies made losses. The cost of living rose dramatically, which led to protests on the streets, and repression in return. Discontent with Nkrumah’s rule within the armed forces produced easy allies for the CIA, who had been flirting with the idea of regime change in Ghana since 1961. In 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup indirectly supported by Britain and America, while on an official visit to China. Shortly afterwards, the pro-Western military junta swiftly shut down the Kwembaya atomic reactor.

America’s main gripe against Patrice Lumumba, meanwhile, was his desire to keep Katanga  —  Congo’s richest province, where separatism was building  —  as part of the Congo. The province was the home of lucrative American and Belgian mining companies; Lumumba wanted to nationalise the industry. And so the CIA suspected Lumumba was a secret Communist and in “Soviet pay” — even though ideologically he was a nationalist. His reputation tarnished by these suspicions, Lumumba’s appeal for UN intervention during the Congo crisis of 1960 fell on deaf ears. With Belgian support, Katanga seceded. Around 100,000 people were killed. Lumumba was captured and executed by Katangan separatists in January 1961.

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In 1960, as Williams reveals through recently declassified documents, the CIA had officially approved a plan to fund and help organise opposition to Lumumba — with the expressed purpose of overthrowing him and replacing him with a “moderate”, pro-Western strong man. The prime candidate mentioned for this role by CIA Director Allen Dulles was Colonel Mobutu, who organised a coup against Lumumba on later that year, but wouldn’t fully come to power until 1965  —  via another American-backed coup. Williams presents unequivocal evidence that Mobutu had been an informant for Belgian intelligence and the CIA for years previously.

The ousting of Nkrumah in Ghana and Lumumba in the Congo followed a similar pattern of US interventions: such “deliberate violations of democracy” had taken place in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. The CIA would support in various ways  — indirectly, and sometimes directly  —  the overthrow of governments that had been democratically elected. These governments were deemed unacceptable by America because they had the misfortune of believing that their nations deserved to exercise self-determination, not simply have it in name. The US would then help install brutal dictatorships — like Mobutu’s — that used torture to repress critics and treated the national treasury as their own personal piggy bank. For American policymakers, this was an acceptable outcome, even though it contradicted the values of their own constitution. Communism was kept in check. Black lives did not matter.

We are in the midst of a frenzied post-colonial “reckoning” but, with notable exceptions (like Vincent Bevin’s absorbing Jakarta Method, published last year), this reckoning has focused on events that took and take place on American soil. For all the interest in black people, there has been little interest, even on the Left, in the African continent — except as a historic victim of Europe. The enemy is 19th century colonialism, which gave rise to the slave trade; 20th century American imperialism has been largely ignored.

But as refugees pour out of Kabul, dragging the failures of American intervention into the spotlight, the revelations in White Malice are perfectly timed. Perhaps now we’ll collectively object to the fact that American companies  —  Apple, Google, Dell  —  are using child miners in Cobalt mines in the Congo. Perhaps we will realise that little has changed in America’s relationship to Africa since the Cold War.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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How Kate won me over

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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.

While Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost meant that it was possible to discuss the USSR’s past more freely than ever, the same openness did not extend to the present, and the Politburo reacted with all the secrecy and dissemination that had been characteristic of the Soviet regime since its founding. It wasn’t until the morning of 28 April that workers at a Swedish nuclear power station detected abnormal levels of radiation and identified the USSR as the source. The news broke worldwide that evening, and the Soviet government was finally forced to admit that their “peaceful atom” was not as safe as they had claimed.

Thirty-five years later, and much has changed in the world — not least the disintegration of the USSR itself — but the idea of Chernobyl endures, lingering on in our imaginations as a symbol of the dangers of nuclear power. It manifests itself in serious books and solemn documentaries, but also in B-movies and weird comics, in an abundance of heavy metal songs, in Kraftwerk’s live shows, and in cult video games.

HBO’s 2019 Chernobyl series was a cultural phenomenon, one of those TV programmes that people just couldn’t stop talking about, like Making a Murderer or Tiger King. The Chernobyl-mania it induced led to a boost in disaster tourism in the area, with Instagram influencers pioneering a new, “pouting-in-Pripyat” genre of selfie. This in turn led to a brief tumescence of scandalised headlines, before the next outrage came along (long since forgotten, of course) to replace it.

