Author: Alexander Boot

According to Robert Gates, America’s former defence secretary, Britain no longer has ‘full-spectrum military capabilities’.

In other words, we’re strictly second rate in military muscle, which doesn’t sound all that bad. Second-rate would be a shining ideal for our third-rate healthcare and fourth-rate education.

So in a way Gates was paying us a compliment. Your military strength, he implied, far outpaces your capacity for treating cancer or teaching children how to read and add up.

One would expect that Dave would smile and say, “Thank you, Mr Gates. Yes, we’re cutting our army to a risible strength of 82,000, while the Royal Navy is losing 6,000 men and the RAF 5,000. But the military remains the only public service we provide with any kind of competence. And anyway, as I say to Sam, it’s not the size that counts.”

However, for some inexplicable reason Dave & Co. decided to take offence. Predictably, they came out fighting with their favourite weapons: empty phrases and statistical larceny.

“We are a first-class player in terms of defence,” said Dave, “and as long as I am Prime Minister that is the way it will stay.” Re-elect me, in other words, and Britain won’t disband her military forces altogether. We’ll always have the TA to rely on.

Politicking out of the way, it fell upon our former Defence Secretary Liam Fox to fill in the blanks with technical detail. Mr Fox left the front bench under ever so slightly murky circumstances and he’s waging a full-blown campaign to return on the back of his technical expertise.

“We’d be able to carry out an enduring stabilisation operation at brigade level – that’s about 6,500 personnel – while conducting a complex non-enduring one of about 2,000 personnel plus a simple one at the same time,” he reassured the nay-saying Yank.

Sounds good and appropriately informed. Even those of us who don’t know the difference between enduring and non-enduring will be impressed by the terminology. That is, until we recall that we had 23,000 soldiers at Waterloo, which is almost three times more than Fox says we can field at the same time now (that’s assuming he’s not playing fast and loose with numbers, never a safe assumption with politicians).

“We’re one of only four or five countries inside Nato to meet our 2 per cent GDP spend commitment. So I don’t think we can be questioned on that,” continued Mr Fox.

True enough, we spend £6 billion a year more than, say, France does. Nevertheless, France has a bigger navy than we do – and an operational aircraft carrier, which we no longer possess. This means that not only would we be unable to match our numerical strength at Waterloo but, closer to our own times and technologies, neither would we be able to launch an equivalent of the South Atlantic operation of just over 30 years ago.

Not only that, but France’s armed forces have 72,000 more personnel, 51 more jets and 2,000 more armoured vehicles. This suggests that a revolution in military thought is under way: the less a country spends on defence, the stronger it becomes.

Taking this discovery to its logical extreme, it should give Dave food for thought: perhaps if we eliminated the defence budget altogether, we’d become much stronger, possibly even to the point of being able to afford a carrier or two.

Then there’s an outside chance we’ll be able to restore the naval status quo in relation to France, whose navy until recently had never been a match for ours since 1805. You know, one of those dates our children no longer learn at school.

The children’s time can be more profitably spent on learning how to use condoms in variously inventive positions, and we know how important that is for the future strength of our country. Meanwhile, the money saved from the defence budget could find better uses too.

Dave and his jolly friends from all political parties aspiring to government could use it to bribe more voters into voting the right way. We could build up our dependent underclass, pay more benefits to Romanian pickpockets and Bulgarian beggars, send more foreign aid to African billionaires, hire more administrators for the NHS, make greater contributions to the EU, conduct more studies on the use of condoms in elementary schools… Why, the possibilities are endless.

Of course such ambitious goals couldn’t be met simply by eliminating the defence budget. We’d still need to print more cash and dip even deeper into the money markets.

But at least nobody would be able to moan, as some unreconstructed reactionaries still do, that the cost of servicing our existing national debt is already greater than our defence budget.

Spend nothing on defence, and this problem will solve itself. Dave will be walking tall, reactionary fossils will have to shut up and Robert Gates will be happy with our growing military strength. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

 

My new book How the Future Worked is available from www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk and the more discerning bookshops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You have to hand it to our politicians: they’ve raised dissembling to such a dizzying height that any normal person would get nauseous vertigo.

Today our Chancellor will deliver a virtuoso performance to do any conjurer proud. He’ll pretend to stand in judgment of the EU while lying prostrate at its feet.

(Knowing what he’ll say doesn’t make me clairvoyant. It’s just that in the good, if rather recent, tradition of our politics, the text of the speech has been leaked. Our ‘leaders’ have to know in advance which of their heart-felt, immutable principles they must change to make them more palatable to more voters.)  

If you haven’t been following British politics closely, I congratulate you. But such laudable detachment means you must be brought up to date on the context of the speech. After all, in modern political oratory it’s the context, not the text, that matters.

In this instance the Tories are heading for yet another chasmic rift over Europe. Much of the parliamentary party detests the EU, and even some cabinet members make decidedly anti noises.

Under normal circumstances a bit of internecine jousting could be absorbed, but next year’s election makes the circumstances far from normal. It’s already predicted that the presence of an anti-EU UKIP will cost the Tories 50 parliamentary seats. Another internal squabble could easily double that number – with the inevitable result of Dave and George retiring to the dinner-speech circuit.

As such a calamity has to be averted at all costs, D&G must play both ends against the middle.

On the one hand they have to mollify some of their own voters and most of Labour’s and LibDems’ by screaming love for the EU. On the other hand they must reassure potential UKIP voters that they hate the EU. This of course runs the risk of D&G coming across as the unprincipled spivs they actually are – and speech circuit, here we come.

Aware of the dangers, Dave has been indulging in footwork to put a tap dancer to shame. Don’t worry, he has been saying. Elect me and George again, and we’ll hold a referendum on Europe. Of course if you don’t, no dice. It’s up to you.

Meanwhile, don’t listen to those UKIP Little Englanders. We – you! – don’t want to leave the EU. If we do, Nigel Farage will be the only Brit left with a job. The rest of us, those who aren’t doing the speech circuit, will be queuing up at soup kitchens.

What we want isn’t to leave the EU but to reform it. We want all those federasts to abandon their principles as readily as we abandoned ours years ago, when we were still pissing it up at the Bullingdon.

We want them to grant us enough autonomy to please those UKIP nutters. We want them to let us pass some of our own laws – not many, but some. Perhaps they could also find it in their heart not to destroy every European economy with miles of red tape wound up around the idiotic single currency. And in an especially kind mood they could also let us keep a few – very, very few – Romanian pickpockets out.

