Month: March 2024

Yesterday was the 71^st anniversary of that day, 5 March. That’s when Sergei Prokofiev, one of the 20^th century’s major composers and arguably Russia’s best ever, died a broken man.

He was only 61, but I did tell you he was broken. The inhuman pressure of life in Stalin’s Russia was too much for him to bear, and his heart gave way.

Hardly a day had gone by that Prokofiev hadn’t been publicly hectored and demonised by nonentities, calling him whatever they were paid to call great men in those days. He’d try to buy a moment’s peace by writing propagandist Soviet works, such as a fawning cantata to celebrate Stalin’s 60^th birthday or one to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the revolution, but to no avail.

His genius shone through anyway, for genius remains free and irrepressible even with a yoke around his neck. Stalin’s bullies sensed that and went after Prokofiev like a pack of wolves pouncing on a wounded bear.

Prokofiev’s first wife Carolina (known as Lina) wasn’t a genius, but she was guilty of another irredeemable sin: she was Spanish, meaning foreign. And not just foreign, but one from a “capitalist”, at that time also “fascist”, country. She simply had to be charged with espionage and sentenced to 20 years of hard labour.

One might say that Prokofiev brought it all onto himself. After the revolution, he wisely left Russia, but unwisely returned in 1932. Anyone who has read the three volumes of his Diaries knows why.

Prokofiev and his contemporaneous West weren’t a good fit. On the one hand, he had to supplement his composing income by playing piano recitals, a career for which he was less equipped than his contemporary Rachmaninov, a lesser composer but one of the greatest piano virtuosos of his or any other time.

Prokofiev resented having to go on concert tours – like all geniuses, he knew his true worth. And there was another problem that made him disillusioned in the West: he knew his true worth, but the West didn’t, not quite. Prokofiev’s were essentially classicist sensibilities, but the West was demanding a different, atonal, modernist kind of music, best exemplified by Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and – most painful to Prokofiev – Stravinsky, a fellow Russian émigré.

Stravinsky was another magnificent Russian export, and he was deservedly hogging the limelight. Yet Prokofiev, another genius, was denied his fair share of it, one he knew he merited. His pride was wounded, and there were those serpentine NKVD seducers begging him to return and promising him all the glory and riches of the world.

In the end, Prokofiev’s hubris got the better of him and return he did, to the living hell known as Stalin’s USSR. To be fair, at first the Soviets were as good as their word. Prokofiev was feted and lionised, he was encouraged to compose more and more works, and he no longer had to play recitals to survive.

But then the hounding started, shrill (and ignorant) accusations of formalism, demands for propagandist music, sleepless nights spent expecting that proverbial midnight knock on the door, illness. What the post-mortem diagnosed as cerebral haemorrhage finished the job.

Yet not a single Soviet newspaper ran an obituary for one of the few true giants associated with Stalin’s realm. And even the leading Soviet musical periodical only reported Prokofiev’s death in a couple of brief paragraphs.

Just think about it: the Soviet Union was home to only two sublime composers (Shostakovich was the other one), one of them died – and that tragic event barely merited the briefest of mentions on page 116 even in a musical periodical.

There was a good explanation for it: the first 115 pages were devoted to another death, that of Stalin, who died on the same day. Or, to be more exact, Stalin probably died a few days earlier, but his death was only reported to hoi polloi on 5 March. The diagnosis was the same, cerebral haemorrhage, but the circumstances of Stalin’s death were mysterious enough to give rise to rumours of assassination.

The country ignored the passing of one of its greatest gifts to world culture, but threw a fit of hysterical sorrow after one of the most evil men in history croaked. Crowds wept in the streets of Moscow, a human throng tried to crush its way into the Hall of Columns, where those malodorous remains lay in state.

Hundreds of people were trampled to death or had their heads smashed when the crowd threw them against the police vans. Even in his death, Stalin didn’t lose his endless capacity for mass murder.

I don’t know how many of today’s Russians lead a life in which Prokofiev has pride of place. Quite a few, would be my guess, certainly in Moscow. Yet even they have to live a life charted by Stalin and shoved down their throats by his worshippers and heirs.

There was something eerily symbolic in those two men dying on the same day. Stalin won the battle for public adoration then, and he is still winning it 71 years later. But life everlasting has a different pecking order – and assigns different quarters to geniuses like Prokofiev and ghouls like Stalin.

Sergei Prokofiev, RIP.

