Gorbachev carries more weight than his fellow Nobel laureate. He too has supported Putin’s foreign policy and accused America of thinking in terms of “a new empire” and of taking a series of unilateral decisions that “ignored the Security Council, international law and the will of their own people”. The comments of these two figures show how Russians who are against the return to a Cold War still hold some of the old nationalist attitudes.

The Moscow establishment is heavily weighed down by a surviving section of the old apparat who combine a traditional Russian drive to be a “Great Power” with the expansionism that marked the Soviet period. These officials are mostly to be found in the Foreign Ministry and the military. If Western diplomacy has been, on occasions, thoughtless, Russian diplomacy has often been clumsy to the point of professional incompetence. This calls for care on our part.

There is not much we can do about the natural and long-standing suspicions of Russia found in Poland, for example. Historically and emotionally, Nato has been an alliance against Muscovite aggression. And in spite of its more recent co-­operation with Russia, that is still how it appears in Russian minds. The question of the Ukraine is more sensitive still.

Solzhenitsyn became very combative in the controversy that took place in Moscow and Kiev academic circles about Ukrainian attempts to have the 1932-33 ­Terror-­famine recognised as genocide. He wrote: “The provocative outcry about ‘genocide’ only began to germinate decades later – at first quietly, inside spiteful, anti-­Russian, chauvinistic minds – and now it has spun off into the government circles of ­modern-day Ukraine, who have thus outdone even the wild inventions of ­Bolshevik agitprop.”