“Opposition” activities are repressed informally (sometimes by unsolved murders). At the same time the regime uses the “Western”, or “European”, language of civil society and the rule of law. It even allows a wide measure of freeish speech. Unlike during the Soviet period, Russians can holiday in Turkey or Egypt or even America. The veteran dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, for instance, has visited Russia, given trouble and returned to England. One can read the true history of Stalinism in small editions, although school history textbooks are heavily weighted towards the “positive” opinions of the Kremlin. Still, some commentators see signs of a possible evolution to a more civilised future in the emergence of a genuine middle class within today’s society.

Abroad we seem everywhere to be seeing the abandonment of the manic ideologies of the 20th century. But there is the revival of an older chauvinism – anti-­American, or anti-­Western – in China as well as Russia. The projection of Russia as a world power is seen in every field. We see idiocies such as the closing down of British Council offices throughout the country (which met with a strong response from the Foreign Secretary) – just one example of a clumsy, ­counter-­productive handling of the outer world. There is no need to tell here of all the super-­nationalistic activities, from the Caucasus to the Caribbean, of the present rulers. Of course Russia is no longer the totalitarian world-­nightmare of Stalin’s time, but chauvinism can be dangerous without ideology. Kaiser Wilhelm’s nationalist expansionism co-­existed with considerable internal pluralism on the political and cultural side. And led to 1914.

Russia’s history over the more than two generations of Communist rule was misunderstood in the West partly because so much of its reality was suppressed or distorted for reasons of what might be called “political hypnosis”. Those of us who were concerned to expose, and resist, Stalinism in the West as well as in the USSR learned much of the truth from such voices as – pre-­eminently – Solzhenitsyn’s.

When I met him in Zurich in 1974, soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, I found him as pleasant personally as he was brave, having illegally, and in the face of harsh penalties, smuggled his writings out of his Gulag cell on scraps of paper (and later, more easily, out of Russia for publication in the West). He had been charged with treason under article 64 of the Russian Federation Criminal code, stripped of his citizenship and expelled to West Germany in handcuffs six weeks after The Gulag Archipelago, depicting life in the labour camps, was published in Paris.