I’m passionate, you are overzealous, they are extremist. And an outside observer who is none of those things, may think we are all the same.

This ought to remind us that philosophy is largely a science of definitions, which may be objective, subjective, absolute, relative, contingent and anything else you can think of. Now, few of our MPs can ever be accused of being philosophers, and yet they too are currently embroiled in a heated argument about definitions.

They feel politically obligated to rid Britain of extremism, which worthy intention we should all welcome. Yet before we ban something we have to decide what it is that we are banning. Specifically in this case, what is extremism, other than being awful?

That question is a brick wall against which our MPs are banging their heads without ever making a dent. I sympathise with their problem. Any definition of extremism can be either commonsensical or all-embracing, but not both.

One definition they are considering is “an ideology that undermines the rights or freedoms of others”. Alas, rather than being dented, the brick wall is getting sturdier. For a need arises to define the definition, which is never easy whenever it contains the word ‘rights’.

These days this nebulous word is used as a politicised description of aspirations and appetites. We are served up any number of rights: to marriage, education, health, development of personality, leisure time, orgasms, warm and loving family or – barring that – warm and loving social services, employment, paternity leave and so forth. Object strenuously to any or all of those, and you may be deemed an extremist.

The definition of extremism currently mooted in Parliament could easily be applied to, say, someone who finds the NHS ridiculous, abortion and euthanasia barbaric, or a full employment law ruinous. And if it can be so applied, it will be – such is the law of modernity that allows no exceptions.

Our parliamentarians state their objective as “cracking down on Islamism and far-right extremism”. That seems to give a free pass to far-left extremism, which the MPs either don’t recognise as objectionable or don’t believe any such thing exists.

Looking across the Channel, France has just enshrined the right to abortion in her constitution, the first country ever to do so. That could easily put anyone who objects to that practice into the rubric of extremism. Yet in half of the American states, the opposite is true: there an extremist is anyone campaigning for abortion on demand.

In Britain, both pro- and anti-abortion groups have been described as extremist, but the overall tendency is unmistakable on this or any other issue.

Anyone who is opposed to transgender ‘rights’, homomarriage, uncontrolled immigration, abortion, euthanasia, vandalism of history, socialism (as in the NHS), ‘liberalism’ (actually left-wing illiberalism), enforced secularisation, expansion of suffrage, promiscuous public spending, ignoring defence of the realm and so on can easily fall under any comprehensive definition of extremism our MPs are likely ever to agree on.

In other words, conservatism, especially the Christian kind, is certain to be the baby thrown out with the bathwater of “Islamism and far-right extremism”. Keeping it personal, I realise to my horror that I’m as extremist as they come. I really ought to denounce myself before others beat me to it.

By contrast, Thangham Debonnaire, Labour culture spokesman, doesn’t have an extremist bone in her body. Everything about her, except her name, is placidly moderate. In that spirit, she demands that the long tradition of playing Rule, Britannia at the Last Night of the Proms be discontinued.

According to Miss Debonnaire, that patriotic anthem is “alienating” to some people who feel their access to culture is thereby being blocked. And culture, according to her, must be “accessible to everyone”, especially those who are deeply offended by that song.

I don’t know if Miss Debonnaire specifically took exception to the line “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves”, but if she didn’t she should. The entire history of Britain, she must believe, is defined by slavery imposed on others. At the same time Britons themselves are slaves to capitalism, which Miss Debonnaire insists must be urgently “fettered”.

To me, she is a far-left extremist, a category that goes unrecognised in Parliament. Miss Debonnaire, on the other hand, must consider anyone like me as a dangerous far-right extremist to be euthanised at the earliest opportunity. Such is the moderate viewpoint.

Now, any reader, especially a British one, must insist that I can only earn the right to criticise other people’s definition of extremism by offering my own that meets all the exacting requirements. That I can’t do and, moreover, no one can.

No definition of extremism or any other political category can ever be all things to all men. One side’s extremist is another side’s man taking a principled stand, and vice versa. If we insist that all sides, and therefore all viewpoints, are equally worthy and valid, then good luck trying to define extremism – you won’t be able to.

Yet our MPs are bound by the vow of liberal egalitarianism. They can’t, for example, say that Christianity isn’t just different from, but better than, Islam, if only because our civilisation was founded as Christendom and not Islamdom. Or that republicanism is a political heresy. Or that – and here I’m stepping on Miss Debonnaire’s toes – that only classical, which is to say real, music should receive government grants.

