The World

Yeltsins and Xis, Nehruvians and Assads, Bin Ladens, Kims and Obamas

THE IDIOT AND THE CANNON: GORBACHEV, DENG AND THE UNIPOWER

As hundreds of thousands were endangered and finally evacuated from the environs of Chernobyl, Gorbachev tried to suppress the news, only announcing it almost a month later. The costs placed more pressure on the economy and on Gorbachev, who now pivoted to plan his own radical explosion. His first reforms to free the economy from Party supervision did not immediately solve his problems. In January 1987, going further than Andropov, he took an astonishing decision that was almost romantically delusional: he would not only reform the economy but set up a sort of one-party demokratizatsiya through a real election to produce a Congress of 2,250 people’s deputies that would outrank the Politburo and government. He was misunderstanding Lenin, who always asked, ‘Who controls whom?’ Lenin had commandeered, then neutered, the Soviets in order to concentrate awesome power in his own hands. Gorbachev was trying to withdraw from the empire, and reform the economy simultaneously with political liberalization, a move bound to stimulate nationalism among the many peoples in the USSR, and political disintegration in Moscow. To try all three was so ambitious as to be either naive or hubristic, almost suicidal.

Abroad, Gorbachev realized that he could not reform the state while engaged in ferocious competition with America. He proposed the phasing out of all nuclear weapons by 2000: in October 1986, he and Reagan met in Reykjavik and almost abolished nuclear weapons. The two got on well, though their wives disliked each other. Later Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would withdraw troops from eastern Europe, embracing not world revolution but ‘all-human values’. The Americans were unsure if this was real or just window dressing, but Reagan kept up the pressure. When he visited the Berlin Wall he said, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’

At home, Yeltsin trailblazed through Moscow, walking to work or taking the Metro, visiting cafés, shops and factories, handing out watches – his devoted bodyguard Korzhakov kept spares in his pocket. Gorbachev sneered at this self-promotion; Yeltsin found the general secretary ‘patronizing’. In January 1987, he criticized Gorbachev for being over-optimistic about perestroika; Gorbachev shot back at Yeltsin’s ‘loud, empty, ultra-leftist words’.

‘I’m still new in the Politburo,’ said Yeltsin apologetically. ‘This is a good lesson for me.’

‘You’re an emotional man,’ warned Gorbachev. At home Communist diehards resisted the reforms. Yeltsin pushed for more, admitting that he had begun ‘to abuse sedatives and become enamoured of alcohol’. In September 1987, when conservatives reprimanded Yeltsin for allowing small demonstrations, he suddenly resigned from the Politburo. ‘Wait, Boris,’ said Gorbachev, ‘don’t fly off the handle.’ But in October Yeltsin attacked Gorbachev at the Central Committee. Infuriated, Gorbachev denounced his ‘immaturity’ and ‘illiteracy’ – ‘You couldn’t tell God’s gift from an omelette!’ Gorbachev now hated him: ‘He wants to be the popular hero.’ Yeltsin drank and fell into wild depression, cutting his chest and stomach with scissors. ‘What a bastard!’ sneered Gorbachev. ‘He bloodied his own room.’ He had Yeltsin hospitalized, then forced him to face ritual denunciations. Yeltsin never forgave this ‘immoral, inhuman’ treatment. Accompanied only by Korzhakov, who resigned from the KGB to support him, Yeltsin retired to a sanatorium. ‘I looked inside,’ said Yeltsin, ‘there was no one there. I was only nominally alive.’

The KGB asked Gorbachev if he wanted something to happen to Yeltsin. Gorbachev declined the offer.

In February 1988, Gorbachev’s reforms loosened Moscow’s control over the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union that were never designed to become independent. In Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, Christian Armenians fought Islamic Azeris who then slaughtered thousands of Armenians. Georgians, seized by Lenin after a short independence, craved freedom. In the north, the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians – Nordic and Germanic peoples, not Slavs, who had been forcibly annexed by Stalin after twenty years of independence – started to campaign. The best way for them to win independence was to win it for all the fifteen republics created by Lenin and Stalin. Some, like Georgia, were ancient nations, others were Soviet inventions that had never existed before. Russia was the largest, followed by Ukraine, which, apart from the many regimes of the civil war, had been ruled variously by Russia since 1654, the 1780s and 1945. Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks had originally been ruled by ancient khanates, but Kazakhstan and the other four ‘stans’ of central Asia were Soviet inventions carved out of Romanov provinces. Before it was White Russia, Belarus had belonged to Lithuania.

As Gorbachev relaxed the Soviet hold over his client-states, he was also trying to negotiate a compromise exit from Afghanistan, where he installed a subtler ex-secret-police chief, Najibullah, to create a government of reconciliation, but conciliation was impossible in the midst of retreat. In May 1988, the Soviet army withdrew unilaterally and Najibullah’s regime started to wilt. A peaceful retreat was afoot in Europe: in December, Gorbachev started to withdraw 500,000 troops from his European vassals, promising ‘freedom of choice’. No empire lasts without the threat of violence.

Gorbachev was now a funambulist attempting not just one tightrope walk but four simultaneously – economic reform, challenging the Party, defending the Union and sustaining Soviet world power. In May 1989, he presided over the first elected Congress, which chose a ruling Supreme Soviet with him as its chairman. At the height of his fame and confidence, an increasingly autocratic Gorbachev hoped to guide reform as an omnipotent parliamentary speaker, but in fact this ponderous, often verbose apparatchik immediately struggled to control diehard Communists, republican nationalists and liberal intelligentsia. Worse, he lost the menacing mystique of a Stalinist general secretary; Moscow lost its power over its vassals. His humane aversion to violence was both his greatness and his tragedy for it doomed his achievements to failure. ‘They don’t know that if they pull strongly on the leash,’ he said, ‘it would snap.’ But the Poles, who had lost their ancient independence, were the first to test the leash. Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, asked Gorbachev what would happen. ‘Everyone,’ came the reply, ‘answers for themselves.’

Across Europe, in the brittle vassal-states from East Germany to Hungary, crowds demonstrated for freedom. Within the Union, Georgia and Lithuania pushed for independence. Yeltsin, on a visit to America, got publicly drunk but was astonished by the plenty in American supermarkets. On his way home, he questioned Bolshevism. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘have they done to our poor people?’

While Gorbachev was attempting to manage all these shocks, Deng Xiaoping was watching in amazement from Beijing, where he demonstrated that there was another way. Deng was tougher, more blood-soaked, more cautious than the naive Gorbachev. The economy could be liberated, but Little Cannon knew power rested on the gun. Lose the gun, lose everything. Gorbachev, said Deng, ‘is an idiot’.

In May 1989, Gorbachev’s arrival in Beijing embarrassed Deng, who was losing control of his own capital. Almost a million protesters, most of them students, were camped in Tiananmen Square, gathered around a huge papier-mâché statue, the Lady of Liberty, demanding democracy as the leadership agonized about what to do. The eighty-five-year-old Deng was still chairman of the Central Military Commission, but he was semi-retired, having handed over to chosen successors who had failed to restrain widening protests against corruption and nepotism. In April, after anti-reformers had ordered that Deng’s ally Hu Yaobang be fired, Hu died of a heart attack, sparking pro-democracy protests at his funeral. A Deng protégé, the general secretary Zhao Ziyang, went to talk to the students. After Gorbachev had left, on 17 May, Deng, convening the Party grandees nicknamed the Eight Immortals in Zhongnanhai, said he feared that ‘Their goal is to establish a totally western-dependent bourgeois republic,’ and warned, ‘There’s no way to back down now without the situation spiralling out of control.’ Little Cannon reached for his gun: troops were massed; Zhao spoke to the protesters in tears and was promptly dismissed by Deng. The Eight Immortals – all men except Zhou Enlai’s widow, Deng Yingchao – voted to crush the rebels.

On 2 June, Deng commanded that ‘order be restored to the capital … No person may impede the advance of the troops.’ The soldiers ‘can act in self-defence and use any means to clear impediments’. The ‘impediments’ were the students, who had built barricades. The army retook the streets. A soldier was killed, stripped naked and suspended from a bus, but then the army started firing. One student stood in front of a column of tanks, halted them and climbed on to the turret to denounce the soldiers. Hundreds were killed.

Appointing new leaders, Deng retired, keeping only the chairmanship of the China Bridge Association. But he remained Paramount Leader, and confirmed his policy of political power with economic freedom before he died at ninety-two. Deng had created a template for Chinese power, Gorbachev an accelerating momentum towards Soviet disintegration. Only force could stop it.

NEW AFRICA: MANDELA AND JJ, MENES AND ISAIAS

In September 1989, Poland elected a non-Communist premier; East Germans probed the borders; within the USSR, Georgians, led by a mad-eyed Shakespeare professor and former dissident, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, voted for independence as their own minorities, Ossetians and Abkhazians, fought for their own states; Armenians and Azeris clashed. At least Gorbachev’s rival, Yeltsin, was disintegrating too. On the 28th, he turned up extravagantly drunk at Gorbachev’s birthday party with a bouquet and tried to gate-crash. Bodyguards roughed him up and threw him into the Moskva River. ‘The water was terribly cold,’ said Yeltsin. ‘I collapsed and lay on the ground … I staggered to the nearby police station.’ Gorbachev’s allies claimed that Yeltsin’s mistress had thrown a bucket of water over him; his allies saw an assassination attempt. The Yeltsin threat was clearly over.

At 11.30 p.m., Berlin time, on 9 November, East German leaders, pressured by the opening of the Austria–Hungary border and then by huge demonstrations, planned quietly to open the gates in the Wall, but bungled the announcement, sparking joyous demonstrations as people suddenly poured through the gates and started to tear down the Berlin Wall with axes and bare hands. In Dresden, as crowds stormed Stasi headquarters across East Germany, an astonished KGB colonel, Vladimir Putin, aged thirty-seven, burned secret files and then started the miserable drive home to Leningrad. In Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Communists were swept away in velvet revolutions. Some were less velvety than others: on Christmas Day 1989 in Bucharest, Romania, a frightened but defiant sexagenarian couple were dragged out of the belly of an armoured personnel carrier. Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his wife Elena had ruled Romania since 1965. Now Ceaus¸escu was overthrown by his own comrades and the people in a shootout with his Securitate agents and quickly sentenced to death. Four soldiers were assigned to shoot them separately, but they insisted on dying together, singing the Internationale. They died mid-verse.

In February 1990, the US secretary of state, James Baker, discussed the reunification of Germany and the expansion of NATO. In September, Gorbachev agreed to the reunification and allowed Germany to join NATO. He could have extracted much more while he still had 300,000 troops in the country, but he needed the western loans to run his state. Now he had missed his chance. The Americans were dizzy with victory. When Gorbachev tried to lay down the parameters of Germany’s relationship with NATO, Bush (now president) told Kohl, ‘To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn’t.’ It showed a lack of imagination. Russia could have been coopted into the EU, even NATO. After all, victories do not last for ever. ‘In victory,’ advised Churchill, ‘magnanimity.’

The ‘Wall’ fell in Africa too. On 5 July 1989, Nelson Mandela, almost seventy-one, newly fitted with a suit after twenty-seven years behind bars, was driven out of prison and taken to meet Die Groot Krokodil – the South African president, P. W. Botha – at his residence Tuynhuys, where Rhodes had stayed, for a secret chat. To Mandela’s surprise, the Crocodile, who as coloured affairs and defence minister had enforced apartheid for decades, was ‘courteous and deferential’ as they discussed history. ‘Now I felt there was no turning back.’

Mandela was right: the fall of the Iron Curtain meant the end of proxy war in Africa. America and the USSR no longer supported their egregious allies, yet their downfall often destroyed the existence of their states: in Zaire – Congo – the fall of America’s long-reigning ally, Mobutu, triggered a scramble for power and for minerals that lasted for thirty years.^*

Mandela was returned to prison; Crocodile resigned in favour of a new Nationalist premier, F. W. de Klerk. On 13 December, ‘I was taken again to Tuynhuys,’ wrote Mandela, where he realized de Klerk ‘was a man we could do business with’. On 9 February 1990, de Klerk told Mandela ‘he was making me a free man’ and then poured them both a tumbler of whisky: ‘I raised the glass in toast but only pretended to drink; such spirits are too strong for me.’ The day after at 4 a.m., Mandela rose. He had befriended and charmed his Afrikaner guards, who had ‘reinforced my belief in the essential humanity even of those who kept me behind bars’. He embraced them. At 3 p.m., Mandela, joined by Winnie, walked out of the prison. ‘When a TV crew thrust a long dark furry object at me, I recoiled.’ He had never seen one. ‘Winnie explained it was a microphone.’