In other words, D&G want, or rather pretend to want, the leopard not just to change its spots but to stop being a leopard. They feign confidence that an organisation set up with the explicit purpose of concentrating all power in the hands of utterly corrupt ex-Trotskyists will suddenly embrace moral goodness.

Oh they do know this isn’t going to happen. They’re just begging the EU to play along long enough and with sufficient verisimilitude for D&G to win in 2015. After that, let all hell break loose, see if they care. Thus in every speech D&G deliver on the subject they only sound like critics. In fact they’re supplicants.

This brings us back to George’s speech today. He’ll start by laying some numbers on the listeners. The EU, he’ll say, accounts for seven percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its economy, but – are you ready for this? – a whopping half of its welfare spending.

“We can’t go on like this,” George will say, meaning that if we do go on like this, as he knows we will, UKIP’s case will become strong enough to put D&G on the speech circuit.

Every fourth person in the EU is out of work, George will continue, and why is that? Because of its “failure to reform and renegotiate”, that is to pretend to reform while pretending to renegotiate with enough conviction for D&G to stay in that Downing Street terrace for a little longer.

“Over the last six years, the European economy has stalled,” George will thunder. “Over the next 15 years Europe’s share of global output is forecast to halve. Make no mistake, our continent is falling behind.”

A highly credible prognosis, I’d say. And one that’s guaranteed to be fulfilled, for the EU is no more about competitive economies than the USSR was. It’s about political domination, just like the USSR.

If some countries within the EU can rely on their own resources to keep their economic heads above the general morass, fine. If not, that’s fine too – as long as the EU’s raison d’être isn’t threatened.

The only sensible solution for Britain would be to get out immediately, without the benefit of plebiscite, leaving the EU to its own vices and devices.

Rather than munching on that old chestnut about ‘reforming and renegotiating’, that’s what George should be saying today, and if our electorate has been sufficiently corrupted to recoil in horror, then so be it.

Don’t call for the men in white coats. I know how insane it sounds, this suggestion that our politicians should stand on principle. Or indeed have one.

 

My new book How the Future Worked is available from www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk and the more discerning bookshops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A strong case can be made that our last four prime ministers have been the worst Britain has ever been cursed with.

Yet there’s no limit to perfection and Ed Miliband, given the chance, has a good shot at outdoing them all. His Mili-mouthed Telegraph article shows he’s already anybody’s match in mendacious cynicism, and that’s no mean accomplishment considering the stiff competition he faces from Tony and Dave.

The article’s title alone is enough to secure Ed’s leadership in the cynicism stakes: Only Labour Can Rebuild Our Middle Class.

The whole raison d’être of the Labour party is… well, I don’t know what that might be. Personally, I see no reason for it to exist at all, but I realise that others might come up with one.

Yet whatever it is, every policy Labour has ever advocated when in opposition or enacted when in power has been aimed at destroying the social, economic, cultural, moral, spiritual and religious foundations of the middle class.

This isn’t really a party-based observation: destruction has been wrought not specifically by Labour policies but by socialist ones, and Dave for one shows that Labour’s patent to subversive ideology has lost its exclusivity.

However, the patent was first issued to Labour, the party that, unlike the Tories, has never in its history deviated from the socialist course. Much of it was charted by Marx who was fanatically dedicated to wiping out the ‘bourgeois’ (middle) class.

As has been amply demonstrated in every place where Marx’s theories have been tried in practice, the middle classes can only be destroyed at a terrible cost to the whole society. This includes total enslavement complete with judicial murders, democide, genocide and concentration camps.

This isn’t the cost Western countries are prepared to bear at the moment, so socialists (in Britain specifically Labour) have had to adapt their tactics to their political environment, which in Britain is still defined by seeking votes.

Thus, for example, rather than simply confiscating all private property in one fell swoop, the socialists surreptitiously undermine it by shifting more and more wealth into the state domain, creating a huge and growing dependent underclass, tangling up businesses in miles of red tape and extorting exorbitant, confiscatory taxes.

In the process they make sure such policies will thrive in perpetuity by saddling future generations with ruinous debts and systematically reducing people’s savings to worthless paper.

Family, that bedrock of middle-class values, has also fallen victim to socialist vandalism. The state assuming the father’s provider role for millions of families has pushed the real father into oblivion, with almost half the children in Britain being raised without him. Total, not to say totalitarian, advocacy of variously degenerate forms of sexual promiscuity unerringly works towards the same worthy goal.

Even most feeble protests against any such outrages are met with institutionalised mockery, ostracism and, increasingly, legal action. At the same time many offences covered by the Decalogue are becoming effectively decriminalised. A burglar, for example, only goes to prison, on average, after 15 known offences and about three times as many unknown ones.

To make sure that the populace meekly submits to such Milibanditry, the socialists have devised an educational system specifically and deliberately aimed at creating a nation of unthinking, illiterate lemmings ready to follow one another over the precipice. The abyss isn’t just economic: the religious, moral and spiritual bases of the traditional middle class have all fallen into the gaping hole.

Morality based on Judaeo-Christian doctrine is routinely held to ridicule, and the illiterate population doesn’t notice that every attempt to introduce a new morality instead has failed catastrophically.  

Lest the people be reminded of their nation’s history of self-sufficiency, industry and enterprise, the socialists have always, and not just in the last couple of decades, tried to yank the country off her national roots.

This glorious purpose has a two-directional vector built in: on the one hand, Labour has always promoted the eternal socialist dream of denationalising government by transferring sovereignty to an international bureaucracy (in our instance the EU); on the other hand, the party has always – self-admittedly! – pushed for diluting Britain’s nationhood with an unsupportable influx of foreign, preferably alien, immigration.

So which of these outrages does the Mili-mouthed Marxist propose to reverse in order ‘to rebuild the middle class’? Silly question.

What’s happening is that Labour’s lead in the polls has been reduced to three points, and Alistair Campbell, Blair’s strategist, has told Ed that he must shift closer to the middle ground from his customary position of proximity to Lenin and Trotsky.

To this end Ed wrote (or rather signed, would be my guess) this revolting article promising to reverse ‘the cost-of-living crisis’. A man with a modicum of decency would have owned up to his own complicity in creating this crisis in the first place, but hey – it’s politicians we’re talking about.