The truth is, however, that while the HBO series gave Chernobyl tourism a bump, it was hardly a new phenomenon. I remember reading an account of a trip to the irradiated forests and abandoned buildings of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the early 2000s in The Fortean Times. The author described an idyllic nature reserve which was not even all that lethal, so long as you didn’t stay too long and knew which areas to avoid. Equally fascinating was the “stalker” subculture that had emerged around the Zone, directly inspired by the 1979 Andrei Tarkovksy film, Stalker.

In that film, a mysterious “Zone” has been left uninhabitable following an alien visitation, but individuals known as “stalkers” illegally explore the forbidden landscape, and bring outsiders in, for a price. Stalker itself was adapted from Roadside Picnic, a novel by the USSR’s premiere science fiction writers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, that was first published in 1972. Thus, the idea of a deadly, forbidden Zone had been imaginatively explored by a celebrated film director and two of the USSR’s most popular authors years before the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone erupted into real life; and that imaginary experience shaped how people conceived of and related to the irradiated landscape they now had to live with.

I was living in Moscow when I read the article in The Fortean Times and thought it would be interesting to visit the Zone, but it was difficult to organise, and I never got round to it. Nowadays, it’s much easier: you can sign up for one of several post-apocalyptic package tour options online, and, departing from Kiev, ride the bus for four hours to Chernobyl, accompanied by professional guides equipped with dosimeters. After stopping by the power plant and pausing for a photo, you can promenade through Pripyat, admiring the abandoned Ferris wheel and the crumbling Polissya hotel. So long as you stick to the approved itinerary, you will only be mildly irradiated — no more than if you spent a few hours on a plane.

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In Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, British author-photographer Darmon Richter chafes against the rigid, schematized approach to experiencing the Zone that has emerged in recent years, and goes as deep into its forests and abandoned settlements as anybody is ever likely to. Richly illustrated with scores of photographs, it is a document of obsession, describing trips undertaken over the years since he first visited as a tourist in 2013. Starting in 2016 he began offering guided tours himself, and over the next four years took over one hundred visitors along routes that went beyond the usual sites to provide deeper insight into life in the area, with a focus on “village life and tradition, public art (murals, mosaics and monuments), and overlooked works of architecture”.

In Tarkovsky’s film, the Zone contains a room which is said to fulfil the wishes of anyone who enters it — if they can reach it, that is. So, too, in his book Richter is constantly searching for new, deeper, ways to experience the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, as if in pursuit of some secret as yet unrevealed. At one point he enlists the services of “Kirill”, an experienced stalker who leads Richter and some friends on an illegal hike that sees them creeping past police checkpoints, dodging cop cars, crossing rivers and fields, sleeping in abandoned houses, and staring at an abandoned radar station before finally spending a night in one of Pripyat’s 10,000 empty flats.

But this journey, while no doubt interesting for the participants, doesn’t quite translate to the printed page. Richter preemptively sucks the tension out of his narrative by sharing the story of a French group who got caught and suffered a fate no worse than $14 fine, and the reduction of their 90-day entry permits to five. They returned to Ukraine the next day, because, well, because the authorities in Ukraine just don’t care all that much.

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Perhaps the most interesting of Richter’s several voyages into the Zone is described in the chapter “Monumenteering”. Here he decides to visit every Soviet monument left standing in all the villages and settlements that were so hastily abandoned by their inhabitants 35 years ago. This section reveals that the Zone is much more than a tourist attraction and nature reserve; it is also a strange radioactive Pompei, a lost world where the signs and symbols of a vanished civilisation linger on, even as they have been erased from the landscape elsewhere as a result of Ukraine’s laws on decommunisation.

As he ventures through this strange landscape, Richter discovers one strange sight after another: abandoned blocks of flats that run alongside crumbling roads; a decaying statue of a glowering Soviet warrior emerging from the trees, clutching a machine gun; a forlorn, overgrown arch commemorating the 300^th anniversary of Russia and Ukraine’s unification; an enormous, rusty, sheet metal hammer and sickle that looks as though it was left in the woods by accident. Entering a former fish farm, he finds ancient specimens still preserved in glass jars; he also penetrates the most dangerous part of the Zone, the “Red Forest”, that was razed to the ground after all the trees died. Now beautiful pines and white birch trees grow there, at once beautiful and lethal.

Most haunting of all are the many monuments to those who lost their lives in World War II. The neglect of these once sacred sites marks a second death of sorts for those who died resisting Hitler’s armies; despite their sacrifice, those men and women cannot, in today’s Ukraine, be forgiven for serving in Stalin’s army. (By contrast, when Richter crosses into Belarus, which is run by a Soviet-style authoritarian, Richter finds that all the monuments to the war dead of the fallen empire are well-maintained).