As he emerged to meet his ANC comrades, ‘I could see the question in their eyes: had he survived or was he broken?’ His marriage was broken: Winnie, unable to resist the strain of loneliness, the bruise of repression and the temptations of power, had had affairs and led a vicious gang terror in Soweto where her bodyguards, the Mandela United Football Club, had killed opponents, even children. ‘She married a man,’ said Mandela graciously, ‘who soon left her, became a myth,’ but then the myth came home and was ‘just a man’. It was his greatest regret: ‘When your life is a struggle, there’s little room for family.’ His children had lost their father and when he returned ‘he was father of the nation’. Mandela divorced Winnie and, at eighty, he met someone else, Graça, the widow of Machel, dictator of Mozambique, announcing, ‘I’ve fallen in love.’

Mandela embarked on a world tour, meeting his old backers Castro and Qaddafi, who had funded the ANC, and new backers, led by Harry Oppenheimer, the liberal magnate, owner of De Beers diamonds and Anglo American gold mines, who helped buy his new house. Mandela had started as a Thembu prince, become a Communist revolutionary and then developed into a humanist liberal democrat who, inspired by Gandhi and MLK, was determined to create a ‘rainbow nation’ of white and black people. Astonishingly, after forty years of vicious repression, he achieved this without any massacre or flight of whites – an achievement without parallel that was the fruit of his personality. A peace and conciliation committee listened to testimony about the repression by South African security agents – and forgave their predations. Where Gandhi had failed to achieve peaceful transition, Mandela, elected president in April 1994, succeeded.

Soviet allies fell too: in Ethiopia in 1984–5, Mengistu’s atrocities, along with a drought, had caused a famine that affected over seven million people. He deliberately restricted food supplies to Tigray and Wollo, where resistance to his rule was most effective. Over a million died. Now in May 1991 Mengistu, abandoned by Gorbachev, fled into exile, leaving a civil war that was swiftly won by an alliance of ethnic rebels led by the Tigrayan Meles, who had rejected Hoxhaite Marxism and formed an alliance with the Eritrean Maoist Isaias Afwerki, which captured Addis. Meles embraced the zeitgeist, promising liberal democracy but ruling as autocrat for twenty years. He soon fell out with the demented Isaias, who converted Eritrea, an independent state for the first time, into a regimented personal domain, in which the entire population were conscripted and terrorized by secret police, a system the UN called a form of slavery: Afwerki ruled into the 2020s. After Meles’s death, the Tigrayans lost power to an Oromo, and the country again dissolved into ethnic fighting.

There was only one Mandela, but another gifted African leader, much less well known outside the continent, rescued his country after almost destroying it. JJ Rawlings, ruling from the Castle for a decade, was the dictator who in 1979 had shot his generals on the beach in front of the press. Now he reacted to the fall of the Wall. Economically he took advice from the World Bank, while politically he fostered a liberal democracy. The showman Rawlings, sporting fancy suits or traditional robes, founded his own political party and ran for president. On 3 November 1992, he won a free election with 60 per cent of the vote, winning a second term in 1996. Succession is the test, but when he had served his permitted two terms he retired at fifty-four, leaving Ghana as a thriving democracy and economic force – one of the successes of Africa. ‘At the risk of sounding immodest,’ reflected Rawlings, ‘Ghana wouldn’t have been brought out of the abyss without a visionary’ – a very flawed one for sure.

In Russia, the fall of Communism was also the work of a visionary – but it wasn’t Gorbachev. In March 1990, Gorbachev’s election to a post, the presidency of the USSR, sparked a cascade of new aspirations in the most surprising places: in Alma Ata, a former steelworker, now first secretary, Nursultan Nazarbayev,^* had himself elected president of the Kazakh republic. ‘I thought we’d agreed there’s only to be one president,’ said Gorbachev.

‘People in Kazakhstan,’ explained Nazarbayev, one of the key movers in what happened next, ‘say can’t we have a president too?’

Nazarbayev switched patrons, following the flux of power to a different source. On 29 May 1990, Yeltsin was elected chairman of Russia’s Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev could not understand it: ‘Here and abroad he drinks like a fish. Every Monday his face doubles in size. He’s inarticulate … but again and again the people keep repeating “He’s our man” and forgive him everything.’ On 12 July, Yeltsin stormed out of a Communist Congress, resigned from the Party and then claimed sovereignty in Russia. Hated by Communist diehards and despised by frustrated liberals, undermined by a collapsing economy and raging nationalism, Gorbachev saw his power wither as he ranted about the ‘scoundrel’ Yeltsin: personalities matter and their rivalry helped destroy the state. In August, Gorbachev negotiated the price of German reunification in return for billions of dollars in loans to the USSR which, grumbled Gorbachev, were instantly stolen: ‘It’s just gone.’ President Bush was delighted that ‘The day of the dictator is over, the totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree,’^* but he was alarmed by Soviet turbulence. Now the adventure of a real suicidal nationalist – Moscow’s closest Arab ally – would further undermine Gorbachev.

On 2 August 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait. He counted himself the victor of the war against Iran, in which the ageing Khomeini had finally agreed to a ceasefire. ‘Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light,’ said the ayatollah. ‘Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice.’ He brought with him to Teheran Ebrahim Raisi, a young mullah who had studied under his deputy Khamenei, and heading the ‘death committee’ personally tortured and oversaw the executions of thousands of opposition activists. When the imam died at eighty-six, his funeral ranked with Nasser’s as the largest ever: millions of frenzied mourners overran the cortège, knocking the flimsily wrapped body to the ground, tearing the shroud to shreds and leaping into the grave, until guards fired overhead and rescued the body by helicopter to be buried later in the day. Yet his creation proved stronger: his henchman, President Ali Khamenei, was chosen as Supreme Leader,^* and ruled for thirty years during which Iran achieved power greater than that of the shah.

Saddam, with a bloated army, mountainous debts, a rapacious family and a splintered country, also sought extreme solutions. At home, he liquidated 180,000 Kurds and Assyrians in Anfal who had assisted the Iranians, slaughtering civilians, using chemical weapons, while he procured nuclear weapons with French help. In 1981, Israel bombed his facility; when he hired a Canadian gunmaker to build a supergun, Big Babylon, Mossad assassinated him.

Saddam struggled to control his sons and cousins. His pimp and food taster, Hana Gegeo, son of his chef and his daughters’ governess, introduced him to a blonde doctor Samira, who became his mistress and then his wife, which naturally made enemies of his first wife Sajida and her sons. His trusted half-brothers wanted their sons to marry Saddam’s daughters but in the mid-1980s his rising young cousins Hussein and Saddam Kamel won the girls, Raghad and Rana. A boy who flirted with his favourite daughter Hala was killed.

Even Saddam was unable to manage his eldest son, Uday, whom he had appointed to run the Olympic Committee and the Football Association, clearly heir apparent. Yet this Caligularian psychopath with a speech impediment regularly beat up men and raped women. In 1988, he burst into a party given for the wife of the Egyptian president Mubarak and beat Gegeo to death with an iron bar. Afterwards he tried to kill himself, then, summoned by Saddam, told his father, ‘Stay with your real wife.’ Infuriated, Saddam almost killed him: he ‘was lucky I was unarmed’. An attempt to flee to America was foiled by his brothers-in-law, the Kamel brothers, igniting a feud that would end in bloodshed. Saddam exiled Uday to Switzerland and switched his favour to the less demented Qusay, who ran the SSO secret police.

Now Saddam was broke. Kuwait had lent him $30 billion and wanted it back. Tiny Kuwait had the same 20 per cent share of world oil as Iraq. Saddam claimed it as part of the old Ottoman vilayet of Basra. He probed America: ‘We’ve no opinion on Arab–Arab conflicts,’ the US ambassador told him, mistakenly greenlighting his plan, ‘like your border disagreement with Kuwait.’ Saddam’s 120,000 Iraqi troops and 850 tanks rolled into Kuwait. The amir fled; his brother was shot, then gleefully pulped by one of Saddam’s tanks. Unleashing Uday, back from exile, and the ravening Tikriti clan in a looting frenzy, Saddam annexed Kuwait.

Gorbachev was infuriated and sent his spymaster Primakov to restrain Saddam, but the Iraqi leader threatened the foundation of the west – oil – not to speak of international law. Bush vacillated; ‘This is no time to go wobbly,’ Thatcher told him. Bush won a UN resolution and recruited an unprecedented coalition, from Thatcher^* to Assad, which mustered in Saudi Arabia. Saddam had achieved the impossible: uniting most of the fissiparous Arab world against himself. Only Arafat – and a reluctant King Hussein – backed him.

On 17 January 1991, Bush launched the first bombardments of Desert Storm, encouraging Iraqis to rebel against Saddam. Saddam fired Scud missiles at Israel before invading Arabia, temporarily taking the town of Khafji. In the first video war, watched live on the new twenty-four-hour news channel CNN, Bush’s grand army of 956,600 troops used overwhelming air and land power to rout the Iraqis, incinerating entire divisions of tanks and trucks while Kurds, Shiites and Marsh Arabs all rebelled. But once Kuwait had been liberated, Bush, wary of entanglement, halted the invasion, leaving Saddam in power in central Iraq with all destructive weapons banned. Saddam had grossly miscalculated but, after two decades of terror, his camarilla remained loyal, even more concentrated on his family. His negotiators won American permission for Iraqi forces to fly helicopters, which they then used to slaughter the rebels. Just 292 coalition troops had been killed compared to 85,000 Iraqis. American apogee coincided with Soviet perigee.

At 4.30 p.m. on 18 August 1991, Gorbachev, on holiday at his Foros dacha in Crimea, was interrupted by his bodyguard: a mysterious delegation had arrived. Gorbachev found his phone lines had been cut. ‘Something bad has happened,’ he told Raisa. ‘Perhaps terrible.’ It was a coup: the State Committee on Emergency Rule, led by the KGB boss and defence minister, had seized power to stop the rolling disintegration of the USSR. In December 1990, Shevardnadze had resigned, warning of a coup. Lithuania had been the first to declare independence, followed by Estonia and Latvia, but Gorbachev himself had lost control since 13 January when his Spetsnaz commandos had shot civilians at a TV station in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, a crime that only consolidated its defiance. In March, Gorbachev had won a referendum to create his new Union of Sovereign States. Nazarbayev agreed to be its first premier. But the same month, Georgia embraced freedom. On 10 July, Yeltsin was democratically elected president of Russia, a legitimacy that the unelected Gorbachev could not equal. Then Ukraine delayed agreeing to the new Union. On 1 August, President Bush tried to save the USSR, visiting Kyiv to warn Ukraine against ‘suicidal nationalism’.^* Gorbachev, himself half Ukrainian, desperately tried to keep Ukraine within his new Union, warning that Ukraine would be too unstable to survive as a state and telling Bush it existed as a republic only because Ukrainian Bolsheviks had crafted it to increase their own power and ‘added Kharkiv and Donbas’. Stalin had organized the actual borders. Crimea was added by Khrushchev. Those Russian regions, Gorbachev explained, would undermine any independent Ukraine.^*

Now at his villa, Gorbachev asked the group who had sent them.

‘The Committee.’

‘What committee?’

When they started to explain the Committee’s aims, Gorbachev shouted, ‘Shut up, you asshole. Scumbag!’ KGB forces had surrounded the mansion; ships on the Black Sea trained their guns. Raisa Gorbachev suffered a minor stroke. Unbeknown to the Gorbachevs, the Committee had made a series of unforced errors in Moscow. First they had planned to arrest Yeltsin and had surrounded his dacha, but he escaped to the Russian Supreme Soviet – nicknamed the White House – where he was joined by several military units. Then the conspirators held a farcical press conference at which at least two of them were drunk. The White House was defended by crowds of people and Yeltsin’s units. Yeltsin then appeared and climbed defiantly on to a tank. The conspirators rushed to Crimea to beg forgiveness, while Yeltsin sent his own units to rescue Gorbachev. After arresting the conspirators, Gorbachev phoned Yeltsin. ‘So you’re alive,’ boomed Yeltsin. ‘We’ve been ready to fight for you!’ Two conspirators killed themselves. When Gorbachev arrived back in Moscow, his power had haemorrhaged and he resigned as general secretary on 24 August. At the Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin launched his own coup, humiliating Gorbachev at the rostrum and forcing him to admit that his own ministers had backed the coup.

On 1 December, Ukraine voted for independence. Yeltsin tried to make it stay inside his new version of the Union but failed; Ukraine’s secession was decisive. On the 8th, at a Belarusian Belavezha hunting lodge, beloved of tsars and general secretaries, Yeltsin secretly met the Ukrainian and Belarusian leaders and pulled off their own coup to end the USSR. Nazarbayev and the Central Asians joined them in a new Commonwealth of Independent States.

‘Who gave you the authority?’ shouted Gorbachev. ‘Why didn’t you warn me? … And once Bush finds out, what then?’ But Yeltsin had already called Bush. On 9 December, Gorbachev received Yeltsin and the Kazakh president Nazarbayev.