The Labour government in which both Eds, Miliband and Balls, served with so little distinction inherited an economy in which no such crisis existed. By way of legacy for the incoming Tory-led coalition, Labour left an economy sliding towards a collapse.

A party led by the likes of Dave Cameron could never stop the slide, but at least the Tories have marginally slowed it down. However, even if HMG were led by a composite figure comprising the best of Pericles, Palmerston and Adam Smith, no improvement at all, regardless of how marginal, could have been achieved without some diminution in the standard of living financed by the printing press.

The shambles left by Labour was too fetid to be fumigated in a few short years. And yet now not just the same party but actually the worst offenders in the same party have the gall to preach the cause of the middle class.

“The British middle class is being squeezed as never before…,” writes Ed. “The motors that once drove and sustained it are no longer firing as they used to. Access to further education and training, good quality jobs with reliable incomes, affordable housing, stable savings, secure pensions: they have all been undermined.”

Quite right. By socialists. Like Ed and other Milibandits.

Mind you, nothing about our political class surprises me anymore. I’m not even surprised that by most calculations next year’s election will be Labour’s to lose. The socialists of all parties have laid the ground work and the road to hell is being paved.  

Alas it’s not good intentions that act as the cobbles but wicked, mendacious, harebrained politicking. If de Maistre is to be believed, this is all we deserve.

In 1965 the critic Kenneth Tynan ushered in a new era by saying the ‘f’ word on television. “I doubt,” he pronounced in an interview, “if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘f***’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.”

Tynan gets bottom marks for social commentary, for public opinion still frowned on public obscenity at the time. But what is a true pioneering effort if not blazing new trails?

Tynan thus gets the highest marks for self-fulfilling prophecy. As a true seer he clearly envisioned that time would arrive when various cognates of the ‘f’ word, sturdily reinforced by its cultural equivalents, would become common currency in public discourse. That time is now.

We are generously treated to prime ministers’ bonhomie of calling their cabinet colleagues ‘f***ing idlers’ – all in the best possible taste of course. And in this realm, if not always in economics, one can always rely on the trickle-down effect.

No one these days bats an eyelid when hearing 3-year-olds use the kind of language that could have got their great-grandfathers arrested. We see nothing wrong when the tots’ mothers scream at them in the same idiom on public transport. And we giggle when walking past a Chelsea Thai restaurant called ‘Phat Phuc’.

In fact, speech profusely adorned with foul language is seen as a sort of password separating friend from foe. Now largely devoid of any semantic meaning, four-letter words send a semiotic signal of kinship, an implicit Mowgli-style assurance “We be of one blood, ye and I.”

What Tynan didn’t anticipate, and we must mark him down for this lapse of prescience, is that in another generation or two lexical rectitude would be stood on its head. While obscene references to complex sexual variants elicit avuncular, indulgent smiles, perfectly common words now draw opprobrium and variously severe punishment.

Last season the footballer John Terry was banned for four games and fined £220,000 (a fortnight’s salary) for publicly calling a colleague a ‘f***ing black c***’. Of the three components of the triad, only the middle one can be used non-elliptically in a respectable publication – and yet it was this seemingly inoffensive word that got Terry into all sorts of trouble.

For he transgressed against the Eleventh Commandment that has more or less superseded at least half of the other 10: “Thou shalt not offend any member of any minority that thou art told qualifies as such.”

Had Terry simply called the other chap a ‘f***ing c***’, no one would have noticed. But sneaking the word ‘black’ into the middle bespoke racism, so off with his head.

Fair enough: we all know that any sin ending in an -ism or -phobia is of the mortal (and probably illegal) variety. Or rather we’d think we all know that – until we’re shaken out of our complacency by yet another incident. Suddenly we realise that our understanding of written and unwritten codes is lamentably incomplete.

The skies open yet again and a booming voice thunders from high above: “What you thought was unacceptable is actually fine – and (are you listening, you callous reactionary?) vice versa!”

The Newcastle manager Alan Pardew had this Damascene experience yesterday when, arguing about a disallowed goal, he called the Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini a ‘f***ing old c***’.

As in the Terry incident, directional microphones at the pitch obligingly put the tirade into public domain, much to an outburst of public indignation. How dare he use such language! He has no respect for decency! Throw him to the wolves!

By now you realise that what upset the public so wasn’t either of the words Pardew put on the wings. It was the one he played through the middle: ‘old’.

By using this imprudent diction Pardew forever branded himself as an inveterate sinner against new morality. His sin is another one of -ism variety: agism.

Actually, the public ought to have been more lenient, considering that Mr Pardew is only four years Mr Pellegrini’s junior. I mean, if an overweight gentleman like me calls a similarly proportioned chap a ‘big, fat c***’, then surely he’d be guilty only of boorishness, rudeness and bad taste, not the mortal sin of weightism or some such.

A penny would drop, one hopes, that every word used in such situations is desemanticised, not just those Kenneth Tynan pioneered in mass media. By all means, denounce such people as ill-mannered brutes (at times I myself qualify – mea culpa), but don’t accuse them of mythical offences against bogus morality.

The danger is very real: by exchanging old certitudes for new ones we risk abandoning the time-honoured notions of virtue and sin, and replacing them with awful caricatures. As the caricatures grow bigger and more ferocious, the may well devour our society.

Risk? Wrong word. This situation is upon us already, and isn’t it a f***ing shame?

 

My new book How the Future Worked is available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk,  Amazon.co.uk and at the more discerning bookshops.

 

  

When I was little, my mother taught me never to say nice things about myself. Like many of her lessons this one scored high on the moral or aesthetic scale and rock bottom on the scale of useful practical advice.

These days it’s hard to get by in any field of endeavour without blowing one’s own trumpet. People have become more credulous than ever in the past; they’re prepared to accept others’ self-assessment on face value – naturally expecting that the same courtesy will be extended to them.

Thus a self-effacing lady or gentleman is unlikely to get far in life, especially in a field where few objective criteria exist. People assume that any modest person has to have a lot to be modest about. Conversely, as so many artists and musicians prove, putting on fine airs paves the road to success much more reliably than any real mastery of their art.

