It was Dr Johnson, not Boris Johnson, who declared “patriotism is a last refuge of the scoundrel”. Some years have passed since Johnson, Shirley Williams and I were guests of an institute outside Moscow. We were there to explain what we hoped were the wonders of western democracy – the freedom, the politics and the economic policies – to Russian politicians and academics who were glorying in having shaken off the constraints of the Soviet Union.
Alas, the glory days were not to last. Along came the so-called oligarchs, and then Putin. The ancient Greek word oligarkhía meant “rule by the few”. But in the post-Soviet world it came to denote a group of people who stripped the nation of its prime economic assets and became very rich – more plutocrats than oligarchs. We all know the consequences: the collapse of the Soviet Union evolved into rule by dictatorship, with the plutocrats fleeing abroad from Putin.