‘OK, sit down,’ Gorbachev told them. ‘What are you going to say to the people tomorrow?’

‘I’m going to say,’ replied Yeltsin, ‘I’m going to take your place.’

Afterwards Nazarbayev claimed he ‘wished I hadn’t been there’, but now he became dictator of a vast new state, Kazakhstan, so absolute that he ruled for thirty years, acclaimed himself Leader of the Nation and named the capital Nursultan.

At 5 p.m., on Christmas Day, Gorbachev rang Bush. ‘Hello, Mikhail,’ said Bush, at Camp David with his family.

‘George, my dear friend,’ said Gorbachev. ‘I finally decided to do it today, at the end of the day.’ He meant his resignation. ‘The debate in our union on what kind of state to create took a different track from what I thought right.’ This was one of history’s great understatements.

At 7 p.m., as Gorbachev addressed the nation, a general arrived to collect the nuclear briefcase and delivered it to Yeltsin. Afterwards Gorbachev told his aides he was going to ring his old mother who ‘has been saying to me for ages “Throw it all over. Come home”’. Gorbachev took his mother’s advice. Down the Kremlin corridors, Yeltsin searched Gorbachev’s office – the Little Corner, once occupied by Lenin, Stalin and Andropov – then demanded, ‘Bring us glasses.’ He and Korzhakov downed their whiskies. ‘Now,’ growled Yeltsin, president of the new Russian Federation, ‘that’s better.’

THE FAMILIA: BORIS, TATIANA AND RASPUTIN

Yeltsin, advised by a cohort of young reformers, banned Communism, opened many archives, pell-mell converted the command economy to free-market capitalism and launched a privatization programme. But almost immediately the economy crashed, Mafia criminals ran amok and the privatizations were fatally rushed and corrupted as a well-connected plutocracy of ex-Communists and self-made robber barons, together known as the oligarchs, bought oil companies for a fraction of their true value. Yeltsin, who combined the liberal instincts of a democrat with the habits of a drunken tsar, revealed the crimes of Stalin and encouraged exposés of history, yet he never dispensed with the security services. Instead of dissolving the KGB, he divided it into two new agencies. Meanwhile he played two entourages off against each other: on one hand, he championed his young westernized reformers; on other hand, he spent time with his swaggering, hard-drinking security chieftain, Korzhakov, now a general.

As Yeltsin took power in Moscow, Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, was metamorphosing into a Georgian leader. In May 1991, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who had been persecuted by Shevardnadze when he was Soviet proconsul there in the 1970s, was elected president by 86.5 per cent in a free election, promising to end all Russian interference. But within weeks Gamsakhurdia, manic, hollow-eyed and neurotic, managed to offend liberals with his despotism, Moscow with his Russophobia and ethnic minorities with his chauvinistic ‘Georgia for Georgians’. By September the president was a lonely Shakespearean figure besieged in his palace. ‘I’m the victim of the infernal, diabolic machinations of the Kremlin,’ he told this author in his office. ‘If Shevardnadze ever returns, we’ll shoot him like a poodle.’ Yet the rebels now surrounded the palace. ‘Yes, I’m like a king in a Shakespearean play.’ Henry V became first King Lear, then Richard II.

His chief enemy was an even more extraordinary personality, a former gangster boss, GULAG prisoner and playwright, Jaba Ioseliani, who during Stalin’s reign had raided a bank. He now formed a private army, Mkhedrioni (the Knights), to defend Georgian territory and overthrow Gamsakhurdia. In December, Ioseliani, the kind of maverick who thrives in the chaos of fallen empires, drove out Gamsakhurdia and formed a State Council that invited Shevardnadze to return. The Grey Fox, once a world arbiter with Bush and Gorbachev, now became an embattled patriot in a tiny, impoverished state in disarray where he was backed by a warlord who had been in jail when he sat in the Politburo. Shevardnadze swallowed his pride. Watching Jaba and his entourage swagger by, he smiled grimly: ‘How I miss Thatcher and Bush now.’

Spasms of killing inspired by medieval dreams of lost empires demonstrated what could happen when neither empires nor superpowers balanced the world. Yugoslavia was shattered by its feuding nationalities, incited to confrontation by vindictive nationalists, leading first to a war between Serbia and Croatia, then to a Serbian campaign to exterminate Bosnian Muslims, complete with concentration camps, mass rapes and massacres. After three and half years of war, in November 1995, Bill Clinton orchestrated a peace deal at Dayton, Ohio, that formed a tortuously complex multi-ethnic Bosnian state, but the Serbs switched to crushing Kosovan Albanians until March 1999, when Clinton unleashed NATO airstrikes that forced Serbian withdrawal and further infuriated Russia.

In Africa, no one intervened. In April 1994, Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda launched a carefully planned slaughter of their Tutsi neighbours, aiming to annihilate them completely. The colonial powers, Germany and Belgium, had long favoured the Tutsi, stirring Hutu resentment that led to massacres just before the country became independent. But France, always keen to promote Françafrique, adopted Rwanda as a sort of colonial foster child, backing the Hutu leadership and training its militias. When the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by a gangly general named Paul Kagame, rebelled, France regarded this as a British-backed challenge to Françafrique. Although Paris did not abet the coming slaughter, it had certainly done nothing to restrain it. When the Rwandan president was shot down by the RPF, Hutus embarked on genocide, killing, often with machetes, over 500,000 Tutsi in a few days. France intervened only partially and very late before the RPF invaded from the Uganda–Congo borderlands and installed Kagame as dictator. The ambitions of Rwanda and Uganda now blew back to support Congo’s own warlords and elite in a continental blood bath, Congo’s Great African War an atrocious struggle for minerals and power.^* Neither European powers nor western intelligentsia showed much interest as the catastrophe killed around 5.4 million.

Back in Moscow, Yeltsin was challenged by a new breed of authoritarian ultra-nationalists in the Russian Supreme Soviet, who defied him from a fortified White House and criticized his pro-American free-market liberalism that had sent the economy into freefall – GDP dropped by 50 per cent; law and order collapsed, with Mafiosi openly assassinating their enemies and infiltrating business. As the White House voted to depose Yeltsin, its forces occupied the TV station at Ostankino and built barricades in the streets; Moscow emptied. Yeltsin’s security chief Korzhakov advised sending in the tanks. ‘Fascist–Communist armed rebellion in Moscow,’ warned Yeltsin, ‘will be suppressed.’ On 3 October 1993, his commandos seized the TV station; the fighting raged all night. Yeltsin’s tanks fired on the White House (watched in person by this author), as it was stormed by his commandos. The autocratic Yeltsin won out: ‘Russia needs order.’

Yeltsin was determined to hold together the Russian Federation,^* itself a honeycomb of ethnic republics. Its most contumacious people were the Islamic Chechens, deported to Siberia by Stalin in 1944. Now, led by an ex-Soviet air force general, this warrior people, controlled by clans and warlords, claimed a messy independence. Yeltsin surrounded Grozny, a feverish city where this author watched posses of militiamen cavort in surreal uniforms, some wearing spangled holsters, as they waited for the Russian assault. In December 1994, Yeltsin ordered the killing of the Chechen leaders by a car bomb to be followed by the storming of Grozny; his defence minister, Grachev, promised to take it in ‘two hours with one airborne regiment’. Instead Russian troops were savaged by the Chechens, who ultimately retook the city. In 1996, Yeltsin was humiliatingly forced to withdraw.

By June that year, Yeltsin, drinking and sick with arteriosclerosis, was facing an election that the resurgent Communists were likely to win. General Korzhakov, who boasted that he had ‘governed the country for three years’, advised cancelling the elections. But Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana, a thirty-six-year-old engineer who had worked in the Soviet space industry, took control, calling in the oligarchs. These were led by a Jewish mathematician and engineer, Boris Berezovsky, who had made billions taking over AvtoVAZ car factories and Siberian oil companies. He had won the family’s trust organizing the publication of Yeltsin’s memoirs. Now he became Yeltsin’s ‘grey cardinal’, nicknamed Rasputin. ‘In history many times,’ he told this author, ‘financiers influenced states: aren’t we like the Medici?’ Even more trusted – and discreet – was Berezovsky’s quiet young protégé, Roman Abramovich. Tatiana had left her husband for Yeltsin’s ghostwriter, Valentin Yumachev, whom she later married. He was soon promoted to Yeltsin’s chief of staff, forming this court around the president – the Familia.

It was not the only family in power. On 21 January 1994, Bassel al-Assad, heir to the presidency of Syria, accompanied by his first cousin Hafez Makhlouf, Republican Guard officer, was speeding to the airport in his Mercedes on the way to a ski holiday when he lost control.

KNIGHTS OF DAMASCUS, MARXIST MONSTER MOVIES AND KINGS OF DATA: IPHONES AND DAGGERS

Bassel was short, bearded, athletic and rugged, a winner of equestrian tournaments, friends with King Hussein’s equestrienne daughter, an enthusiast for guns, sports cars and Lebanese girls. Trained in Russia, now commander of the Presidential Security, he was the beloved favourite of his father, Hafez al-Assad, whom he advised on Lebanon. The president portrayed him as the young Saladin, the Golden Knight, on horseback fighting Crusaders and Zionists. His companion in the car was also at the heart of the dynasty: Makhlouf’s aunt was Anisa Assad, the first lady, his brother Rami already emerging as the family’s business fixer.

Ailing with diabetes and arteriosclerosis, Assad based his dynasty on his alliance with Iran, which would protect him from his rival Saddam. But he was infuriated by the emergence of secret talks between Rabin, now Israeli prime minister, and Arafat, PLO chairman.

As successive US presidents, starting with Carter, tried to nurture peace, Israel had refused to negotiate with the terrorist organization for over twenty years. Now Rabin allowed his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to start secret negotiations. The two – laconic Rabin, visionary Peres – hated each other. Peres orchestrated secret conversations in Oslo between an Israeli academic and a Palestinian official that developed into Israeli recognition of the PLO and vice versa, establishing a Palestinian Authority, the first step towards a state, and the sharing of Jerusalem. ‘I said peace first, then the details,’ Peres recalled. ‘Peace is like love: first you have to trust.’ To Assad this was betrayal, but for King Hussein, who had managed to appease his menacing Arab neighbours Saddam and Assad while secretly meeting with Rabin for decades, it was an opportunity: Hussein joined the process. On 13 September 1993, at the White House, Rabin and Arafat, accompanied by King Hussein, hosted by Clinton, signed the peace accords. A month later Hussein and Rabin signed their own treaty.

Watching this in Damascus, Assad ordered the assassination of King Hussein. He was not the only one reaching for his pistol. On 4 November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish zealot. The killing started the disintegration of the Oslo Accords, exacerbated by Israeli nationalists and Palestinian extremists. When Rabin’s successors offered a division of Jerusalem, Arafat rejected it. The two-state solution – the only hope for peace – remained frozen. ‘We’re not ashamed, nor are we afraid,’ said Hussein at Rabin’s funeral in Jerusalem, ‘nor are we anything but determined to continue the legacy for which my friend fell, as did my grandfather in this very city when I was with him – and but a boy.’ Hussein, warned by the CIA, avoided Assad’s assassins, but secretly he was suffering from cancer. His brother Hassan was crown prince, but he started to groom his eldest son, Abdullah.

In Damascus, Bassel al-Assad was killed in that car crash, his cousin wounded. Hafez ordered mourning for the ‘Martyr of the Nation’. Three children were left: the youngest, Maher, was a stocky trigger-happy officer with anger-management issues; the second youngest Madj had mental problems; and a middle brother, Bashar, was a doctor living in London under an assumed name. Anisa favoured Maher, but Assad summoned the twenty-eight-year-old Bashar, tall, lanky, chinless with a lisp and a liking for Phil Collins music – an unlikely candidate for dictator. He had become an ophthalmic surgeon because he hated blood, yet he was about to unleash a level of butchery even his father had never contemplated.

The Communist rulers who survived were those who combined dynasty with ideology. The Castro brothers endured in Cuba. In North Korea, Kim Il-sung curated his succession. On 8 July 1994, when Kim died aged eighty-two, he was not only embalmed^* but also declared the immortal Eternal President, while his carefully laid plan for a hereditary Marxist dynasty smoothly raised his son, Kim Jong-il, to the throne. Born in Russia, named Yuri – the family called him Yura – he had been educated in China during the Korean War (sometimes holidaying secretly in Malta), while starting his rise quietly in the Party apparat, until 1980 when his father promoted him to Dear Leader and Supreme Commander.