Alas, this is one of the very few of my mother’s commandments that I have followed (with minor and infrequent deviations). That’s why I won’t say what I think of my new book How the Future Worked (available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk), leaving gasps of delight to others:  

“Alexander Boot explains what it is to be Russian. Reared in the hell that was Brezhnev’s paradise, he writes about his homeland with a kind of benign despair, giving so vivid a portrayal of a Soviet childhood and youth we could almost be there, while being very glad we weren’t. Entertaining and informative too.” Fay Weldon

“A brilliant evocation of life in the Soviet Union after it had settled down into its oppressive-drab phase, which will tell you more about Russia than a hundred academic volumes. Boot plunges us imaginatively into the Gogolian-Leninist Russian world as if we were there ourselves.” Dr Theodore Dalrymple

“A gripping, intelligent and masterly narrative that flows naturally while revealing the truths of Soviet and Russian life like no other memoir I’ve ever read… Boot is a superb writer.” Vitali Vitaliev

Anyway, enough of all that. Normal service on this blog resumes tomorrow.

This is another in a series of excerpts from my new book How the Future Worked, available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk or on Amazon.co.uk.

Another member of that narrow circle was Zhenia Kapman, a top student at our German-language department. That took some doing as Zhenia was blind from birth. He lived with his girlfriend Valia whose heart was bigger than her body, which was saying a lot. She looked after Zhenia without ever complaining and was effusive about his amorous stamina which, according to her, wasn’t so much hampered as enhanced by his disability.

Zhenia was a slim man of about 5’5” whose pockmarked face was of indeterminate age and ethnicity, a condition I’ve often observed among blind people. In his late twenties at the time, he could have passed for 50. And, though Jewish on both sides of his family, Zhenia could easily claim to be anything else. As I once found out, he often parlayed that ability into material gain, not only his own but also his friends’.

It was yet another bitterly cold winter and Muscovites were all wearing fur hats with earflaps down, fluffy scarves wrapped around their faces and layers of clothing under their heavy overcoats. That made us look like a nation of brown bears, but even those four-legged animals would have found it hard to negotiate the sheet ice covering every pavement – while dodging icicles falling down from the roofs. Some of those projectiles were two feet long and ten inches in diameter, which made them good to avoid.

As everything else in Russia, winter clothing, especially fur hats, was in short supply. Thus those hats acted as status symbols, ranging from patrician mink for 150 roubles to plebeian rabbit for 12. No one who was anyone would have stooped below nutria. I myself never rose above a succession of rock-bottom rabbits, as I was so absent-minded that every winter I’d leave at least one hat behind on a bus. Finding a replacement was never easy and I often had to brave Moscow frosts wearing an inadequate cloth cap worn over a heavy scarf protecting my ears from an otherwise guaranteed frostbite.

It was during one of those cold spells that Zhenia asked me what kind of fur hat I had. ‘None actually,’ I admitted ruefully. ‘How come?’ ‘Lost it. You know how I am.’ ‘Now that was a stupid thing to do.’ Zhenia liked to state the bleeding obvious.

‘You’ll end up like Van Gogh, missing an ear or two. But not to worry. If you have twelve roubles on you, we can go to any fur shop and buy you one. You’re size fifty-nine, aren’t you, big-headed bastard that you are?’

I laughed with the bitterness that only a fellow Russian would have understood. ‘You a tooth fairy, or a magician? How are you going to pull a rabbit hat out of a shop when not a single counter in the city displays one?’

‘Sasha, Sasha, Sasha,’ reproached Zhenia. ‘You have no faith in your friends. I’ve done this a million times. Come on. Let’s go.’

Not knowing what to expect, I led Kapman to the fur shop in Stoleshnikov Lane and pointed him towards a pretty salesgirl with smudged mascara disfiguring her baby-blues. ‘One twelve-rouble rabbit hat, please. Size fifty-nine,’ said my friend nonchalantly.

Kapman was fortunate not to be able to see the contemptuous smile that made the girl’s face look rather less pretty. ‘Which planet are you from, comrade?’ she asked rudely. ‘Can’t you see… oops, I mean, don’t you know that we hardly ever have those things?’

‘But you are a fur shop?’ asked Kapman who liked to dot all the t’s and cross all the i’s. ‘Yes we are.’ ‘You are a fur shop and yet you have no fur hats.’

The girl’s voice effortlessly went from ennui to irritation. ‘That’s right, comrade. We’re a fur shop and yet we have no fur hats. Will there be anything else?’

By contrast, Zhenia’s voice was deadpan. ‘I’d like to see the manager please.’ ‘A whole lot of good that will do you. Well, all right. Pal Palych!?!’ shouted the girl who by then had had enough of us.

Pal Palych, a bald fiftyish man whose face looked liked a blob of butter propped up on top of a giant jumper-clad ball, appeared instantly, no doubt smelling trouble. ‘What can I do for you, comrade?’ Talking to a blind man, he was making an effort to sound polite.

‘One twelve-rouble rabbit hat, please. Size fifty-nine,’ repeated Zhenia affably, turning his whole body in the direction of the manager’s high-pitched voice. ‘Sorry, comrade. Didn’t get our supply this month. Try us in April. Or in May.’

‘You sure you don’t have just one, somewhere?’ Zhenia was still calm and collected. ‘Sorry,’ repeated the manager as he turned to go back to his office.

‘Right,’ said Zhenia, taking a step back. Suddenly a horrible convulsion distorted his face, white foam appeared in the corners of his mouth, his whole body began to shudder like a Pobeda that wouldn’t start, his fingers curled each at its own angle, and he screamed louder than I’d ever heard anyone scream indoors: ‘Thieves!!! Robbers!!! Jewboys!!! One thief on top of another!!! Nothing but blood-sucking thieving Yids!!!’

 hat last accusation was rich coming from someone named Kapman, but then his audience didn’t know Zhenia’s surname. He then went into a shamanistic dance, ending up on the floor, frothing at the mouth and jerking his limbs in uncoordinated directions.

‘Christ killers!!!’ he bellowed, showing a well-tuned psychological insight. ‘D’you know who I am?!? I burnt in my tank in the battle of Rzhev! I lost my eyes protecting kikes like you!!! Should’ve let Hitler finish the job!!! Bloody Yids!!!’ Zhenia was actually born in the year of that historic battle, but his face, as I’ve mentioned before, was ageless.

