In Syria we are told Putin is winning. It depends what you mean. The idea that responsibility for the reconstruction of a country destined to be dominated by terrorism and religious-based conflict for generations to come rests with Russia, whose GNP is about the size of Italy’s, and 20 per cent of whose population is below the poverty line, is a curious concept of victory. To say nothing of the vileness of the regime Russia will find itself supporting. His short-termism poses dangers for us as well as Russia herself. A combination of power projection abroad and economic stagnation at home can only increase his domestic problems. The point may come when he becomes like the man described by Nietzsche who thinks he’s leading the crowd, but when he looks round discovers they’re chasing him.

The temptation will be to maintain popularity by risky moves abroad, while dramatising Western reactions as threats to the motherland. For the West, it is as if Russian foreign policy were being run by the Russian intelligence service — something that did not happen in the Soviet Union, when the Politburo was in charge. The vulgar, shock-jock style of the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova makes her a Putin favourite, but she would have horrified Gromyko.

Reaction to the Putin phenomenon in some American and European circles has been disconcerting. A troubling number of politicians or commentators who would have been seen as anti-communists in the past speak fondly of a man who in many ways is harking back to that past. To see Western figures oozing admiration, whether Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, or Republicans in the USA, is remarkable. The fact is that today’s Russia is edging close to the fascistic spectrum.

A harsh word, yet it is hard to think of another. In Russia we have ultra-nationalism, oligarchic corporatism, militarism, a leadership cult, militant youth movements, thuggish treatment of opponents, state-sponsored murder, homophobia, religious mysticism — together with a revanchist mindset over the country’s Cold War defeat. Anti-semitism is also there, though not as official policy or in the Kremlin.

When we speak of the Cold War we tend to think of the Soviet Union rather than China, yet the global impact of unleashing the energies and intelligence of more than a billion Chinese has been far greater than that of 140 million Russians. Some saw it coming. As early as 1927 Oswald Spengler, in Man and Technics, wrote:

And so presently the natives saw into our secrets and understood them, and used them to the full. The innumerable hands of the coloured races — at least as clever, and far less exigent — will shatter the economic organisation of the whites to its foundations.

Once the Chinese had sloughed off the Maoist incubus, nowhere has the truth of his words been more striking than in their country. As the Russians — who import not just most of their consumer goods from China but high-tech items too — will have noticed.