Sporting a bouffant quiff and Stalinka tunics, Kim had been raised as a princeling, favouring Scotch whiskies, lobsters and sushi, but he was a shrewd power broker, learning from his father the essential rules of Kimite dynasty – survival depended on playing off the superpowers, promoting the family and liquidating any opposition. His two obsessions were western films and nuclear weapons. Father and son regarded themselves as being at perpetual war with South Korea and the capitalist states, and kidnapped over 3,000 citizens from South Korea and even Japan. Having started in the Agitprop department, Jong-il craved a sophisticated film industry. In 1978, he orchestrated the kidnapping from Hong Kong of Choi Eun-hee, the beautiful actress ex-wife of the leading South Korean film director Shin Sangok; when he was lured to Hong Kong to find her, he too was kidnapped. After two years of indoctrination, they were taken to meet Kim, who showed them his collection of 15,000 movies, ordered them to remarry and produced their Marxist monster movie Pulgasari.

As for any monarch, the biology of succession was unremitting. Kim had first had a daughter in an arranged marriage, but while supervising North Korean films and theatre he naturally had access to a harem of official entertainers known as Kippumjo, the Joy Squad, said to be divided into Satisfaction, Happiness and Entertainment divisions for sex, wellbeing and dancing, according to Kenji Fujimoto, Kim’s sushi chef and companion. A film star, married to someone else, gave birth to his first son Kim Jong-nam – but without the father’s all-important blessing. Around 1972, he started an affair with a dancer Ko Yong-hui, who bore him three children, two sons – the second named Kim Jong-un – and a daughter Kim Yo-jong, who became his official family.

While maintaining a state with a million-strong military and 200,000 political prisoners, father and son sought the Bomb, but their Soviet and Chinese allies refused to help. The Kims scoured the world for technology to upgrade uranium and develop weapons, opening negotiations with Pakistan, which was trying to catch up with India. Pakistan’s nuclear mastermind, A. Q. Khan – nicknamed Centrifuge Khan – handed over the technology during the 1980s when Benazir Bhutto, daughter of the executed premier of the 1970s, heiress of another south Asia family dynasty, was elected prime minister. First promoted by Benazir’s father, A. Q. Khan had embarked on history’s greatest criminal enterprise: the sale of Pakistani nuclear technology. He travelled the world to eighteen countries. Saddam was interested; in Iran, Syria and Libya, Khamenei, Assad and Qaddafi bought it. Khan delivered the Libyan package emblazoned ‘Good Look Fabrics’, disguised as a suit from an Islamabad tailor. When Kim bought it, Benazir Bhutto supposedly delivered it personally.

When America discovered the existence of North Korea’s nuclear programme, Kim, whom American diplomats remembered as genial and masterful, conducted negotiations to squeeze maximum benefits for his dwindling economy while secretly procuring the Bomb. At the same time, he reviewed his sons for their suitability for the succession: the oldest was not of his official family; the second was too weak; but his third son, Kim Jong-un, nicknamed ‘Jong Unny’, whom he had sent to a Swiss school, was just like him.

In Moscow, reformers, oligarchs and the Familia feared that Yeltsin, fuddled and soused, was about to lose the election to the Communists: a heart attack had rendered him almost gaga. But Berezovsky raised $140 million and commandeered the TV stations to ensure that he was re-elected. The Familia fought Korzhakov for power: Lenin and Stalin had commandeered the criminal underworld for their murderous secret police; courtiers and oligarchs now threatened to kill each other. A bomb beheaded Berezovsky’s driver. ‘After the attempt on Berezovsky’s life,’ recalled Korzhakov, ‘he always wanted to kill someone in return … telling me so calmly, as if I was the guy killing everyone.’

Yeltsin’s Familia dismissed the overmighty bodyguard; the half-alive Yeltsin won the 1996 election. But in August Chechen warlords infiltrated Grozny and retook the city, expelling the Russian army. Yeltsin underwent quintuple coronary surgery. The Familia then ruled the floundering state.

America thrived as the unipower. The elation of Cold War victory dizzied American and European potentates; America and its system, liberal democracy, had triumphed. Success begets success: in Africa and south America, countries became US-style democracies. It was hard not to watch Russian implosion with a certain smugness.^*

On 21 March 1997, Yeltsin, meeting Clinton in Helsinki, agreed that NATO could expand into the former Soviet empire, in return for $4 billion, but he warned that it was ‘a mistake, a serious one’ and ‘a sort of bribe’. Clinton himself could not believe what Russia was conceding – and nor could many Russians. It was just the start of a blistering humiliation. It was not magnanimous of the US but, worse, it lacked foresight. America encouraged Yeltsin’s reforms, but it could have offered a Marshall Plan to ease Russia’s transformation and find a way to invite Russia into the western system. It was not just America’s fault: Russian grandees still thought of Russia in terms of empire and autocracy. Moreover, America brushed aside Yeltsin’s protests to bomb Russia’s ally Serbia. Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary joined the European Union and NATO, as did the three ex-Soviet republics on the Baltic. Ukraine and Georgia were next to apply.^* Marxism had been defeated, Russia broken, and China was far behind. It looked as if the Leninist empire had fallen bloodlessly; in fact the fall of the USSR would extend over thirty years – and be far from bloodless: Russian resentment was felt viscerally by an ex-Chekist fallen, like his motherland, on hard times.

‘We lived like everyone, but sometimes I had to earn extra money,’ recalled an KGB colonel struggling to survive, ‘as a taxi driver. It’s not pleasant to speak about.’ The taxi driver was Vladimir Putin, now unemployed in St Petersburg. ‘What’s the collapse of the Soviet Union?’ he said. ‘It’s the collapse of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union.’^* As such it was ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century’.

In March 1997, the Familia summoned Putin to Moscow. Putin, then aged forty-four, had attached himself to the liberal, if venal, mayor of Petersburg, becoming his omnipresent fixer and deputy. Revealingly his first TV interview highlighted his KGB past and played the Stierlitz theme tune. When the mayor lost an election, Putin was offered a minor job in the presidential apparat in Moscow. But just a year later, he was appointed deputy chief of the presidential staff at the time of Russia’s deepest humiliation and America’s triumph.

It was bizarre moment. Russia was stumbling; Yeltsin fired one premier after another; gangsters killed their rivals; oligarchs strutted; the Chechens were defiant. Yet Yeltsin, half visionary liberal, half clumsy autocrat, understood the lessons of history. ‘We are all guilty,’ he said on 17 July 1998 as he presided over the burial of the skeletons of the murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his family in the Romanov crypt in Petersburg, but ‘the bitter lesson is that any attempts to change life by violence are doomed’. Now he considered his legacy: ‘We must finish this century, which has become the century of blood and lawlessness for Russia, with repentance and reconciliation’ but also strength. The Familia sought an heir.

Many claimed to have invented that heir. Berezovsky insisted he had first noticed Putin, but it was Yumashev who spotted him. In July 1998, they appointed this unknown as chief of the FSB, successor of the KGB. Swollen, dazed, yet imperious and mysterious, Yeltsin could not stop his authority from disintegrating; the opposition was preparing impeachment as the prosecutor-general investigated Familia corruption. In April 1999, Putin unveiled a grainy video of the prosecutor-general, paunchy and naked, cavorting flabbily with two prostitutes. The prosecutor-general was dismissed. Tatiana and Yumashev, guided by Abramovich, were impressed with Putin, young, tough, inscrutable. They made him an extraordinary offer – to be president, provided the Familia would not be prosecuted. ‘How will I keep my wife and children safe?’ Putin asked – he had two daughters. The Familia explained that the Kremlin would keep him safe. But how would he win? A short, victorious war.

On 9 August 1999, Yeltsin suddenly appointed Putin as premier. ‘I wasn’t just offering a promotion,’ recalled Yeltsin. ‘I wanted to hand him the Cap of Monomachos’ – the tsar’s crown.^* In October, Putin invaded Chechnya, delighting Russians with his gangsterish swagger: ‘We’ll follow the terrorists everywhere; if we find them on the toilet, excuse me, yes, we’ll kill them in the crapper.’ Russia fought an unrestrained war against terrorists, and also against civilians, who were tortured, vanished and murdered at will. The army was a brutal, clumsy tool: Russian generals, said Putin admiringly, ‘don’t chew snot’. Yeltsin told Putin he was going to appoint him acting president. ‘I’m not ready,’ replied Putin. ‘It’s a difficult destiny.’ Yeltsin was determined. ‘I agree,’ said Putin finally, remarking, ‘It would be stupid to say, “No, I’d rather sell sunflower seeds.”’

‘Today I want to ask your forgiveness, because many of our hopes have not come true,’ said Yeltsin, on New Year’s Eve, 1999. ‘I am standing down … The country has a strong man, fit to be president.’ He named this mysterious person as acting president.

The first decree Putin signed was entitled ‘On guarantees for the former president and his family’.

On 26 March 2000, Putin won the presidency. Yeltsin showed him into Stalin’s old office: ‘It’s your office now, Vladimir.’ The Familia believed they would control this ‘accidental’ president. Yet Putin brought the focus and tactics of a judo blackbelt to the Kremlin. ‘I toil,’ he said, ‘like a galley slave.’ Proud to sit in Stalin’s office, he invited visitors to open books from the former general secretary’s library kept in the Little Corner. Absolute power crafts a new character. Initially awkward and clumsy, he quickly developed the ferocious vigilance needed to thrive in the Kremlin, his relish in deploying targeted violence and military hardware scarcely tempered by gallows humour. Revelling in his machismo, he posed bare-chested and gun-toting, cradling tigers and stalking bears. Questioned about his ruthless reputation, he joked, ‘There’s no one to talk to since Mahatma Gandhi died’ – and on his birthday his courtiers gave him a bust of Gandhi. His favourite saying was, ‘It’s like shearing a piglet – too much squealing, too little wool.’

Putin swept the Familia aside and restored the power of the state, controlled elections, emasculated the Duma (parliament), broke the press and promoted a mix of liberals and KGB veterans. ‘The government’s undercover FSB team has completed its first assignment,’ he joked to a gathering of secret policemen, often adding, ‘There’s no such thing as an ex-KGB man.’

He ‘pacified’ Chechnya, appointing a murderous princeling, the twenty-nine-year-old Ramzan Kadyrov, as ruler. Kadyrov became his loyalest courtier, vying with his secret police to be his most lethal grandee.^* Putin then turned on the oligarchs, inviting them to Stalin’s mansion, to warn them against meddling in politics. When they disobeyed, they were broken: one was arrested and sent to a labour camp. Berezovsky, outraged that his puppet had seized the sceptre, was driven out of Russia. Putin ordered his security forces to liquidate traitors: ‘Enemies are right in front of you, you fight, you make peace, everything’s clear. But a traitor must be destroyed’ – even in England: Berezovsky died mysteriously – found hanged in his Surrey mansion; his associate ex-KGB Colonel Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium. ‘I don’t know who killed him but he was a traitor,’ said Putin. ‘It wasn’t us, but a dog’s death for a dog.’ In the former imperium, he was determined to restore not the USSR – he was appalled by Lenin’s creation of a Ukrainian Soviet republic out of Russian national lands – but its traditional empire. Russia, he believed, was a ‘unique civilization’, the mother of all Russias, and he espoused autocracy and an ethno-nationalism, envisioning an exceptionalist Orthodox Russian World, a Eurasian successor to Kyivan Rus and the Romanov empire, superior to the west, channelling the ideas of Slavophiles and White philosophers in the Russian civil war. As the other ex-Soviet republics developed their identities as nations, Russia, created as an empire, found no other vision of itself – except it was now an empire with a grievance.

Putin denounced American paramountcy. ‘What’s a unipolar world?’ he asked. ‘It’s a world where there’s one master. And that’s pernicious not only for all those within this system but for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.’

In November 2000, as Putin orchestrated the crushing of Chechen resistance, the Americans – after a near draw that led to a legal standoff – elected another inexperienced leader in his forties. While Putin grew up feral on a Leningrad housing estate, George W. Bush was sailing yachts at his family compound Kennebunkport.

Son of a president, grandson of a senator, a Yalie aristocratic fratboy who had remade himself as a swaggering Texan, making money in oil, owning the Texas Rangers baseball team, he won the presidency on his first attempt. The two Bush presidents – father and son, along with Clinton – presided over the climax of the American century. Simultaneously, US entrepreneurs spearheaded technical advances that dovetailed with America’s global vision – and the globalized economy that it dominated.

‘For the past thirty-three years,’ said Steve Jobs, in remission from cancer and looking back on his life while talking to students in 2005, ‘I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”’ Jobs had changed the world: ‘Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds.’ Intolerant and intolerable, unkind and often cruel, Jobs believed creativity was about following your instincts – ‘connecting the dots’. Jobs was the son of two teachers – a Syrian and his Swiss lover – but ‘my biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption’ – and he was adopted by an American coastguard. As a schoolboy he worked at the business-machine company Hewlett Packard, later travelled to India, embraced Zen Buddhism, dropped out of college (to take a calligraphy course), then at twenty founded a company in his parents’ garage, where he started to design the first consumer computer. He called it Apple.