His audience were stunned, and so was I. The manager and his employee, neither of whom looked Jewish, carefully helped Kapman to his feet, as if handling a precious statue. ‘Please, comrade, please,’ implored Pal Palych, ‘everything will be all right. You’ll be fine, just please calm down…’

Calm down Zhenia did, instantly. ‘Right,’ he said as if nothing had happened. ‘One twelve-rouble rabbit hat, please. Size fifty-nine.’

‘Well, you see, comrade,’ the manager sounded nervous and contrite, ‘we really, really don’t have any today. Wait,’ he begged hastily as Zhenia produced a grimace that looked even more awful than the one before.

‘Just come tomorrow. I promise we’ll sort it out, comrade. As God is my witness,’ he added in a most un-Soviet way.

Throughout this whole scene I felt like fading into the wallpaper, thinking that losing my ears to frostbite would have been the easier option. But the manager was as good as his word. The next day I stopped by the shop and walked out wearing my new hat. Everyone in the store was polite to the point of servility, asking after my friend’s health.

A fortnight later I lost my fur-lined gloves, a loss almost as irreplaceable – and potentially as perilous – as the loss of a hat.

‘How come your hands are so cold?’ asked Kapman as we greeted each other at the university. ‘Lost my gloves,’ I answered unthinkingly before I could stop myself.

‘Buy yourself another pair,’ suggested Zhenia. ‘I can help, as you well know.’ I assured my friend that no help was necessary. I’d wear my father’s spare gloves.

‘As you wish,’ frowned Kapman. As far as he was concerned, the sighted were an ungrateful bunch.

This is another in a series of excerpts from my new book How the Future Worked, available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk or on Amazon.co.uk. Here I talk about my university life and a few colourful freinds.

 

The most agreeable lad in the bunch, Tolia Dostenko, was in the same class as I. Unlike the others, he always showed up every morning, toting his ubiquitous guitar and a tattered briefcase containing two bottles of red. He’d sit in the back row, quietly plucking the silvery strings, taking the odd pull from the bottle, not bothering anyone and being seldom bothered himself, except by our conscientious phonetics instructor.

Of the six periods of practical English we had every day, four in that first year were devoted to phonetics. We had to learn pages upon pages of English texts by heart and enunciate them as closely to the received pronunciation as we could manage. Most texts featured as the principal character a fictitious Mr Sanford, the local rep for the communist paper The Daily Worker, as The Morning Star was then.

‘I say, Mr Dixon,’ we’d intone dutifully. ‘Do you receive TheDaily Worker at all?’ ‘No, I can’t say I do, old chap, can’t say I do.’ ‘Oh, what a shame! Surely you wouldn’t mind trying it for a month or two, what-what?’ ‘Not at all, old chap, not at all. Oh bother, it looks like rain.’ ‘It does indeed, it does indeed. Terrible nuisance, that.’ ‘Well, the English climate isn’t at all changeable, is it, Mr Sanford? Ha-ha-ha…’ No one told us that people who employed the diction we were trying to emulate were unlikely to flog The Daily Worker door to door, although they were perfectly capable of funding it behind the scenes.

The phonetics instructor faced the tall order of reshaping our speech-producing organs, inured to throaty Russian. To that end this pleasant, blue-haired lady would stick her nose into our mouths, making sure our tongues were properly retracted in the direction of our hard palates. She attempted that trick with Dostenko a few times, only to be thwarted by the industrial-strength smell of good vodka and bad teeth.

Before she gave up on him she once asked if he could recite Text Five by heart. The question was posed in English, but the reply came in Russian: ‘Fraid I can’t.’ ‘Well, Text Four then.’ Galina Stepanovna wasn’t getting the message. ‘Can’t do that one either.’ ‘What can you do then, Tolia?’ demanded Galina Stepanovna in a Russian as pure as Dostenko’s own. ‘I can sing you a song,’ he offered. ‘Please do, by all means,’ said the instructor with what she thought was devastating sarcasm.

Undevastated and undaunted, Dostenko strummed his guitar and went into a hoarse, drunken rendition of the Russian folk song At the river, the river, the o-o-o-other bank, Marusia was washing her darling white feet. He knew it in its never-ending entirety. Galina Stepanovna, who had never heard anything quite so surreal in her 40-year career of hard-palate searching, was so stunned that she stopped the song only after four verses, each followed by the eponymous refrain.

Petia Shuruyev, the fifth musketeer, once made a pass at another phonetics instructor, a beautiful girl who had just taken her degree and was several years his junior. When rejected, Shuruyev, a wayward offshoot of a good family, took revenge by employing his rare talent of being able to vomit at will.

Every time the comely Liudmila Nikolayevna demanded some kind of performance from him, be that reciting a text or pronouncing a phrase, he’d gag theatrically and throw up his daily intake of red and white wine into the aisle. As the girls in his class knew he was going to perform that charming trick, they’d sensibly take their seats as far away from him as the smallish classroom allowed.

Before long Shuruyev was summoned to the dean’s office and asked to account for his behaviour. ‘I can’t help it,’ he explained in his refined Moscow accent. ‘It’s an involuntary reaction, comrade dean. Every time she calls out my name, it just happens. Hard as I try I can’t keep it in.’ The dean dismissed him, saying it was more than high time something was done about him and the other four degenerates who belonged in front of a firing squad, not in a university auditorium.

To their credit, the Alkies never got drunk unless there was an important occasion to celebrate. It was just that in the Russia of my youth there was at least one such occasion every day. All one had to do was open the calendar.

Some, such as May Day, November 7 (Revolution Day), February 23 (Red Army Day), March 8 (International Women’s Day) were huge national holidays when no one worked. Some were less important: Printers’ Day, Railway Workers’ Day, Scientists’ Day, Teachers’ Day, Steel Workers’ Day and so forth, ad infinitum.

And that wasn’t all. For we also had anniversaries: of every battle in the war, of every speech Lenin ever delivered, of every important Party Congress (such as the Tenth in 1921, when all opposition was banned), of – well, you get the gist. There was a pecking order to the anniversaries, and there was a sacrosanct protocol involved in the festivities.

Once our university’s Party Secretary ordered that on such and such day we were to present ourselves at the conference hall to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of the 1905 revolution. An occasion of that magnitude clearly called for a rally, not just a piss-up. And no rally of that type could have been complete without at least one eyewitness of the glorious event, proudly displaying himself in the presidium on the stage.