Richter succeeds in his quest to visit all the monuments in the Zone, but he is not quite done. One more voyage remains: just as Tarkovsky’s Stalker is structured around a journey towards a mysterious room, so it turns out that Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide is leading us to the control room of Reactor 4, where the disastrous test that led to the meltdown run that fateful night 35 years ago. But whereas Tarkovsky’s film leaves the room unpenetrated and mysterious, Richter manages to bribe his way in and so achieve his heart’s desire; he even manages to sneak in a tour of the immense New Arch that today encloses the Soviet-era concrete sarcophagus that in turn encloses Reactor 4. It seems like a real achievement, but then he lets us know that today even the control room has been added to official tours. It is almost as if, by entering the room himself, Richter broke the spell.

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Of course, there are those who might dismiss Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide, as “disaster tourism.” Richter rejects the term, describing it as “grossly misplaced”, and says that of the people he has led on tours “more had come to see signs of life and progress, than of disaster.” That may be so, but even then, I am not so sure that “disaster tourists” have that much to apologise for in the first place. People have been fascinated by ruins and the remnants of fallen empires for centuries. In Berlin you can visit a perfectly preserved bombed out church in Berlin and buy a postcard, in Mexico you can visit ziggurats erected by practitioners of human sacrifice, who were swept away by war and disease, and nobody will criticise you.

For as Richter discovers when he enters the control room at the end of his journey, Chernobyl has no great secret. In truth, its meaning is very old, and very obvious: there are forces larger than us that we cannot control, we are not the masters of the world, and our grand dreams can shatter in a second, humbling us. There is not much we can do about that but stand and stare and remember our powerlessness; it’s probably even quite a healthy thing to do.

That Chernobyl is today a popular tourist destination, added to the list of other sites where empires fell or tragedies happened, is a sign that the process which started 35 years ago, when people first began processing the event in books and art and music, is almost complete. Once unimaginable except in works of science fiction, today Chernobyl is almost normal.

Darmon Richter’s Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide is published by FUEL

The romantic penumbra that surrounds the dictatorship in Cuba to this day is a good example of the moral leeway still granted to projects that are nominally socialist, or which seek to transform humanity in some way. As Leszek Kołakowski put it, progressive hearts which are “bleeding to death when they hear about any, big or minor (and rightly condemnable) injustice in the US… suddenly become wise historiosophists or cool rationalists when told about worse horrors of the new alternative society”.

But the Soviet Union has been gone for almost 30 years, and today’s Cuba is mainly of kitsch value, its youthful revolutionary heroes preserved as a piece of sixties nostalgie; its diminishing achievements — education (Fidelista indoctrination) and internationalist healthcare (Cuban doctors sent overseas have been likened to indentured labour) — implausibly trotted out to justify over half a century of dictatorship.

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And so a new generation of political “seekers” have turned to China for their ideological sustenance.

Beyond the mere worship of money and power, there is not much to like about the government in Beijing. The programme of socialist modernisation launched four decades ago by Deng Xiaoping has produced an authoritarian state capitalism overseen by a dictatorship which censors the internet, bans independent trade unions and pursues an aggressively imperialist policy in the South China Sea.

What the Chinese regime shares with the Stalinist USSR is contempt for ethnic minorities and civil society. Over recent years China has arrested a million Uyghurs and Kazakhs and placed them in forced labour camps. As Nick Cohen writes for The Observer, evidence of their criminality includes “wearing a veil or headscarf” and the “avoidance of alcohol”.

The esteemed British historian Eric Hobsbawm was asked in an interview for Desert Island Discs in 1995 if communist utopia would have been worth the sacrifice of millions of lives. Yes, the historian replied. The most charitable interpretation of Hobsbawm’s remarks was that it was at least plausible in the 1930s to believe that Stalin’s USSR was the only alternative to a western capitalism which looked increasingly like the handmaiden of fascism. Of course even that is a stretch: there were plenty of individuals at the time who eschewed fascism without embracing Stalinist mass murder.

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But does anyone truly believe that contemporary China is forging an egalitarian new civilisation? Income inequality in China exceeds that of the United States. Moreover, when it is not herding Uighurs into the Gulag, the Chinese Communist Party is busy suppressing young Chinese Marxists who have noticed the gap between official rhetoric and the corrupt and unequal reality.