The idea of computers was not new.^* Their development made inevitable the arrival of smartphones and computers facile and small enough to be used by ordinary people, but it took forty years to happen. In 1959, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor invented a single piece – a monolithic integrated circuit, a chip – that made the revolution possible just at the same time as Paul Baran was developing his messaging network to function after a nuclear apocalypse. In 1968, Alan Kay at Xerox predicted a ‘personal, portable information manipulator’ that he called a Dynabook, just as the first active-matrix liquid-crystal display was developed. In 1975 IBM created its first portable device, the same year that a Seattle lawyer’s son, Bill Gates, dropped out of Harvard to develop a system of instruction for computers to use – software – bought by IBM. Five years later, Gates launched a more sophisticated system, Windows.

In 1974, the Pentagon’s ARPA communications, designed to connect the leadership after nuclear war, had been extended into academia by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who called it the inter-network – internet. In 1980 ARPANET was closed, but the European nuclear research organization CERN started to use the system, which in 1989 inspired a thirty-four-year-old mathematics professor there, Tim Berners-Lee: ‘I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain system idea and – ta-da! – the World Wide Web.’ Like Edison or Watt before him, he did not claim to have invented it: ‘Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multi-font text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together.’ He invented a system of addresses – //www – that became so universal the internet almost became a groove of the human brain. ‘I never foresaw how big the Net would become,’ Berners-Lee told this author, ‘but I had designed it to be totally universal. And there was a moment as it grew exponentially that I realized it would change the world.’

In 1984, Jobs, a visionary bundler of ideas, tweaker of inventions and crafter of exquisite designs, launched the Macintosh, a computer that a consumer could use to move between different facilities, adding a hand control that he called a mouse and the ability to choose new fonts, inspired by the course of calligraphy he had once taken. ‘I was lucky,’ he explained. ‘I found what I loved to do early in life.’ But ‘Then I got fired. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.’

When Jobs returned to Apple he devised, starting in 1998, a series of devices beginning with an ‘i’ (standing for ‘internet, individual, instruct, inform and inspire’). In 2007, his iPhone changed human behaviour, creating a fashionable but indispensable machine. By 2020, around 2.2 billion iPhones had been sold, 19 billion smartphones altogether – tiny mechanisms that forever changed human nature and behaviour in ways not yet clear. Smartphones became technologies so essential they became almost membral extensions. By 2005, at least 16 per cent of humans were using smartphones; by 2019, the figure was 53.6 per cent, 86.6 per cent in the west. The internet opened a mass of new knowledge to citizens, and many abandoned more laborious yet more trustworthy sources of information. The internet thickened society, adding new layers of discourse and power to give a dynamic to already pluralistic societies – a further shift from ‘sovereign power’, in Foucault’s analysis, to ‘disciplinary power’.

The new knowledge spread openness; but, like writing, printing and television, it could be controlled and manipulated: even in democracies, its panjandrums exercised vast secret power as despots of data, and there has never been a better tool for tyranny. Its tendency to create sequestered localities of the same-minded meant that it parochialized as many as it globalized. In many countries, mobile phones were used by people who still lived in iPhone and dagger societies, dominated by kin, tribe and sect, that could barely feed or heat their people. In some cases, terrorists were beheading people with swords while chatting via WhatsApp on their iPhones.

Less flashy but as important were the astonishing improvements in public health – reduced child mortality, smallpox vaccinations, chlorinated water. These are the result of interlinked developments high and low: the invention of the lavatory linked to sewers may have saved a billion lives since the 1860s. The doubling of human life expectancy in one century and the reduction of child mortality by a factor of ten are triumphs with no downside – except our own voracious success as a species, our population rising from a billion people in 1800 to eight billion in 2025. The industrial revolution combined with our medical revolution now threatens our own existence.

While the Net was invented by Brits and Americans and developed in Silicon Valley, where the new digital titans worked out how to make it profitable, it was the closed world that would really grasp its potential: the Chinese security services were quickest to appreciate its power of surveillance. The Russians harnessed its ability to amplify and justify rage and propagate lies in the open world. The autocracies understood quickly that their hackers could poison the delicate political anatomy of the democracies by using their very freedoms against them.

Bush was keen to meet Putin. On 16 June 2001, at a Slovenian summit, the new commande-in-chief of the unipower met the new Russian potentate. ‘I looked the man in the eye,’ said Bush, revealing the naivety of American paramountcy. ‘I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.’ Putin, fighting an Islamic insurgency in Chechnya, warned Bush of the jihadi threat to the American homeland from a new Afghan force, the Taliban. The Communists had not lasted long after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, but a vicious civil war had discredited the warlords. In Kandahar, a coterie of ex-mujahedin Ghilzai talibs (madrassa students), under Omar, a one-eyed expert RPG-7 gunner who had returned to teaching, formed a vigilante band to stop crime and corruption. Adopted and funded by the Pakistani ISI, and backed by Haqqani, the Taliban quickly conquered the country, and invited Osama bin Laden back.

PRINCE OF THE TOWERS

‘Those extremists are all being funded by Saudi Arabia,’ Putin told Bush, ‘and it is only a matter of time before it results in a major catastrophe.’

Bush was astonished. ‘I was taken aback,’ recalled Condoleeza Rice, daughter of a minister from Birmingham, Alabama, descended from slaves, who became a State Department Russianist, Stanford professor and now the first black national security advisor,^* ‘by Putin’s alarm and vehemence.’ It was they decided sour grapes after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.

Putin was right. While W had been planning his presidential run, another entitled scion of privilege was planning his own momentous mission. The older Bush’s Iraq war and protection of Saudi Arabia had horrified Osama bin Laden; he demanded an audience with King Fahd, though he was instead received by his brother Prince Sultan. Osama proposed that he reject American troops – present since the Gulf War – and let an Arab legion of mujahedin defend Mecca. Fahd trusted the bin Ladens, but dismissed Osama’s quixotic fanaticism and expelled him. He in turn despised the debauched Saudi kings for whom his father had worked: the Prophet had banned infidels from Arabia; now American troops were stationed there, while the American ally, Israel, had attacked Lebanon. Bin Laden, who received a $7 million annual income from his family, refined both his ideology and his organization, setting up in Sudan, working on his own engineering business while also setting up a network of terrorist cells, fundraisers, bomb makers, undercover operatives and the essential cannon fodder of Islamic terror, young – often teenaged – suicidists.

When his plans were ready in early 1998, he procured a fatwa from a tame cleric to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – and to ‘liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [Jerusalem] and the holy mosque of Mecca’. That August, bin Laden killed hundreds when his suicidists drove truck bombs into US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Clinton ordered missile attacks on bin Laden in Sudan, which was forced to expel the terrorist.

Bin Laden had lost his family income and was living on subscriptions from Saudi backers when he got Omar’s invitation. He arrived on a private plane with wives and 300 mujahedin. Backed by Omar, now calling himself Amir al-Mu'minin, and Haqqani, justice minister, bin Laden declared war on the USA and started to train al-Qaeda volunteers. As Clinton secretly ordered his capture or assassination, Omar helped bin Laden set up headquarters, where he now considered a long-time ambition: an attack on American skyscrapers. In 1999, a trusted Pakistani henchman proposed a spectacular attack by suicidists piloting jet planes^* into the Twin Towers, the prestigious Manhattan skyscrapers with which he was familiar because they had been abortively attacked by his nephew seven years earlier.

Suicide bombers had been invented by the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers,^* quickly copied by jihadis. Bin Laden grasped the power of attacking the homeland: ‘to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting’. Although a US commando attack on al-Qaeda camps was cancelled, Clinton ordered missile strikes – just missing bin Laden, who was already personally selecting his team of suicidists, in particular a cell from Hamburg who spoke English, nineteen of whom were now dispatched to learn aviation in American flight schools. ‘I was responsible for entrusting the nineteen brothers with the raids,’ bin Laden later bragged. Fifteen of the nineteen were Saudi. Its date was chosen for the defeat of the Ottomans outside Vienna in 1683.

Although the CIA and FBI realized that bin Laden was planning an American attack, and although the two agencies collected shards of intelligence, including the bizarre revelation that there were Arab pilots who were only interested in studying take-off but not landing, they were, with a few stellar exceptions, too competitive to share information and too unimaginative to grasp the scale of bin Laden’s ambition.

Three months after Putin’s warning, on 11 September 2001 George W. Bush was listening to children reading The Pet Goat in a Floridian school when his chief of staff interrupted to whisper in his ear: ‘A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.’

As Bush arrived at the school, nineteen mass murderers had seized four jet planes, filled with innocent civilians; at 8.46 a.m., the first plane, controlled by five terrorists, flew into the 110-storey North Tower of the World Trade Center; Bush was informed that a small plane had accidentally crashed into the tower; he then entered the schoolroom. At 9.03 a.m., the second plane flew into the South Tower. As terrified people jumped from the higher storeys, with the world watching on live TV, the towers collapsed – a vision of live pandemonic apocalypse. At 9.37 a.m. a third plane dived into the Pentagon in DC. Each plane was the scene of desperate yet unknown despair and heroism; in a fourth plane, assigned to the White House or the Capitol, brave passengers, after wishing loved ones goodbye in heartbreaking messages, cried ‘Let’s roll!’ and attacked the terrorists, who in the ensuing struggle crashed the plane into a Pennsylvanian field at 10.03. Altogether 2,977 were killed, as well as all the terrorists. Bin Laden had laid the bait, and already American potentates were considering whether to hit not just bin Laden and the Taliban but also Saddam Hussein. That afternoon, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, wondered if intelligence was ‘good enough to hit SH at same time. Not only OBL … Need to move swiftly … Go massive … Sweep it all up. Things related or not.’

Amid panic and fear in the heartland, the fifty-five-year-old Bush, converted to his new mission, turned to his experienced vice-president Dick Cheney, a midwestern Yalie with a snarl who, as Bush senior’s defence secretary, had supervised Desert Storm before making money chairing the oil service company Halliburton. ‘I can hear you,’ Bush told Americans through a bullhorn at a Ground Zero stinking of fire and death. ‘So will the people who knocked down these buildings.’ Soon afterwards he warned the Taliban to ‘hand over the terrorists, or … share in their fate’. Cheney, the most powerful vice-president in US history, devised new domestic powers making it easier to find terrorists and unleashed the CIA to hunt them across the world and foil more atrocities. As he sanctioned the ‘rendition’ (seizure), ‘enhanced interrogation’ (torture) and imprisonment of suspects in secret ‘black prisons’ lent by sympathetic powers, Bush declared a worldwide War on Terror that encompassed a global anti-terror campaign and two land wars.

In October, American troops, aided by sympathetic northern warlords, many of them Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, invaded Afghanistan. Special units, Operational Detachment Alpha 574, rode south on horseback, taking part in history’s last cavalry charges. The quick conquest and the establishment of a new president, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun whose father had been shot by the Taliban, encouraged an exhilarating confidence in American paramountcy that called for a wider mission. Amir Omar escaped to Pakistan, as did bin Laden, both aided by the Haqqani terror dynasty led by the founder’s son Sirajuddin.

Although there was no real connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, in January 2002 Bush warned Americans of an Axis of Evil – the phrase a reference to the Hitler Axis of the Second World War – including North Korea, Iraq and Iran, which could not be permitted ‘to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons’. Cheney and Rumsfeld proposed an ambitious escalation: not only to destroy an unfinished enemy, Saddam Hussein, but to impose American democracy in west Asia.

Saddam had slaughtered rebel Kurds and Arabs to restore his power after Desert Storm, but in August 1995, his two sons-in-law – cousins, the brothers Hussein and Saddam Kamel, married to his daughters Raghad and Rana – suddenly fled Baghdad and drove in a convoy across the desert to Jordan, where they were given asylum. The loss of his daughters was humiliating, but the Kamels had clashed with the demented Uday, who dubbed himself Abu Sarhan – Son of the Wolf – and was once again terrorizing Baghdad: girls were raped, men beaten; a group of French tourists were forced to have sex with each other at gunpoint. All remembered not his mania but his ‘eerie quietness’. He had recently rushed into a family party, fought with his brothers-in-law and, drawing his gun, accidently shot an uncle in the leg.

Hussein Kamel, who had helped procure Saddam’s illegal weapons, had destroyed them after 1991 and now, debriefed by the CIA, he confirmed their destruction. But Saddam approached the brothers through his daughters, promising protection if they returned. Foolishly, in February 1996, they all went back to Baghdad, where, after being ordered to divorce their wives, they were attacked in their house by their clan and killed after a twelve-hour shootout. The sisters blamed their brother Uday for the killing. Soon afterwards, Uday’s car was ambushed and he was wounded but survived. Blaming his sisters, he arrested them, claiming they had planned to kill him. Eventually Saddam restored some family order among his murderous spawn.