That was the tough part: what with the average life expectancy for men stuck at 57 and declining, finding a superannuated veteran was no mean task. But, according to Lenin’s well-known pronouncement, ‘there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks can’t storm.’ Impressive detective work by the Secretary tracked down a senile octogenarian Cossack. The veteran swore he had been an active participant in the 1905 revolt before covering himself with glory in the ranks of Budyonny’s cavalry during the Civil War.

When the hero staggered onto the stage, even the Party Secretary’s face showed some doubt. The man had a vacant look that suggested he wasn’t in complete command of his faculties. That impression was enhanced by the saliva dripping out of his toothless mouth and onto his already dirty tie.

But beggars can’t be choosers. The Secretary braced himself and got the ball rolling by delivering a formulaic half-hour speech at the end of which he introduced the veteran. ‘So let’s give a warm welcome to Maxim Ivanych!’

We clapped enthusiastically, anticipating some good fun. Maxim Ivanych didn’t disappoint. He got to the microphone, tottered a bit but then straightened himself up.

‘I remember that day azh if it wazh yeshterday,’ he said and tottered again. ‘There wazh a rally in the shquare. Lotsh of red flagzh, all shorts of people, shtudentsh, workerzh. They wazh all shouting, one Jew climbed on top of a shoap boksh to give a shpeech.’ He smiled apologetically for having inadvertently identified the orator’s ethnicity.

‘Then the shquadron commander yelled “Shabresh out! Charge!!!” And,’ he ended on a triumphant note, ‘we chopped’em all up to ribbonzh!!!’.

In the ensuing tumultuous ovation Maxim Ivanych was whisked off the stage by the despondent Secretary whose face had turned beetroot-red. The poor sod had made a career-ending mistake: he hadn’t checked the facts, having satisfied himself that the Cossack had indeed fought with Budyonny. It escaped his attention that Maxim Ivanych had only seen the Bolshevik light in 1917, not in 1905 when he had been doing his normal Cossack service in the imperial security troops.

This is another in a series of excerpts from my new book How the Future Worked, available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk or on Amazon.co.uk. Here I talk about bribery in Russia and the role it played in my education.

 

Papa played the baksheesh system considerably better than Alfred Brendel plays the piano, but the trick was in finding someone in a position of influence to bribe. Had I decided to read chemistry or a related subject, it would have been no problem, what with my uncle a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and my father quite well known in that industry. But languages? Who the hell did we know in languages? No one, as it turned out. But it just so happened that Papa’s old girlfriend knew this chap, a medical doctor of sorts, who serendipitously was head of the outpatient clinic at the very university I wished to enter.

Did he ‘take’? Of course he bloody well took; what did you expect the poor chap to do, live on 175 roubles a month? A contact was made and, after playing hard to get for three seconds or so, Dr Palatnikov agreed to mastermind my ascent to the ranks of the Academe for the very reasonable sum of 500 roubles, about Papa’s monthly salary. For that paltry remuneration, and believe him, he was only asking for so little out of a genuine desire to help an obviously worthy young man, Dr Palatnikov agreed to act in the capacity of general contractor, wherein he would undertake to establish a confidential contact between Papa and the appropriate examiners, with whom Papa could then make separate arrangements. Dr Palatnikov didn’t think the separate arrangements would go over 200 a pop, unless of course those thieves had upped their fees from last year, which he wouldn’t put past them.

As we found out later, the thieves not only hadn’t upped their fees from last year but actually had to kick half of them back Dr Palatnikov’s way. The latter’s professional credentials might have been weak but, as often was the case in Russia, he had more real power than his official status would suggest, since it was up to him to decide how many sick days professors were allowed to take, and how many free holiday vouchers they were entitled to receive. Power in Russia, as you’ll have plenty of opportunity to see, doesn’t derive from money or position; it’s roughly the other way around.

The 1,300 roubles Papa had to pay in total went not only towards offsetting the imperfection of my CV but also towards covering my nonexistent academic attainments. My English, though decent, was certainly not up to the highest standards; my literature was weak in formal terms, even though I had been a voracious reader for 13 years; my history of the Communist Party was frankly pathetic, and my really strong subjects, drinking, carousing and hustling chess, cards and pool cut no ice with the examination board.

Making up the deficiency of my training in the month remaining before the first exam was a clear impossibility; the prospect of spending a month pestering girls in the street and drinking with my best friend Volodia Anikeyev was a sheer joy. So while other applicants were buried in textbooks I placed implicit faith in Dr Palatnikov’s organisational talent and was buried in things that offered greater tactile delights, if less enlightenment.

The good doctor delivered, thus proving yet again that vice can always triumph over virtue, at least in this world. While my performance at three out of four exams was surprisingly not bad, meriting at least a four, if not necessarily the straight fives I did receive, it was the oral exam in Russian literature that made me appreciate fully Dr Palatnikov’s clout within the academic hierarchy.

Though widely read in the Russian classics, I was a bit of a dilettante, in that I knew only what I liked and, more to the point, didn’t know what I hated. As the luck of the draw would have it, the book whose literary and social significance I was expected to enlarge upon was Gorky’s The Life of Klim Samgin. That I hadn’t read the book was, in Russian parlance, ‘half the trouble’; but the fact that I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what the book was about spelled trouble with a capital T, as I wasn’t even in a position to cover my ignorance with the smokescreen of verbiage.

This sad state of affairs became obvious to the examiner, a mousy little woman in steel-rimmed glasses, after 10 seconds of my incoherent mumbling. ‘All right, young man,’ she said, ‘it’s obvious you need some help. The Life of Klim Samgin is a what? Starts with an N?’ ‘A novel!’ I exclaimed, happy to be engaged in some kind of dialogue. ‘Good, good, good,’ she said contemptuously and took her glasses off. ‘Now what kind of novel is it?’ she asked, squinting myopically. ‘Starts with an E.’ ‘Epistolary !’ I was on a roll, but her contempt for me deepened perceptibly. ‘No, no, no, have another go.’ ‘Enigmatic? Effervescent? Ephemeral?’ Desperation was setting in.

‘Listen, young man,’ my torturer said. ‘I have neither the time nor the inclination to go over the entire vocabulary of the Russian language you possess. That might keep us here for an hour. I’ll give you another clue. The second letter is a P.’ ‘Eponymous… Epic!’ I exclaimed in a flash of revelatory zeal. ‘Excellent!’ she smiled, which almost made her look like a woman. ‘Now tell me frankly,’ she glanced at the examination sheet, ‘Boot. Have you read the book?’