Yet much like during the Cold War, a roll-call of useful idiots have faithfully stepped forward from deep within the cosseted bosom of western liberal democracy to defend China from criticism. Some, undoubtedly chasing clout on social media, have decided that “Muslims are treated better in Russia/China than in the United States”. This is concerning — the “journalist” in question has sixty six thousand followers — but easy to dismiss as inane online prattle. Still, behind the hot air merchants stand “progressive” organisations that have taken the decision to align themselves with the Chinese state while one of the biggest crimes of the 21st century unfolds.

The Morning Star, long an uncritical mouthpiece for authoritarian communism, describes evidence of Chinese persecution of the Uighurs as “laughably weak”, despite mountains of material from independent human rights organisations demonstrating the veracity of the claims. (The paper has history here: The Morning Star’s predecessor The Daily Worker faithfully toed the Soviet line, defending the pact with Hitler and the murderous show trials in Eastern Europe, while of course never mentioning the millions of people being worked to death in the Gulag). It is shameful that the British Left treat The Morning Star with reverence as an alternative to the capitalist press.

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But The Morning Star is not the only culprit; new organisations are springing up to do Beijing’s dirty work. Today we have the “Progressive International”, launched in 2020 by prominent leftist luminaries including the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, as well as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein (among others). The Progressive International says it wants to “defeat a rising authoritarian nationalism”, yet it has aligned itself uncritically with the Qiao Collective, a vehicle for the promotion of Chinese imperialism combined with the sort of authoritarian nationalist groups that the Progressive International were ostensibly founded to oppose. The Qiao Collective brooks no criticism of the CCP and either denies the persecution of Uighur Muslims, or portrays their oppression as a function of legitimate “anti-terrorism” policy by Beijing.

Together with denial and obfuscation when it comes to the projection of Chinese power, the Qiao Collective pushes Chinese state media which depicts western nations as in the grip of strife and malfeasance. The Russian television station RT has long deployed a similar tactic. Western audiences are urged to scrutinise their own governments and to “Question More” — until RT turns its attention to Russia, when this critical approach is replaced by the party line from the Kremlin.

This glaring double standard is evident to anyone who isn’t trying to make a name for themselves as an anti-American talking head. Just as the Soviet Union accused the West of “warmongering” (sometimes justifiably, as in Vietnam) while it sent armies to Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa to prop up bloody dictators, the Chinese State and its obsequious mouthpieces extol the virtues of racial justice in the US, while incarcerating a million Muslims in concentration camps.

It is perhaps understandable, although no less egregious for it, that the Chinese state should seek to downplay its misdeeds and calumnies. Stranger is the spectacle of progressive-minded commentators credulously lining up to offer the Chinese state their support.

Depressingly, a permanent feature of politics seems to be a stubborn rump of ideologues whose criticism of their own government co-exists with a need to develop a corresponding loyalty to another unit. Orwell called this phenomenon “transferred nationalism”. For Orwell, transference has an important political function: “It makes it possible for [the transferer] to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.”

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Ideologues miss Orwell's greatest lesson

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Authoritarian, rapaciously capitalist China is merely the latest “camp” that stands ready to be embraced by those who are temperamentally inclined to transference. “We examined the source data on the claims of millions of Uyghurs in so-called concentration camps,” said Max Blumenthal, the American left-winger and son of a former aide to Bill Clinton, on RT earlier this year. “We haven’t seen the evidence for these massive claims,” he added.

Blumenthal is the founder and editor of the far-Left news site The Grayzone. In the past, The Grayzone has supported grisly dictatorships in Syria and Venezuela for no reason other than the latter’s opposition to western liberal democracy. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespeople Hua Chunying and Lijian Zhao have both approvingly tweeted a Grayzone article which sought to rubbish claims that China is persecuting its Uighur population.

The Max Blumenthals of the world may be base and cynical (Blumenthal’s politics took a 180 turn following a 2015 trip to the Kremlin), but in this postmodern age, it’s apparent that people still yearn to be part of something bigger than the self. Materialism and solipsistic self-betterment are not enough though. They have limited appeal next to the desire — felt in the days when Wells visited the USSR, and even more strongly felt today — to be part of a world historical struggle between good and evil. Whether or not this quasi-religious impulse is transposed onto an atheistic communist tyranny is largely beside the point. The search for a tyrannical fatherland, a steady ideological pole to cling onto in tumultuous times, continues unabated.

With the emergence of the contemporary pro-China useful idiot in mind, it is worth paraphrasing the dissident Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, himself a believer at one time in the big idea of communism, who noticed: “when there are no more worthwhile banners, people start to march behind worthless ones”.