Saddam did not believe the Americans would attack him again. Like the Kims in North Korea, he felt vulnerable without weapons of mass destruction. A lifelong radical, he hated the supervision of the west, which he feared could embolden Iran. His policy was to destroy his weapons so as not to give America a pretext, while refusing to cooperate in order to maintain the menace towards Iran. It was the most catastrophic bluff in history.

Elated by the surgical American conquest of Afghanistan – the unipower at its maximal – Bush ordered the CIA to find the evidence of such weapons in Iraq. Meagre and misleading intelligence was soon sculpted to fit his policy, now backed by Tony Blair, the talented British prime minister. An attractive, well-spoken public-school boy and Oxford barrister, he disciplined his Labour party, possessing the encompassing charisma to win three elections on his own personal centre ground. He and Bush had little in common, but they shared a Christian faith and missionary vision. Drawn to America at its plenitude, despite soaring opposition and suspicion about the dubious intelligence, Blair committed Britain to the war.

On 20 March 2003, Bush ordered 130,000 American and 45,000 British troops into Iraq, defeating Iraqi troops in an awesome display of high-tech warfare and seizing Baghdad three weeks later: the unipower had taken just twenty-six days to conquer Iraq. But the US occupation was short-sighted and heavy-handed. All Baathists – most of the army and civil service – were dismissed. A frivolity was reflected in a most-wanted list in the form of playing cards: Saddam – the Ace of Hearts – had vanished with his sons. Three months later, Uday and Qusay and the latter’s fourteen-year-old son Mustafa were betrayed by their host in Mosul for $30 million and killed in a three-hour shootout with the Americans. In May, Bush, standing on USS Abraham Lincoln in a bomber jacket, in front of a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner, declared the ‘end of major combat operations’ that in fact marked the start of a creeping insurgency by a sinister gallimaufry of jihadist terrorists (led by al-Qaeda), Sunni and Shia militias (the latter backed by Iran) and the sacked Baathists. In December, at a remote farm, Saddam, shaggy and unkempt, was captured hiding in a manhole, but it made little difference. Using funds channelled by Saddam’s wife Sajida and his daughter Raghad, the insurgents converted the American triumph into a dystopic pandemonium of bombings, assassinations and urban cauldron battles. If there had been no link to al-Qaeda before the US invasion, now its terrorists launched a spree of sectarian killings.

At dawn on 30 December 2006, a stooping grizzled figure, wearing a dark suit, was led on to a scaffold between two executioners in ski masks in front of an audience of his Shiite enemies, including several ministers in the new Iraq government, some of whom were filming with their mobiles. As a rope was tightened around his neck and he recited the shahada, voices cried out the names of Shiites he had killed. ‘That’s how you express your manhood?’ growled the sixty-nine-year-old Saddam.

‘Go to hell!’ shouted the audience.

‘The hell that’s Iraq?’ – and the trapdoor opened.

‘The tyrant,’ they chanted, ‘is dead.’^*

Bush finally embraced the new counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq, devised by a gifted general, David Petraeus, surging US troops and building Sunni alliances, to stem the mayhem – but 4,000 Americans and 500,000 Iraqis were killed. No weapons of mass destruction were found. The new Iraq, sectarian and corrupt, was far from a liberal democracy.

Moving between Afghan and Pakistani hideouts, hunted by American commandos, bin Laden could reflect that his gambit to bleed and degrade US power had worked. But he had not foreseen that the chief beneficiary was not his Sunni jihad but instead the resurgence of Shia Iran.

‘So how’s it feel?’ W. Bush asked Barack Obama.

‘It’s a lot,’ replied Obama. ‘I’m sure you remember.’

‘Yep, I do,’ said W. ‘It’s a heck of a ride you’re about to take …’

It was 20 January 2009: W and Laura Bush were welcoming the new president Obama and his wife Michelle to the White House. The polar opposite of Bush, Obama was a uniquely charismatic figure who attracted different segments of American society. Not only was he the first black commander-in-chief, the son of the maverick Kenyan economist who had come to Hawaii and Harvard on a scholarship, and the free-spirited white anthropologist. He was the most literary, cerebral president since Lincoln. This cool-blooded law professor, nicknamed No Drama Obama, was elected to soothe Americans after Iraq. Yet his background was not totally American – closer to Africa, further from the slavery experienced by most African-Americans. He described himself as ‘a platypus or some imaginary beast’, joking, ‘I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher.’

Obama was obsessed by his Kenyan family: ‘I only remember my father for one month my whole life.’ In 1988, aged twenty-seven, before he started studying law at Harvard, he travelled to Kenya to research his book of family history – ‘making peace’, wrote his wife Michelle, ‘with his phantom father’.^*

Moving to Chicago after Harvard, he worked at a top law firm – ‘Oh how earnest I was then, how fierce and humourless,’ he wrote – where he met a stellar Princeton and Harvard alumna descended from slaves in South Carolina, Michelle Robinson. Daughter of a charismatic father who scarcely let MS cramp his style and died ‘having given us absolutely everything’, and from a family filled with strong women, she was ambitious: ‘I assessed my goals, analyzed my outcomes, counted my wins … the life of a girl who can’t stop wondering am I good enough?’ She always remembered, ‘There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: you’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.’

As the only two African-Americans in their law firm, they dated, finding in his adventurousness and her stability that ‘opposites attract’. She thought him rare as a ‘unicorn … this strange mix-of-everything man’ – ‘refreshing, unconventional and weirdly elegant’. He thought her ‘an original … She was tall, beautiful, funny … and wickedly smart. I was smitten.’ But she believed that ‘the road to the good life was narrow and full of hazards. Family was all.’ He had that characteristic of politicians: ‘He was oddly free from doubt.’

Obama started community work and taught law at Chicago before at thirty-five winning election to the Illinois Senate in November 1996. Michelle laughed at his effect on white people: ‘In my experience you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers.’ When Obama, who became a US senator in 2004, ran for the presidency four years later, Michelle ‘avoided talking to me about the horse-race aspect of the campaign’, until, her face ‘pensive’, she asked one night, ‘You’re going to win, aren’t you?’

Obama had studied the darkness and the light within American society. America was the ‘only great power made up of people from every corner of the planet’, but the challenge was ‘to see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to our creed.’ He was an optimist. ‘Maybe I can do some good,’ he told Michelle. America was the ‘place where all things are possible’. When he won the presidency, ‘I felt,’ wrote Michelle, ‘like our family launched out of a cannon and into some strange underwater universe.’

Obama had campaigned for the White House on the slogan ‘Yes we can’, but in power things at home and abroad were less possible than he expected.

Yet ‘The more pressure he was under,’ noticed Michelle, ‘the calmer he seemed to get.’ That was just as well since he arrived in the middle of a world banking crisis caused by reckless investments in American property. Great financial houses crashed. Prompted and aided by Gordon Brown, ascetic and analytical British prime minister, Obama spent $626 billion on saving the economy and those banks too big to fail. Yet his election did not halt the trigger-happy racism of American society: on 26 February 2012, Trayvon Martin, seventeen years old, was shot in Florida by a vigilante; on 17 July 2014, Eric Garner, a gentle forty-two-year-old horticulturalist, was killed in a chokehold by a Staten Island policeman. Its filming by a witness with a mobile phone launched a new movement: Black Lives Matter.

As for ‘my foreign policy?’ he said. ‘Don’t do stupid shit.’ He agonized over how to end the 9/11 wars and tried to reset the US relationship with Putin. America’s Iraqi catastrophe was an opportunity for Putin, who hated Obama, for him the personification of American humbug.

Putin waited for a chance to assert Russian power in his sphere, embracing the myth of the Broken Promise: Bush and Clinton had promised not to extend NATO eastwards and yet now Ukraine was moving towards membership. ‘Not one inch to the east, they told us in the 1990s,’ said Putin in December 2021. ‘They cheated, just brazenly tricked us.’

It was only a matter of time before Belarus, ruled by a porcine tyrant, former director of a collective piggery, would return to the Muscovite fold, but huge, proud Ukraine, divided, ill led and beset by corruption, still had dangerous potential as a democracy that could undermine Putin’s autocracy and his imperial millenarian vision of the Russian World. In 2004, a pro-western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, keen for Ukraine to join NATO and the EU, was set to win presidential elections. Putin ordered FSB agents to poison the candidate, who only just survived, his face scarred. Then an attempt to rig the election for Putin’s candidate, the corrupt, brutish Viktor Yanukovych, was foiled by 200,000 Kyivans who occupied central Kyiv in their Orange Revolution. To Putin, the Russian state was unthinkable without Ukraine. ‘What is Ukraine?’ Putin asked. ‘Does it exist as a country?’ He added, ‘Whatever it has, is a gift from us.’ He regarded Ukraine and Belarus as little Russias with no independent right of existence.^*

Putin watched and waited. His first opportunity came in tiny but defiant Georgia. Putin despised Shevardnadze, who had given away the empire. When in 2003 the Grey Fox, by then seventy-five, faced a revolution led by the young, showy American-educated Mikheil Saakashvili, Putin refused to back the old leader. Shevardnadze retired.

Putin watched Saakashvili’s posturings with contempt. When Saakashvili, encouraged by America, challenged the Russian clients in Ossetia, Putin snarled, ‘Bring me Saakashvili’s head,’ and invaded, routing the Georgian forces.^* America protested but did nothing.

Now Obama flew in to see Putin. At his mansion at Novo-Ogarevo, Obama observed Putin: ‘short and compact – a wrestler’s build – with thin, sandy hair, a prominent nose, and pale, watchful eyes’, exuding ‘a practiced disinterest … that indicated someone who’d grown used to power’. He reminded Obama of a Chicago ‘ward boss, except with nukes’.

Ironically Putin’s view of American presidents was almost identical: he advised his henchmen to watch his favourite Netflix drama House of Cards to explain US politics. ‘Don’t harbour any illusions,’ he later lectured Obama’s vice-president Joe Biden. ‘We’re not like you, we may look like you but … inside we have different values.’ Obama listened to Putin accuse America of being ‘arrogant, dismissive, unwilling to treat Russia as an equal partner’. Putin worked to redress the balance: in 2010, his vassal Yanukovych won the Ukrainian elections, then, in the Arab world, he found a further opportunity.

BASHAR, THE BAYONET AND THE MONA LISA OF INDIA

On 6 March 2011, in the southern Syrian town of Deraa, fifteen schoolchildren mocked the young dictator Bashar al-Assad in graffiti on the walls of their school, inspired by demonstrations against the dictators of Tunisia, and then of Egypt, Libya and Yemen, communicating by the exciting encoded medium of WhatsApp. In Deraa, the hated governor, a cousin of Assad, arrested the schoolchildren and tortured them. When their families protested, the army fired on them. The town rose in rebellion, which spread across Syria.

In 2000, when Hafez al-Assad died, the thirty-four-year-old ophthalmologist Bashar succeeded to the throne, marrying a British-Syrian surgeon’s daughter, Asma, who was an unlikely recruit to the Mafia-style family – a private schoolgirl (then known as Emma) and French literature graduate. Anisa, Bashar’s mother, had disapproved of the marriage: she wanted Bashar to marry a cousin. But the couple were in love. Asma gave Bashar the pet name Batta – Duck. When she arrived, the Assads isolated her.

She and Bashar promised reform and courted the west. Vogue magazine hailed Bashar as ‘wildly democratic’ and Asma as the ‘rose of the desert … glamorous, young, and very chic – the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies … a thin, long-limbed beauty … breezy, conspiratorial, and fun’. Vogue was right about the conspiracy: in 2006 when the Lebanese billionaire Rafic Hariri, former and future premier, challenged Syrian power, Bashar ordered his killing in a car bombing, which so outraged the Lebanese that he was forced to withdraw his troops. Sensing ‘a great conspiracy’, Dr Assad sent tanks and troops against his own students, teenagers and Islamicists. ‘My father was right,’ he said. ‘Thousands of deaths in Hama bought us three decades of stability …’

On 17 February 2011, Libyan cities rebelled against the Neronian dictator Qaddafi, who, assisted by his son Saif al-Islam, threatened that the rebels, these ‘cockroaches’, would be ‘hunted down street by street, house by house until the country is cleansed of dirt and scum’. Obama was determined to avoid any interventions. In Egypt, Mubarak, who had been in power since Sadat’s assassination, faced a popular revolution and looked to Obama for support. Obama refused: Mubarak resigned. In Libya, Qaddafi had lost half of the country, but he promised, ‘Everything will burn.’ David Cameron, fresh-faced young British prime minister, regarded Qaddafi as ‘Mad Dog, a horrific figure who sold Semtex to the IRA’ and ‘ordered the downing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie’. He called Nicolas Sarkozy, the diminutive, manic French president, to discuss an intervention. Obama was, recalled Cameron, ‘unenthusiastic’. But now Qaddafi’s forces were advancing on rebel Benghazi.