You know how it is. At some point a man must recover his honour at whatever cost. Honour can under certain circumstances be more valuable than life, which explains the charge of the Light Brigade and my answer to the mousy creature’s question. ‘No, I haven’t,’ I said. ‘And I can promise you that I will never in my whole life read, whatever the provocation, anything produced by that crushing bore Gorky.’ ‘A literary critic, are we?’ the woman became sarcastic again. ‘Dismissed!’ An English sergeant major would have a lot to learn from a Soviet professor.

I walked out into the hall, where Anikeyev was waiting for me or, to put it more precisely, for the drink I had promised to buy him if he stuck around. ‘How did it go, old man?’ Only noonish, but his speech was already slurred.

I replied with an obscene Russian colloquialism that can be roughly translated as ‘I don’t think I did at all well, actually.’ ‘Oh, well,’ said Anikeyev who had just been expelled from our night school for drink-induced absenteeism, ‘those are the breaks. How about Palatnikov though? The last-ditch man?’ ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘if the old bastard delivers on this one, I’ll lose whatever illusions of justice I have.’ ‘If you have any left,’ said Anikeyev affectionately, ‘you’re even a bigger arsehole than I thought you were.’

Ten minutes later, a man with a Chaliapin-quality basso announced the results: ‘Avilova, 4; Astafiev, 3; Astakhov, failed; Batyuk 4; Bauman, failed; Bolin, failed; Boot, 5…’ – and my faith in justice was for ever lost, a small price to pay for guaranteed admission to one of Moscow’s better institutes.

 

This is the first in a series of excerpts from my new book How the Future Worked, available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk or on Amazon.co.uk.

 

Next time you hear an expert from one of the better universities, or, worse still, a journalist, claim he understands the Russians, ask him this question: ‘Have you ever lived in a Soviet communal flat?’ And if he answers ‘no’, call him a liar, throw him out of your house and refuse ever to talk to him again. Unless, of course, he recants, which he probably won’t.

The communal flat is the microcosm, it’s the distillation of the Russian spirit, the stage for tragedies and comedies compared to which Shakespeare’s plays are soap operas and everyone else’s are commercials. The communal flat is the forge of character, the smithy of taste, the educator of souls, the judge and the jury. More important, the communal flat was my childhood.

Nabokov’s memory spoke to him in continuous narrative, a carefully woven fabric of a Bach fugue arranged for the romantically minded by Busoni. Much as I admire both Nabokov and Bach, my own memory speaks in the modernist staccato bursts of discordant sounds, in images more worthy of Kandinsky than Metsu. The memory is thus divorced from the rest of me, but it would be wrong to let the rest of me interfere. After all, one’s memory is a sieve that retains what’s needed and lets the rest run down the drain. What settles between the holes is the stuff of which understanding is made.

Thus the communal flat of my childhood comes back to me in a potpourri of sounds, a kaleidoscope of images, a bouquet of smells. Oh, the smells of my native land! Both Pushkin and Lermontov described them in glowing terms, making it clear even to a neophyte that they never darkened the threshold of a communal flat.

A Bordeaux wine taster would perhaps be able to analyse the bouquet better, but for the time being you’ll have to make do with my nasal memory. It comes back with sweat, bodies that go unwashed for weeks, underwear that goes unlaundered for months, outer clothes that have never seen the inside of a cleaner’s, sauerkraut, stale urine, dried sperm, condensed vomit, cheap cigarettes, alcohol vapours and decaying teeth. That was the communal olfactory background against which individuals could smell their own lives.

In our flat there were 22 of them. They were divided into six families, each occupying one room and sharing the kitchen, lavatory, bathroom, corridor and telephone. These days class-conscious Englishmen, who can’t help noticing that I don’t move my lips when reading and sometimes use words of more than two syllables, remark accusingly that I must have been upper-middle class back in Russia.

That’s God’s own truth. For not only did my mother try to protect me from egalitarian influences, but the flat, indeed the whole building in which I grew up, was decidedly upmarket. Most tenants there had degrees from decent universities, held responsible jobs and sneered at the equivalent of the lower-middle class.

Those people could only dream of such luxury. Their lives were circumscribed by the so-called ‘corridor system’, in which dozens of rooms (each housing a family), one kitchen, one bathroom and one lavatory hid on either side of a smelly winding corridor perhaps 300 to 500 feet long. Our poor relations lived in one of those. I liked to visit them because in their corridor one could ride a tricycle around numerous bends at most satisfying speeds.

The lower classes looked even upon the corridor system with the same expressions one sometimes notices on the face of a rubbish collector driving his lorry through an exclusive neighbourhood. They lived in communal barracks at the outskirts of Moscow, not what you’d describe as fashionable suburbs. Their lavatories were outside and consisted of a hole in a wooden frame erected over a pit and enclosed in an unheated wooden shack.

In winter, when outside temperatures plunged to minus 40C, certain activities you take for granted became life-threatening. Predictably, just like during the American westward expansion, human ingenuity defeated the elements. Our heroic compatriots would do their business onto newspaper sheets spread over the floor of their rooms. They’d then carefully fold the paper, discreetly put it under the bed and dump it into the outhouse on their way to work in the morning.

They worked in places like the Red Proletarian Factory or Car Depot No. 6 and went there by public transport, where their odours intermingled. Someone with a reasonably sensitive nose needed a gas mask to enter a Metro train on a hot day, but entering was the easy part.

The real trial came when the train suddenly jerked to a stop, and all the short-sleeved passengers grabbed the overhead rail not to fall down. In doing so, they’d raise their arms, thus adding a certain armour-piercing quality to the already pungent smell of their bodies and clothes. Typically, they had no bathrooms at all and several times a year washed in communal baths, whether they needed to or not. This was seen more as a social occasion than a hygienic imperative.

Communal apartments of one type or another were by no means a rarity in Russia. In my time, about 90 percent of the urban population lived in them. Now, 40 years later, 15 percent still do, according to the official data. Unofficially, the number is much higher for, say, a one-bedroom flat housing three generations of the same family doesn’t fall into that category. It would be classified as a ‘separate flat’, whereas most Russians, when hearing an unqualified ‘flat’ mentioned, would still assume that it’s a communal variety.