If our MPs really want to define extremism, they have to choose sides. Either they see themselves as promulgators and defenders of our civilisation or its enemies. Once they’ve made that choice, then and only then will their task become possible.

In fact, it would become easy. For example, I’d define extremism as any fanatical and especially violent expression of hostility to our civilisation.

At this point, any MP trained in logic would demand that I define our civilisation, and I’d be only too happy to oblige. Our civilisation is Christendom, with all our core beliefs, tenets, laws and morality traceable back to the bedrock of our founding religion.

I’m aware of how woefully unhelpful I’m being. No MP sitting on any front or back bench shares my definition of our civilisation and consequently of extremism. In fact, they’d probably regard my definitions themselves as extreme and, if declared too vociferously, extremist. And if by some accidental mutation a few MPs would agree with me, they’ll keep that view to themselves if they wish to remain MPs for a while longer.

That’s their right – as long as they realise that exercising this right makes it impossible for them to come up with any sound and coherent definition of extremism. And if they can’t define it, they can’t really ban it.

They can’t even ban ‘Islamism’, which is only consistently pious Islam, without lumping it together with Christianity, Judaism and, in the long run, conservatism. Anything else would be seen as discrimination, and trust our legislators to give that good word a bad name.

It seems churlish to complain about a slight to my family while three great British heroes are suffering the same indignity. Fair enough, public good should come before private gripes.

But before I tell you of the affronts perpetrated on British history and my family (in that order!), I have to reveal the identity of the perpetrator.

She is Louise Simpson, ‘headteacher’ of what the papers describe as “the elite £17,000-a-year Exeter School in Devon”. Her proper title should be ‘headmistress’, which is what headteachers of girls’ schools have been called in England since the 19^th century.

Now, I realise that the old title is gender-specific and therefore offensive to our brittle sensibilities. But the problem shouldn’t have arisen in the first place because Exeter was founded in 1633 as a boys’ school. Such schools have always been run by headmasters, not headmistresses, which stands to reason, as traditions usually do.

However, modern obsession with ideological madness demands that the sex pack be thoroughly reshuffled, and augmented with dozens of new cards. That, I believe, is called ‘inclusivity’, a mass psychosis that produces many unsavoury symptoms.

‘Ms’ Simpson (she predictably insists on this perverse honorific) suffers from one such symptom in its most virulent form. That’s why she dumped the names of Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and General Sir Redvers Buller from school houses, saying they don’t “represent the values and inclusive nature” of the school.

A pedantic stickler may argue that a private boys’ school charging £17,000 a year ipso facto falls short of the highest standards of inclusivity. But that apart, such historical vandalism is as subversive as it is these days ubiquitous.

Sir Francis Drake was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. More important, he defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, making sure that ‘Ms’ Simpson’s bailiwick is called Exeter School and not Escuela de Exeter. Sir Francis also earned my undying gratitude because I’m so tone-deaf to Romance vowels that I wouldn’t survive in a Spanish-speaking country.

Sir Walter Raleigh also took part in that linguistic triumph, but then he blotted his copybook by playing a leading role in the English colonisation of North America. But for him, ‘Ms’ Simpson might not have sleepless nights worrying about the possibility of another Trump presidency.

Yet according to ‘Ms’ Simpson, Raleigh and Drake “had less than positive connotations”. Also cancelled for bearing the stigma of the same connotations is General Sir Redvers Buller, the hero of Zulu and Boer Wars, whose statue adorns central Exeter. In addition to their CVs, all three culprits were native Devonians, which is to say local boys. But that cuts no ice with ‘Ms’ Simpson.

Essentially, she and her ilk violate one of the seminal points of English common law by making today’s moral fiats, such as they are, retroactive. Messrs Drake, Raleigh and Buller couldn’t comply with the exacting demands of modern morality because they were unable to anticipate their advent centuries later.

Otherwise I’m sure Drake would have welcomed the Spanish invasion in the name of diversity, Raleigh would have sung From the Atlantic to the Pacific on marches in support of Red Indian rights, and Buller would have let the Zulus eat as many missionaries as they fancied.

Of course, ignorantia juris non excusat, as the Romans used to say, but ignorance of the law that doesn’t exist must at least be taken as a mitigating circumstance. Not for ‘Ms’ Simpson though.

