Accepting for the moment that the invention and subsequent growth of the microchip was a historical accident, can we imagine other historical accidents which would have been favourable to the Soviet Union? Let’s consider one of them: assume that Soviet researchers in biology managed to produce a set of super-intelligent mice by injecting into an embryo’s brain a certain substance one week before birth. With no more than a moderate amount of further research they decided to start experiments with human beings. They had plenty of volunteers who would have regarded their patriotic duty to allow surgical interference with the embryos they carried. The experiments on humans turned out to be successful. The children born could read and write at the age of three. By the time Chernenko came to power, the Soviet Union could have had a division of superhuman men and women, a division of John von Neumanns. It is futile to speculate how these superhumans would have made the Soviet Union an even greater power but we can imagine the Western reaction. Mice would have been fine, possibly even monkeys, but humans? Definitely not. The West would have fallen behind. The ultimate victory of Communism would have come that much nearer.

This example may be too specific. The point is that if there was danger to human life in any experiment the Soviet Union would always have had volunteers ready to please the authorities, whereas such experiments would have been banned in the West. So our conclusion is that the collapse of the Soviet Union could have been avoided if new technology had not come to the fore in the West. But it did.

The Soviet Union duly collapsed. The planned economy has been abandoned, a free-market economy has been installed. Russia has changed completely. But has it?  Russia has never had an independent judiciary. Corruption, collusion and narrow interests still prevail, inflation is rampant and military expenditure is once more enormous. Admittedly, there is now a middle class, more reluctant to accept official propaganda but once fear is reintroduced it will keep quiet.

We may safely conclude that not much has changed. The diseases of Soviet times are still there but they no longer threaten the existence of the regime. The base and the superstructure are once more in harmony: it is a capitalist economy upheld by the intelligence services. Putin has given up the messianic mission to convert the world to Communism. He just wants to get back what he believes was stolen from him. His ambition is to restore old Soviet borders. Can he do it? Can he challenge the West? Can he catch up with Western technology?

Our answer to the last question is no, the technological gap will remain. He might achieve some success in a few specialist fields but he will not be able to build a semiconductor industry comparable with that of the US. Will continued technological inferiority curb his ambitions? Unlikely. So what will happen in the next five years?