Now, history may indeed repeat itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce. However, the first event in the flat that I recall coherently comes back to me as a detective story, and that’s how I’m going to tell it.

Grandpa walked into the room and beckoned us to the door. Sensing that something important was afoot, Mama, Papa, Grandma and I followed him to the kitchen without arguing. As our room was next to the front door, to get to our destination we had to walk the entire length of the corridor, unlit for considerations of fiscal prudence. Bumping into the handles sticking aggressively out of the doors of the other five rooms, we passed the bathroom, then the lavatory, executed a neat 90-degree turn and found ourselves in the kitchen. By contrast it appeared to be brightly lit.

The view was familiar: two gas cookers with eight rings between them, one assigned to each family, two up for grabs (the nightly battles for those two were worthy of Dostoyevsky’s pen at its most dramatic); six rickety tables for preparing food and washing dishes afterwards; two clothes lines hung with faecally stained underwear quite past laundering. Some of our 17 neighbours completed the scene. In the tradition of the Russian characters so aptly described by the classics and enacted on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre, their mouths were smiling but their eyes weren’t.

Grandpa, incidentally, was himself an actor at that famous theatre. By the time I was born his personal repertoire had crystallised to one role only, that of Stalin, whom he impersonated in The Chekists and other Moscow hits. In the past he used to play other roles as well, such as Schiller’s Karl Moor (after whom a famous London journalist is named), and according to Mama, if no one else, his performances had been brilliant.

Like most actors, he was histrionic off-stage as well, a tendency that showed in the semi-circular sweep with which he pointed at our own kitchen table. There, between two dirty plates and a half-finished cup of tea with a cigarette butt in it, lay a lock of hair plucked out of Grandpa’s thick mane. He was waiting for us to guess who the perpetrator was…

Back in the USSR, the post-war years saw a madcap drive towards establishing Russian ‘priority’ in matters scientific and technological.

Polzunov invented the steam engine, Kotelnikov the parachute, Mozhaisky the aeroplane, Popov the radio, Petrov the electric bulb, Lodygin the electric arc, Tsiolkovsky the rocket, the Cherepanovs the locomotive.

And anyone disseminating information that disputed those indisputable historical facts had to be re-enlightened at the educational facilities under the auspices of The State Administration for Camps (GULAG for short).

Though today’s Russian children are allowed to know who James Watt was, that drive hasn’t necessarily ended, except that this time the rest of the world has been taken in as well.

Only a week was left of 2013 when Mikhail Kalashnikov died at 94, the ‘K’ in the series of weapons based on the original AK-47 rifle. By far the most popular post-war infantry weapons, the Kalashnikovs have killed considerably more people than all WMD combined, and Gen. Kalashnikov’s demise was consequently eulogised in countless obituaries the world over.

However, they all omitted a rather significant detail. Kalashnikov didn’t really develop the Kalashnikovs.

Hugo Schmeisser did, except of course his original customer was Hitler’s rather than Stalin’s army.

Schmeisser, however, broke even in popular perception by being credited with the German MP-40 machine pistol, such a ubiquitous star in war films. However, that ‘Schmeisser’ was developed by others, and Hugo’s only contribution was the magazine. But the magazine had his name on it – hence the confusion.

The ‘Schmeisser’, incidentally, was far from being as popular in combat as in the post-war cinematography. It was used mostly by the Waffen-SS and officers in the Wehrmacht. Grunts usually carried bolt-action rifles that had several times the ‘Schmeisser’s’ 70-meter effective range, but of course fell far short of its rate of fire.

Long before the war the Germans realised that fire fights in modern mobile combat seldom presented targets farther than 300m away. This led to the idea of combining the features of a submachine gun and a bolt-action rifle.

The gun itself came about later, but already in 1924 Hugo Schmeisser developed the firing selector switch, a version of which is now used on all assault rifles. The hybrid rifle itself, Schmeisser’s StG44, went into mass production much later, in 1944, and the Germans only had time to make 450,000 units.

About 50 StG44s, 10,785 sheets of technical designs and, critically, Schmeisser himself along with his whole team, were in 1945 shipped to the town of Izhevsk in the Urals where they were made to work in harness with Soviet designers, including Kalashnikov. Schmeisser and his men were allowed to go back to Germany in 1952, by which time their work had been done.

Only in 2009 did Kalashnikov acknowledge publicly that in designing his rifle he had been ‘helped’ by Schmeisser. Privately, this was an open secret not only to experts but to anyone who saw the photographs of the StG44 and the AK-47 side by side.

The two guns look like dizygotic twins, if not exactly identical ones. Of course in their fine tradition of veracity the Russians have always claimed that this was where the similarity ended. It wasn’t.

All the key features of the AK-47 were copied from the StG44, if occasionally at one remove, with such features as the trigger, double-locking lugs, unlocking raceway and the high-tolerance system had been first reproduced in other rifles and then transplanted into the AK.

The long-stroke gas system and layout of the StG44 were copied faithfully, as was the banana magazine and the stamped-receiver manufacturing process. However, only in the 1959 AKM modification did the Soviets begin to use stamped sheet metal, something Schmeisser had been doing from 1943.

Long-stroke gas pistons, high tolerances and the magazine specially designed for stubby hybrid rounds simplified the maintenance of the gun, making it less likely to jam. This made the Kalashnikov ideal for the poorly trained Soviet army and also for millions of barely trained paramilitaries all over the world.

Approximately 100 million AKs have been produced and in 2006 Russia accounted for only 10 percent of the production. The rest were made in China and elsewhere, usually without the benefit of a licence.

In fact the Russians had been unable to patent the weapon until 1997. And in his adult life Mikhail Kalashnikov was never associated with the designs of any guns other than the AK and its knock-offs. Now you know why.

I apologise for the surfeit of technical detail but, as I’m sure you realise, my purpose is more general. It’s to show that, like energy in the First Law of Thermodynamics, the Soviet Union hasn’t really disappeared. It has merely been transformed.

It’s the same ulterior motive that animated my new book How the Future Worked, just published by RoperPenberthy. This is an anecdotal account of my life in Russia, written in as entertaining a form as I could manage.

The book, however, only masquerades as my memoir – it is actually less about me than about Russia, albeit as seen through my eyes. For the next few days I’ll be running excerpts, along with effusive praise by others – and will continue to do so until you buy the blasted thing.

You can get a copy on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, which is better than getting it on Amazon.co.uk.