Also caught in her crossfire and slated for similar cancellation are several benefactors of Exeter School, and here we finally come to the gaping personal wound I’ve suffered. For one of them is identified as Sir John Daw, who happened to be my wife’s maternal great-uncle.

Since Uncle John, as he’s known in the family, died when Penelope was a little girl, she couldn’t contribute many personal touches, other than the fact that he didn’t have much time for little girls, specifically her.

What she is absolutely certain about is that Uncle John never circumnavigated the globe, defeated the Armada, colonised America, wasn’t rumoured to be romantically involved with Elizabeth I or for that matter any other woman, and fought neither Zulus nor Boers nor anyone else.

Sir John was a successful solicitor, Chairman of the Devon County Council and a philanthropist. The last word does share one of its roots with ‘paedophile’, but even ‘Ms’ Simpson must be aware of the difference. So what’s her problem with Uncle John?

He himself was an Old Exonian, as were most male members of the family, including my brother-in-law. As far as I know, none of them has been implicated in any crimes, real or bogus.

Nevertheless ‘Ms’ Simpson is on a roll, firing broadsides with truly woke abandon. She has the zeitgeist billowing her sails, and her ship will sail on until it runs aground.

I hope you’ll forgive the naval metaphors, but all this talk about Drake and Raleigh has to add this slant to my prose. So I hope all those who observe our civilisation going under will join me in shouting “SOS!” at the top of their lungs.

Russians don’t just kill Ukrainians. They also do an increasingly good job killing other Russians.

Street and domestic violence, including murder, have shot up in the past two years. Some explanations of this upsurge are instantly obvious. Others lie deeper under the surface, which may make them even more destructive over a long term.

The most obvious reason is the demobilisation and homecoming of Russian soldiers completing their combat tour. Some of those veterans were murderers, rapists and even cannibals recruited out of prison camps. They were promised an amnesty in exchange for a six-month stint at the front, too good an opportunity to miss.

The promise was faithfully kept, and surviving serial murderers went back into the community, which community they promptly began to terrorise. I don’t know if a carte blanche to post-demob murder was part of the deal, but one could easily get that impression.

Yet even law-abiding recruits are so thoroughly brutalised in the army that they don’t return home the same rosy-cheeked innocents they were at the recruitment office. Beatings, torture and arbitrary executions are routine in the Russian frontline army. Soldiers refusing to go on suicidal attacks (‘meat storms’ in Russian army slang) are beaten to a pulp, raped, kept in icy holes filled with corpses, shot without trial, have their skulls smashed with a sledgehammer and so on.

A few months of frontline service, where such practices are routine, can turn even previously normal lads into sadistic brutes, especially since they are encouraged – often ordered – to treat Ukrainian POWs and civilians with sadistic brutality. And then they descend on their native towns and villages, with the line separating war from peace smudged in their minds.

A woman walking the streets of a Russian town looks, often also talks, just like her Ukrainian counterpart. A demob-happy rapist may ignore the nuances and treat the Russian the way he treated the Ukrainian.

Nor is it just violence against female strangers. Wife beating is a traditional Russian sport, and society has always treated it with good-natured indifference. I often cite Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer in which he describes a peasant who beats his wife within an inch of her life, which, according to the author, doesn’t diminish in any way his spiritual superiority over any Westerner.

Russian women, known for their forbearance, accept black eyes, busted lips and broken bones with equanimity. They often repeat the old proverb, “If he beats, he loves”, a sentiment that hasn’t quite caught on in the West.

That meek acceptance of savagery has been enshrined in the law. In 2017, perhaps in preparation for things to come, wife beating was decriminalised in Russia. First offenders now risk nothing harsher than a small fine, which puts domestic violence on a par with jaywalking.

That was before thousands of brutalised murderers, looters and rapists returned home with blood on their hands and savagery in their eyes. “Hide, honey, I’m home!” is becoming the slogan of Russian domestic bliss. Those women who dare complain are accused of militant feminism, which Russian courts treat as a terroristic crime.

Against that background, any growth of violence against women shouldn’t strike anyone as counterintuitive. Yet so far we’ve only probed skin-deep.

Deep subcutaneous shifts are occurring in Russian social mores and morality, especially in its relation to violence. For the past 10 years, especially during the past two, the Russians have been exposed to incessant all-pervasive propaganda demonising the 40 million people living just west of the country’s borders as subhuman.

