Time passed. Russia changed. And, as we shall see, so, apparently, did Solzhenitsyn. In his last years, he continued to show himself to be a Russian patriot. But this led him to take political stances that have been regarded as anti-­American. Indeed, even when he lived in the US and spoke publicly, as at Harvard in 1978, he was hard on much of America’s culture – although he focused on the American intellectuals’ delusions about communism.

Meanwhile I had published another book about Stalinism, The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), which told the story of the peasantry, and particularly that of the Ukraine, over the past century. And this time Solzhenitsyn appears in a different light.

The rise of new, or temporarily forgotten, nations in the area between Russia, Poland and Turkey has been well covered by Anne Applebaum in her Between East and West. Friedrich Engels (with Marx’s blessing and published by the Soviets) wrote that “the Poles and Czechs are essentially an agricultural race”; that in Eastern cities “manufacturers are Germans and traders – Jews”, regarded as more German than otherwise, their tongue being “a horribly corrupt German”. German culture was prevailing and, together with diplomatic and military pressure, ensuring “the slow but sure advance of denationalisation by social developments”. The dying Czech nationality, “even if continuing to speak their own tongue”, could only exist henceforth as “part of ­Germany”.

My great-grandfather’s map, c.?1845, has the Balkans under “Various Slavonic Tribes”. Only after the middle of that century do we get Bulgarians etc, and later still Ukrainians. These nations were thus only stirring in the late 19th century. The generations then emerging in Russia had little notion of this. Lenin, well into the Revolution, thought of Ukrainian as a peasant dialect, quite in the Engels tradition. It was only when the Soviet regime looked vulnerable that he took a different line on that country, making as usual all the essential concessions.