On 28 February, Cameron suggested a no-fly zone; NATO agreed to intervene to save lives, and Obama delivered air cover. Qaddafi threatened to kill Cameron and his family. Beginning on 20 March, NATO air forces, led by Britain and France, attacked Qaddafi’s forces for months until the regime cracked. On 15 September, Cameron and Sarkozy visited Tripoli: ‘we’d promised we’d go together … We wove through jubilant hordes to a stage in Freedom Square and gave speeches as 10,000 people chanted Cam-er-on and Sar-koz-y! Still we had no idea where Qaddafi was …’

Putin approved the NATO campaign, provided Qaddafi himself was not targeted. Anglo-French air strikes strafed the colonel’s convoy. ‘They say they don’t want to kill him,’ sneered Putin, ‘so why are they bombing him? To scare the mice?’ On 20 October, near Sirte, NATO got him. Qaddafi, wounded and hiding in a drainage pipe, was captured, wounded in the stomach, then, filmed on a smartphone, sodomized with a bayonet and finally shot dead. Watching the video of the tormented tyrant, Putin saw himself: ‘You could end up losing Russia. Qaddafi thought he’d never lose Libya but the Americans tricked him.’ So this was American freedom: ‘All the world saw him being killed, all bloodied. Is that democracy?’ He would not let it happen again: in Syria, Putin backed Assad.

As the revolution reached the suburbs of Damascus, Assad, backed by his brother Maher, his Alawite clan and secular Sunnis, treated his own country as enemy territory: ‘Assad or We Burn the Country’ was their slogan. He released Islamic jihadis from prison to taint the rebels; his secret police tortured and slaughtered many; he launched unrestrained bombing and chemical attacks. As pandemonium spread, Assad flirted with gushing girls in his office, and Asma spent $250,000 on new furniture online. While Maher led the 4th Armoured Division against the town of Homs, Asma reviewed Christian Louboutin shoes online. ‘Does anything catch your eye?’ she emailed a friend. When her friend, a Qatari princess, warned her she was in denial, Asma responded, ‘Life’s not fair, my friend, but ultimately there’s a reality we all need to deal with.’

‘If we’re strong together we’ll overcome this together. I love you,’ she wrote to her Duck, even though she may have discovered Bashar’s infidelities. He responded with a love heart and some country-and-western lyrics: ‘I’ve made a mess of me / The person that I’ve been lately / Ain’t who I wanna be.’ In 2013, returning from an end-of-Ramadan party, Assad and Asma were attacked by rebels. They survived, but now Maher was unleashed to crush the rebels, while their sister Bushra gave advice and her husband Assef Shawkat, one of the intelligence chieftains, clashed with him. Maher shot and wounded him. Later Shawkat was killed in a rebel bomb attack. Maher lost his leg in another assassination attempt. Soon afterwards Bushra al-Assad, widowed by the killing of Shawkat, left for Dubai. But Asma stayed. After the death of the matriarch Anisa, Asma became official First Lady. ‘The president is the president of all Syria,’ she announced. ‘The First Lady supports him.’ The family held on, just as the greatest democratic dynasty was subsiding.

‘She was a striking woman in her sixties,’ was how Obama described Sonia Gandhi in November 2010, ‘dressed in a traditional sari with dark, probing eyes and a quiet, regal presence.’ Sonia Gandhi had recovered from the murder of her husband, Rajiv, to assume leadership of Congress, and Obama was impressed by her ‘shrewd and forceful intelligence’ in the service of ‘the enduring … family dynasty’. After winning two elections, Sonia chose not to become premier herself, appointing an ex-finance minister, Manmohan Singh, India’s first Sikh leader.

Nicknamed Mona Lisa, Sonia dominated from behind the scenes for a decade, but Obama was less impressed by her son, Rahul, the heir. Obama wondered if this was the end: ‘Would the baton be successfully passed?’

Four years later, Rahul was routed by a Hindu nationalist from Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In an India long ruled by dynasty, Modi represented a self-made Hindu middle class; he liked to say he had once sold tea at Vadnagar railway station. As a boy he joined the paramilitary RSS, a believer in Hindutva. Joining its youth wing at eight, Modi became a full-time pracharak – organizer – so devoted that although he went through an arranged marriage as a boy, he never lived with his wife: politics was his sole passion. The Nehrus were declining thanks to decades of corruption, entitlement and failure to confront India’s inequalities.

The BJP’s rise was accelerated by a campaign to raze the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya, supposedly built by the first Tamerlanian emperor at the site of a Hindu shrine believed to be the birthplace of Rama. Holiness is always infectious, the holier and more hallowed for one sect, the more so for its rival. In 1992, a national campaign had mobilized a Hindu crowd to attack the mosque and demolish it, sparking riots that killed 2,000 people.

In 1998, the BJP managed to form a coalition government. In February 2002, in Gujarat, where Modi was chief minister, elected after a campaign promoting Hindutva, a train bearing Hindu pilgrims to Ayodhya caught fire – probably after a Muslim mob set the coaches alight. Modi declared it a terrorist attack by Muslims and did little to defuse the tension. In the following days, Hindu mobs killed around 2,000 Muslims, some of them burned alive, women raped and mutilated, while police stood by. Promising free-market reforms, in 2014 Modi won the first of two general elections, but his autocratic style, bias against Muslims in his Citizenship Act and clumsy economic reforms revealed that he was as careless as the Nehrus, only less tolerant of minorities.

At 2 p.m. on 2 May 2011, as the Arab Spring gathered momentum, the calm of a walled mansion in north-eastern Pakistan, not far from the capital Islamabad, was broken by the distant whirl of helicopters.

WHERE LIONS AND CHEETAHS LURK

Two US Blackhawks bearing, in Obama’s words, ‘twenty-three members of the Seal team, a Pakistani American CIA translator and a military dog named Cairo’ were taking part in Operation Neptune Spear. Obama joined his staff in the White House Situation Room as the choppers flew low over Pakistan. As they approached the mansion, one of the helicopters went down.

It was Obama’s hardest decision. The CIA had informed him that at a mysterious fortified house, linked to Osama bin Laden by two of his couriers, they had been watching a tall man walk in the tiny garden. ‘We call him the Pacer,’ said the lead officer. ‘We think he could be bin Laden.’ Obama consulted his cohorts: Vice-President Biden ‘weighed in against the raid, given the enormous consequences of failure’. But Obama approved the mission against bin Laden, tactlessly codenamed Geronimo.

At home, Michelle endured the stress of politics. ‘I sensed an undercurrent of tension in her, subtle but constant,’ recalled Obama, ‘like the faint thrum of a hidden machine.’ He saw ‘part of her stayed on alert, waiting and watching for the next turn of the wheel, bracing herself for calamity’. Sometimes ‘the lions and cheetahs started to lurk’, wrote Michelle. ‘When you’re married to the president you come to understand quickly that the world brims with chaos …’

They sensed a coming darkness, a backlash against their liberal values – and they were right. In 2010, a tall, wide-hipped property developer with an auburn tan and a bright-yellow combover started to consider running for president against Obama. Donald Trump, then aged sixty-four, was already the personification of American illusion – grandson of a Bavarian immigrant and gold-rush brothel-keeper, son of a post-war Queens slum landlord. Using his billion-dollar inheritance, he became a developer of luxury Manhattan hotels and Atlantic City casinos, funded by junk bonds, constantly refinanced on the edge of bankruptcy and paying scarcely any tax on his loss-making ventures. In the 1980s, he had promoted the myth of this dealmaking with a bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, which in 2004 won him the job of presenting a TV reality show, The Apprentice. His new fame enabled him to reinvigorate his Trump franchise.

Husband of three glamorous women – a Czech skier, an American model and a Slovene model – patriarch of a business dynasty, lover of a bazzoon of Playboy centrefolds and porn performers, this bombastic bazooka of complex inferiority would put on a fake voice and, claiming to be his own publicist, ring newspapers to tell them that ‘the Donald’ was having affairs with supermodels and popstars. While having an affair with his future second wife, he had quoted her praise of his sexual virtuosity to give the New York Post one of its most memorable headlines: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD’. He was a fairground huckster, for whom the truth mattered less than the spectacle, and expertise or knowledge were contemptible, but he had a gift for articulating what millions were thinking. As a ‘killer’, never a ‘loser’, he had long coveted power: in 1987, he had taken out advertisements offering to negotiate arms limitation with Gorbachev. Steeped in the seamy dealmaking of New York property, with its hints of Mafia pay-offs, long mocked in New York high society, he had built a Monopoly set of golden tower buildings, altogether achieving much more than most politicians had ever attempted before they came to office.

In March 2011, to the Obamas’ incredulity, Trump floated a racist conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the USA. ‘Growing up, no one knew him,’ he said. ‘I want him to show his birth certificate …’ Obama, rattled and astonished, mocked him but realized that Trump ‘was a spectacle and in the USA of 2011 that was a sort of power … Far from being ostracized for the conspiracies he’d peddled, he had never been bigger.’ Michelle felt that ‘The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited … But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.’ Yet Trump still seemed to be a reality-show maven who posed no threat.

Now in the Situation Room in May 2011, as Obama watched the grainy image of the chopper making an emergency landing in Pakistan, he feared the worst, but the pilot managed to land: ‘I saw … grainy figures on the ground … entering the main house’ as the commandos worked their way up the three-storey house, passing groups of children, shooting three armed men who challenged them, a woman who was caught in crossfire, until they reached the top floor: they heard shots. But where was Geronimo?

THE KILLING OF GERONIMO

On the top floor of the mansion, the Seals encountered Osama bin Laden, ‘the man who had directed the murder of thousands and set in motion a tumultuous period of world history’. They shot him in the forehead and chest. In the Situation Room, ‘audible gasps’. Obama was ‘glued to the video feed’. Then suddenly ‘we heard … words we’d been waiting to hear’.

‘Geronimo ID’d … Geronimo EKIA.’ Enemy killed in action.

‘We got him,’ said Obama softly. A photo arrived of the dead terrorist: ‘I glanced briefly … it was him.’

Bin Laden’s body was carried off by the Seals, and was later buried in the Arabian Sea. When Obama announced the hit, he linked it to his own mission. ‘Americans can do whatever we set our mind to – that’s the story of our history,’ he said. ‘We can do these things because of who we are.’

Geronimo had been a risk. The new technologies offered easier ways to wage surgical warfare. On 30 September 2011, Obama approved the killing by drone of a terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen. It was far from being the first of these killings by US ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’, devices that heralded a new era of warfare.^*

Trump did not run for the presidency in 2012. As Obama won his second term, an intrigue in Chongqing was settling the struggle of two princelings for the Chinese leadership. In November 2011, the body of an English financier, Neil Heywood, entangled in high Chinese politics via a powerful woman he called an ‘empress’, was discovered in a Chongqing hotel, destroying one candidate for the leadership – and opening the way for the other to be the all-powerful autocrat. The two rivals were both crown princes, sons of Mao’s grandees, leaders and heirs of what the Party called ‘lineages’ of family power. Bo Xilai, flamboyant son of one of Deng’s Eight Immortals, was an ambitious Politburo member, boss of what was later called the ‘independent kingdom’ of Chongqing, and candidate for the leadership.

His rival was Xi Jinping, son of Deng’s ally Xi Zhongxun, who had fallen from power and then returned to the top. Xi junior, like many of those who had been rusticated, combined the entitlement of the princelings with the plain, harsh habits of the peasants. The trauma had made the family closer; it had toughened Xi but it had not put him off the Party. On the contrary, it was the Party that had restored order and safety after the Cultural Revolution. But it was only after Mao’s death that Deng brought them back. When Xi senior retired, he arranged for his son to work at the Central Military Commission, the most important office after the Politburo’s Standing Committee. In 1986, when he was promoted to deputy secretary of Hebei province, he met someone who changed his destiny. Peng Liyuan was the most famous singer in China, a beautiful soprano who, sporting Red Army uniform, sang Party ballads. Xi, just emerged from an unhappy marriage to an ambassador’s daughter, ‘fell in love at first sight’ – according to his official biography – and they had a daughter. His stolid climb up the Party was far from meteoric. In 1997, he joined the Central Committee as an alternate, becoming a full member in 2002, but he was on his way. He was appointed first secretary of Zhejiang province and in 2007 joined the Standing Committee as a future leader. But just behind him came the flashier Bo, who caught up fast.

Bo had a flaw – his wife, Gu Kailai, herself the daughter of a general. Together they had recruited Heywood as their fixer, in return for commissions. But Heywood, fluent in Chinese and married to a Chinese woman, got too close. When Gu demanded he divorce his wife and devote himself to her interests, he complained she was ‘behaving like an old-fashioned Chinese aristocrat or empress’. Whether he had an affair with Gu or demanded a vast commission or both, Gu recruited the Chongqing police chief who entertained Heywood then poisoned him with cyanide, declaring later that his death was from alcohol poisoning. They cremated the body. When the police chief feared he was about to be killed himself and sought asylum in the US embassy, the murder was exposed.