Exterminating them is equated to culling a herd or spraying a field with insecticide. As a result, people’s nerve endings become cauterised and thus incapable of feeling normal human revulsion to violence. Their immune system no longer resists savage acts with the same fortitude; what used to elicit a gasp of horror now elicits an apathetic shrug.

The Russian state is also doing its level best to increase the volume of violence exponentially. Just look at the prison sentences meted out to those perceived as dissidents.

In my day (I left the Soviet Union in 1973), the harshest sentence for dissent was seven years in a labour camp. Most sentences were less severe: for example, my KGB interrogator, Major Sazonov, only threatened me with a year or two.

These days, someone expressing the mildest disapproval of the war can go down for 25 years or even for life, sentences unknown in a post-Stalin Soviet Union. Officially, Russia no longer has the death penalty, but anyone who has glanced at the papers over the past 20 years knows there are ways around that annoying obstacle.

One minor example: the treatment of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were outlawed in Brezhnev’s Russia, as they are at present. But back in the 1960s they’d typically receive a one-year sentence in a milder camp. Now they routinely get a fiver of “severe regime”, where survival rates are worse than with some cancers.

Beatings and torture in both police stations and prisons are neither exceptional nor even simply widespread. They are so ubiquitous as to be invariable. Throughout the Russian penitentiary system, inmates (including those in remand prisons) are beaten, tortured and raped by their captors. The powers that be don’t just condone or close their eyes on such crimes but actively encourage them.    

Add to this the war itself from which hundreds of thousands have come home crippled if at all, and you can see how the sum total of violence in Russia has gone beyond a certain critical mass. The whole society has become brutalised, with violence accepted as not just a necessary evil, but increasingly as not an evil at all.

Such are some of the traditional values so admired by Putin fans in the West. And these ‘values’ won’t disappear the moment the last shot of the war is fired. With the best will in the world, they’ll take decades to expurgate. And where in Russia have you ever seen the best will in the world?

Stalin asked that rhetorical question when someone mentioned that the Vatican wasn’t exactly happy with the outcome of the 1943 Tehran Conference.

It was wartime, and the number of divisions was a relevant criterion of national strength. The Soviet Union, for example, had some 300 divisions at the beginning of its war with Germany and roughly twice that number at the end of it.

At the time of the Tehran Conference, Britain’s 85 divisions weren’t a match for Stalin’s army but we still had the Vatican’s comfortably outgunned. Then again, the Pope didn’t need any soldiers (apart from a handful of those cute Swiss guards) and Britain did.

Now the world is facing the most dangerous time in post-war history, Britain must again take stock of her divisions. There’s no point in the Vatican doing so: the strength of that institution doesn’t depend on military muscle. Hence today’s Pope would answer the same question with the same single word: none.

However, if Andrew Neil is to be believed (and he is usually trustworthy), Britain could echo His Holiness by letting his answer reverberate through Whitehall: none. “We spend over £50 billion a year on defence,” writes Mr Neil, “yet the British Army could not field a single fully equipped division.”

I recall debates about the European Union some 30 years ago. Following my usual tendency to leaven gravity with levity, I voiced my support for a united Europe, provided it was united on a different basis.

“We should put an armoured division on Eurostar,” I suggested, “establish a beachhead at Gare du Nord, get some more troops across, take over Paris and then on to Berlin. That’ll unite Europe alright, under the aegis of a new British Empire.”

“A damn good idea,” replied my interlocutor in the same spirit. “Except we don’t have an armoured division.” His response was, I thought, as frivolous as my suggestion. It was as impossible for Britain not to have a single division as it was for her to harbour acquisitive designs on France.

Thirty years on, his jest has come true, to potentially catastrophic consequences. Yet even if Britain’s military strength or lack thereof isn’t tested in combat, the disgrace mentioned by Andrew Neil has to be a symptom of a deadly systemic malaise.

This malignant disease afflicts public administration in the UK, both elective government and civil service. Looking at the two front benches, I can’t remember a single Parliament in my lifetime so densely inhabited by cowardly, inept nonentities.

To be fair, the nonentity quotient may be at its highest now, but Britain has had and survived incompetent governments before. Our civil service, widely considered the best in the world, was able to step in and pull the country out of the quicksand. That’s no longer the case: over the past few decades the civil service has degenerated to its present miserable level.

Corruption reigns, and the worst kind of it, not just a few palms getting greased. Our government and His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition seem to be competing against each other in which can betray more of their sworn responsibilities.

