He watches in horror Russian troops mass on the borders of Ukraine. He could not imagine that they would invade. His Russian wife, who was dying of cancer, replies, “Of course they’ll invade”.

This is a hefty, meticulously researched book on a massive subject, written by Cambridge historian Mark B. Smith. Although it deals with the relatively “vegetarian” period of Soviet history after Stalin’s death (to borrow Anna Akhmatova’s famous phrase), which was dominated by Khrushchev’s secret speech renouncing the cult of personality and some (but by no means all) of the horrors of the 1930s, the idea of the Soviet Union existing as a “civilisation” certainly intrigued this reader.

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