In 2012, Bo and Gu were arrested and condemned, their patrons on the Standing Committee were purged and their rival Xi emerged as the leader. As Obama led the US in holding pattern, Xi directed what he called the ‘resurrection’ of China. But it was a more singular moment than that: America was starting a process of self-laceration that altered its world mission. As the bipolar system was a memory and American paramountcy was wavering, China, which many times had dominated its own region, would, for the first time, join the World Game.

* In Latin America, the end of the struggle against Communism accelerated the fall of juntas in Argentina and Brazil, which then became democracies; in Paraguay, the vicious Hispano-Bavarian tyrant Stroessner, who had protected Josef Mengele, was deposed; in Haiti, ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, who at nineteen had inherited the throne from his father Papa Doc, claimed he was ‘firm as a monkey tail’ but, rocked by protests and pressured by Washington, flew into exile. In Colombia and Mexico, America feared a new export, not Communism but cocaine. In 1989 in Colombia, the rise of a minor Colombian cigarette smuggler from Medellín in the late 1970s had transformed the cocaine business: Pablo Escobar, paunchy and moustachioed, had created a business – offering his victims ‘money or lead’ – that manufactured cocaine and delivered it to its American markets. Now at his height, he exported eighty tons a month, bringing in $70 million a day, so much that he subverted and corrupted the fragile Colombian state. When threatened, he launched a murderous terror in which his assassins killed 25,000 people with bullet and bomb, even blowing up a civilian airliner while, worth $30 billion and commanding his own army, he lived in splendour at his spacious ranches. When Escobar was arrested, he was so powerful he was able to build his own prison, and escape when he wished. America intervened to help Colombia: on 2 December 1993, Escobar, at the age of forty-four, was finally hunted down and killed by American and Colombian commandos, his business commandeered by a more discreet cartel from Cali. After they too were arrested, the business was taken over by Mexican narcotraficantes who lethally undermined the Mexican state.

* Nazarbayev was an astute player of the system, orchestrating the overthrow of his boss to become the youngest premier in the Union. ‘I was an ambitious young man and Party membership was the route to all advancement,’ he explained. ‘If I had thought that it would have helped my ambition in those days to be a Buddhist I would have become a Buddhist.’

* Except in Albania, still a Communist dictatorship. Hoxha had died in 1985 but his chosen heir Ramiz Alia was still hoping to hang on – which he did until December 1990.

* In 2020, the Supreme Leader orchestrated the election of his former pupil, the Butcher of Teheran, Raisi, as president.

* In November 1990, Thatcher, having won an unprecedented three elections, but showing signs of deluded grandeur, promising to ‘go on and on’, was overthrown by her own cabinet – she was the longest serving twentieth-century PM and the ablest since Churchill.

* The US and UK were in denial. This author was travelling through the Caucasus and central Asia at this time; on his return to Moscow he was debriefed by both British and US intelligence officers who enquired if he had seen any nuclear weaponry while assuring him that ‘The USSR is here to stay.’

* Sometimes Bush’s entourage was more realistic than Gorbachev’s. When Jim Baker, secretary of state, discussed Ukraine with Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev, he wondered if there would be war. There were twelve million Russians in Ukraine, replied Yakovlev, ‘many in mixed marriages, so what kind of war would that be?’ Baker replied: ‘A normal war.’

* The expelled Hutus joined the mayhem in Congo. Kagame pursued them, backing a veteran revolutionary whose life personified the catastrophe of modern Congo. At twenty, Laurent-Désiré Kabila had embraced Marxism and backed the pro-Soviet faction, fighting with Che Guevara, but when the American ally, Mobutu, took power, Kabila had become a gold smuggler and Tanzanian brothel keeper. Only now was Kabila emerging to take power in Congo, backed by Kagame and the long-reigning Ugandan autocrat, Yoweri Museveni, with all sides using armies of kadogos (child soldiers). Once in power, Kabila, nicknamed Mbongo – the Bull – struggled to satisfy his backers in a new frenzy of mineral exploitation and murderous warfare. He fell out with Uganda and Rwanda, then embraced Zimbabwe and Angola, but losing control of the army he executed his once-loyal child soldiers, who now conceived Operation Mbongo Zero – Kill Bull – orchestrated by Rwanda. The children infiltrated the Marble Palace and, aided by a bodyguard, shot him dead. Kabila had named his son as heir: Joseph, aged twenty-nine, succeeded him, ruling for twenty years.

* And to claw back power in the newly independent republics, backing the armed secession of Abkhazia on Georgia’s Black Sea shore: Shevardnadze defied Moscow but was almost killed in Sukhumi. As Russian tanks threatened Georgia and the ex-president Gamsakhurdia tried to rally his forces (he would be killed in the attempt), Shevardnadze flew to Moscow to bend the knee to the tsar, inviting this author to fly with him: ‘There are at least two Russias,’ he said: ‘democratic and totalitarian; in ten years I hope Russia and Georgia will be democracies but in Russia the dark forces of empire are the wolves that are always waiting in the forest.’

* A special medical unit had long maintained Lenin’s body and honed this special Soviet skill. Communist leaders, first Georgi Dmitrov of Bulgaria, then Marshal Choibalsan of Mongolia and Gottwald of Czechoslovakia, were all embalmed and displayed. When Stalin died, he joined Lenin in the Mausoleum, but in 1961 Khrushchev ordered his removal. That was far from the end of the embalming of Communist autocrats. In 1969, Ho Chi Minh was embalmed, followed by Mao and Neto of Angola. The embalmments of Forbes Burnham of Guyana and later Hugo Chávez of Venezuela were botched and they had to be buried. Lenin, Mao, two Kims, Ho and Neto remain on display.

* Yet just as it seemed that all human life was leading progressively to a freer world, the warnings from scientists who proved that human industry over two centuries was warming the planet became increasingly urgent. Few leaders had paid any attention to these warnings: one of the first to do so was a visionary prince of Wales, later Charles III, who, at twenty-two, in February 1970 warned against the ‘horrific effects of pollution in all its cancerous forms’, asking, ‘Are we all prepared to accept price increases … to discipline ourselves to [accept] restrictions and regulations for our own good?’ Only twenty years later, in June 1992, at a first UN Earth Summit in Rio did politicians start to debate how to limit this anthropogenic damage. This now became one of the most urgent challenges facing humanity. Yet to achieve meaningful change leaders, especially in surging industrial nations like China and India, would have to not only ignore but override the immediate interests of their nations and people in favour of a future benefit for all mankind.

* One of the American successes was persuading Ukraine and Kazakhstan to give up nuclear weapons left after the fall of the Soviet Union in return for US aid. In 1991, Ukraine and Kazakhstan found themselves in possession of thousands of Soviet warheads, the world’s third and fourth largest nuclear powers. In 1992, Kazakhstan gave up its nuclear arsenal. At Budapest in December 1994, Ukraine’s ‘territorial integrity’ was guaranteed by Russia, the USA and Britain in return for giving up its nuclear weaponry – a decision that some now regard as a mistake.

* ‘The dangerous timebomb,’ that allowed the republics to secede, ‘planted in the foundation of our state, exploded the moment the safety mechanism provided by the Communist Party was gone,’ Vladimir Putin wrote later as president. ‘A parade of sovereignties followed.’

* In September, three mysterious apartment bombings killed three hundred people. Blamed on Chechen terrorists, it was possibly the work of FSB agents creating the crisis for Putin to solve.

* Putin’s initial choice was an Islamic rebel warlord Akhmad Kadyrov, who had been the mufti of independent Chechnya but in 2000 changed sides and became Putin’s Chechen president. On his assassination in 2004, Putin turned to his son Ramzan.

* In 1837, the poet Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada, countess of Lovelace, and her friend Charles Babbage, partly inspired by the article of an Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea, later premier of united Italy, had devised a programme for what they called an Analytical Engine. In 1843, Lovelace wrote instructions that she called algorithms, inspired by al-Khwarizmi of 820s Baghdad, but she also foresaw the perils of ‘autocrats of information’. Babbage designed their Engine. Yet it was a century before such technology was invented by a German scientist Konrad Zuse who in 1941 built the first computer, Z3, in Berlin and devised the first programming language, Plankalkül. His Z3 was destroyed by an Allied air raid, but after the war Zuse founded the first tech company – and sold his patent to the American company IBM, which had also worked on tabulating vast quantities of personal data for the US government in Nazi Germany and the USA. Simultaneously, at Bletchley Park in Britain, a young mathematician, Alan Turing, who at twenty-four had defined a ‘universal computing machine’, was designing an electromagnetic machine to decrypt the German Enigma code. In 1946, he designed an Automatic Computing Engine and two years later he built one: it filled a room. Next he and a colleague created the first gaming programme, the chess-playing Turochamp. In January 1952, a series of accidents, involving his male lover and a burglary, led to Turing admitting a homosexual relationship, illegal under an 1885 law. Turing pleaded guilty to ‘gross indecency’ and he agreed to an atrocious treatment, chemical castration. At forty-one, Turing killed himself with cyanide.

* After retiring as secretary of state, Rice researched her family history: ‘My great-great-grandmother Zina on my mother’s side bore five children by different slave owners,’ she wrote. ‘My great-grandmother on my father’s side, Julia Head, carried the name of the slave owner and was so favored by him that he taught her to read.’

* The idea of using planes as flying bombs was as old as flying itself, considered by Russian terrorists against the Romanovs in 1905 and used by Japanese kamikazes during the Second World War. Palestinian hijackers had proven both the vulnerability of civilian jet planes and the spectacular fear produced by attacking these hulking symbols of western comfort.

* That was how they killed Rajiv Gandhi. His premiership was overshadowed by an arms scandal, an environmental disaster and his intervention in the civil war between the Sinhalese government and the Tamil Tiger militia in Sri Lanka, initially to protect the Tamils, of whom there were many in southern India. But once in Sri Lanka, Indian troops found themselves fighting fanatical Tamil insurgents, the Tigers. Rajiv lost the 1989 election; and, on 21 May 1991, while campaigning, he was approached by a female Tamil Tiger suicide bomber – the first of a new phenomenon – who ignited her explosives.

* All this blood and treasure delivered one dividend: Qaddafi, fearful that he was next for the Saddam treatment, surrendered his nuclear programme: he was welcomed into the western family. The Americans were outraged to discover that Qaddafi had bought the technology from the Father of the Pakistani Bomb, A. Q. Khan. But the scientist was unchastened: ‘I saved the country for the first time when I made Pakistan a nuclear nation and saved it again when I confessed and took the whole blame on myself.’ Astonishingly the greatest criminal of the nuclear age was never investigated or prosecuted, dying in 2021 of Covid.

* Obama lost his mother early too: in November 1995, aged fifty-two, she died of cancer.

* ‘Russians, Ukrainians and Belorusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus,’ Putin wrote in a historical essay in July 2021. ‘Russians and Ukrainians are one people: a single whole,’ while ‘Modern Ukraine was entirely a product of the Soviet era … on the lands of historical Russia … One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed … The true sovereignty of Ukraine is only possible in partnership with Russia.’ Putin and his new imperialists focused on the Muscovite and Russian conquests that suited him – and ignored the cosmopolitan multi-ethnic Ukraine, ruled by Ottomans, Habsburgs, Polish kings and Lithuanian dukes, and peopled by Cossacks, Tatars, Poles, Jews, Italians and Greeks, as well as Russians and Ukrainians.

* Putin was now premier, having served two presidential terms, the limit allowed by Yeltsin’s constitution. He had pulled off a political chess move – rokirovka – in which a player switches king and castle, choosing a bland henchman to serve as president.

* The drones had been invented during the Yom Kippur War by an Iraqi-born Israeli designer, Abraham Karem, for reconnaissance. In 2001, after 9/11, Cofer Black, chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, proposed arming the Predators to kill Osama bin Laden. The hunter-killer drones fired supersonic Hellfire missiles that hit targets before they could be heard. Keen to avoid hitting their own troops and causing other accidental deaths, Bush commissioned the CIA to run the targeted killing of terrorists using the Predators, later updated to Reapers. Kill lists were collated by the CIA and presented to the president, then the teams – ‘mission intelligence coordinators’, ‘pilots’ and ‘sensor operators’ – sitting in hangars at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada triggered the executions thousands of miles away in the mountains of the Hindu Kush or the deserts of Yemen. The drones were in the ‘humane’ tradition of the guillotine, but early strikes killed hundreds of innocent passers-by. A 2008 strike against Haqqani killed around twenty innocent people, but he survived. They became increasingly accurate, by 2015 used for assassinations by most sophisticated military powers. Artificial intelligence would soon enable drones or high-tech guns to kill targets identified by facial recognition. The future of war will encompass daggers and rifles but also robotic killing machines operated from satellites, and possibly reprogrammed to kill certain individuals on sight.