How else can you explain the catastrophic state of our defences? Britain’s annual defence spend of £58 billion may be criminally low, but it’s still the second highest in NATO. So one has to wonder where that money goes.

Is it pilfered? Some of it doubtless is, but not enough to account for our denuded defences. Most of the problem is bungling procurement, lackadaisical administration and a general atmosphere of indifference and incompetence.

By comparison, France, though far from free of her own similar problems, spends £4 billion a year less on defence and yet, for the first time since Trafalgar, has more warships than Britain. How did that come about?

Obviously, while budgets are important, simply throwing money into the black hole of incompetence isn’t going to heal the underlying disease. Britain has the heaviest tax burden since the Second World War, and yet I’m hard-pressed to name a single public service that functions well.

The NHS? Don’t get me going on that.

Some seven million Britons (10 per cent of the population) are currently on waiting lists. It takes a fortnight or longer to get a GP appointment. And, perhaps most shocking, our cancer survival levels are up to 15 years lower than in some other civilised countries. France, for example, had better survival rates in the 1990s than we have at present.

Apparently, the NHS denies chemo- and radiotherapy to many patients, especially older ones. They’ve had a good innings, so there’s no point throwing good money after bad, seems to be the underlying philosophy. No wonder calls for euthanasia, voluntary or otherwise, are becoming more pervasive and shrill.

(My own Stage 4 cancer was treated privately, which is why I can still vituperate against the NHS over 20 years later.)

For obvious reasons, comparisons with France crop up often in my writing, so here’s another one. Roads in France are infinitely better than in Britain. And I don’t just mean the major motorways, whose upkeep is financed by tolls, nor even the N (national) highways maintained by the government. Even the small D (departmental) roads are regularly resurfaced, with nary a pothole anywhere in sight.

That’s something to ponder during long bumpy drives on British roads, with your car’s axels screaming bloody murder every few hundred yards, and your wife threatening to throw up unless you slow down.

The same goes for road construction. I’ve seen a 10-mile bypass on a French N road not far from us built in a couple of months. Replace months with years, and you’ll get closer to the likely length of a similar project in Britain.

Both Britain and France are largely socialist, with France even more so. Britain’s public sector spends 45 per cent of the GDP; in France that figure is closer to 60 per cent. But one suspects that centuries of dirigiste centralism have immunised France to socialism more than Britain’s relatively more recent exposure to the same blight.

If socialism has been drip-fed into France’s system in ever-increasing doses, Britain’s body was walloped with a huge dose within a few post-war years. The country was eventually brought to her knees in the 1970s, only then to lean on Mrs Thatcher’s mighty shoulder and rise again.

No such shoulder is in evidence now, and the country’s knees are buckling again. That’s devastating news for everyone who loves Britain and for the country’s allies who depend on her.

We pray that someone will pull the country out of the morass into which she is sinking, but no such saviour other than God is visible anywhere. And He seems cross with us.      

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, head of Britain’s armed forces, is certain that Putin won’t invade any NATO country. Why?

Speaking at a Chatham House defence conference, Sir Tony answered that question with exhaustive finality: “The biggest reason that Putin doesn’t want a conflict with NATO is because Russia will lose. And lose quickly”.

Article 5 of the NATO Charter, saying that an attack on one member is an attack on all, will be enacted, and “the inescapable fact is that any Russian assault or incursion against NATO would prompt an overwhelming response.”

How overwhelming? Do your own maths, suggested the admiral.

“NATO’s combat air forces, which outnumber Russia’s 3:1, would quickly establish air superiority,” he explained, while NATO’s ships would “bottle up” Russia’s navy.

“NATO has four times as many ships and three times as many submarines as Russia,” added Sir Tony and it’s “an alliance that is becoming stronger all the time.”

With Sweden and Finland joining, NATO is growing from 30 to 32 nations, “with a collective GDP twenty times greater than Russia. And a total defence budget three-and-a-half times more than Russia and China combined.”

“Plus NATO has the additional strategic depth of a population of over one billion,” he said. “And sitting above all of this is NATO as a nuclear alliance.”

You could see me wiping my brow even as we speak. Not only have I worried for no good reason, but I’ve also communicated my concerns to at least some of my readers. Then again, my problem is that I’m not good at maths.

Anyone who can add up would know that, for all of Putin’s bluster, there’s no way he’d ever consider attacking a NATO country. He knows the numbers as well as Admiral Radakin, possibly even better.

Now that my fears have been allayed, I can heave a sigh of relief and do a bit of historical revision. For, contrary to a popular misconception, Hitler didn’t attack the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. He couldn’t possibly have done so because the numbers were prohibitively stacked against him.

The principal offensive weapon of the time was the tank, and the Red Army enjoyed a 7:1 advantage over Germany, 4:1 at the Soviet western border. Moreover, Stalin’s tanks were not only more numerous but also better.

Of the 21,000 Soviet tanks, roughly 3,500 were brand new T-34 and KV models that had no analogues in the Nazi panzer force. That means Stalin had a greater number of advanced tanks than Hitler had altogether. Moreover, the Soviet equivalents of Germany’s T-1 and T-2 tanks, which made up the bulk of the panzer force, weren’t even regarded as tanks in Soviet nomenclature.

In warplanes, Stalin’s numerical superiority was a meagre but still impressive 3:1. And the quality of the Red Air Force was at least comparable to the Luftwaffe, slightly superior in some categories, slightly inferior in others.

Most of the 60,000 Soviet artillery pieces were new models, whereas the German artillery park wasn’t just grossly outnumbered, but most of it dated back to the previous World War.

The numerical strength of the Red Army was roughly twice that of the Wehrmacht, and Russia’s mobilisation reserves were vastly superior. Another critical factor was that Russia has a practically unlimited supply of natural resources, such as oil, whereas Germany relied on imports for most of hers.

Add to this the sprawling expanse of Soviet territory, known to have defeated earlier invaders all by itself, plus an undefeated Britain in Germany’s rear, and you’ll realise that Hitler couldn’t possibly have attacked Stalin. So did he?

I have it on good authority that he did. And came within a hair’s breadth of winning, only succumbing four years and 28 million Russian corpses later.

On paper, Hitler was so vastly outnumbered in just about every category that it was sheer madness even to conceive of something as foolhardy as Operation Barbarossa. But wars aren’t fought on paper. They are fought on battlefields, where many imponderables come into play.

One such has to do with a common-or-garden mosquito. That tiny insect you can barely see is capable of puncturing a thick human skin with its minuscule sting. How does it do it? By concentrating all its power on one point.

The Nazis used that very principle to rout the regular Red Army in the summer of 1941. If a division attacks a front sector defended by a single regiment, it’ll break through – regardless of the power ratios in other sectors. All it takes is audacity and generalship.

NATO is strong, but its strength isn’t distributed evenly. Its defences of, say, the Baltics are paper-thin. The Russian army has suffered horrendous losses in the Ukraine, but it’s now battle-hardened. It could indeed do to the Baltics what Putin promised to do to the Ukraine: occupy them within days.

That, according to Sir Tony, “would prompt an overwhelming response”. Allow me to be ever so slightly sceptical.

Article 5 isn’t a tripwire. It only says that NATO “will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary including the use of armed force to assist the Ally attacked.”

That falls short of a guaranteed commitment to use armed force. To deem such a response necessary NATO would have to show unity and resolve, commodities that seem to be in short supply. If NATO members are reluctant to supply the Ukraine with enough armaments to win the war, how prepared would they be to commit their own troops?

Many of the impressive figures cited by Sir Tony come from by far the biggest and most significant NATO member, the US. Yet the US commitment to NATO seems to be dwindling away.

Biden’s administration talks tough, but does much less than is vitally necessary. And Trump’s understated affection for NATO is widely known and never concealed.

Moreover, when it comes to a possible confrontation with Putin, Trump’s feelings may be informed by what former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull described as the “awe” of Putin.

“When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions,” said Mr Turnbull to Australian TV, “he’s like the 12-year-old boy who goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero.’ It’s really creepy.” 

Since the next US president will in all likelihood be either Biden or “the 12-year-old boy”, US participation in any overwhelming response can’t be taken for granted, and without her participation one has to wonder just how overwhelming that response would be.

One would be foolish not to have doubts about the strength of the bellicose spirit in at least some NATO members, such as Germany, France, Hungary, Turkey and yes, even Britain.

When President Macron suggested hypothetically that under some extreme circumstances France might consider sending her troops to the Ukraine, 68 per cent of French respondents in the subsequent poll were aghast. I doubt the results of similar surveys in the countries I’ve mentioned would be drastically different.

None of this is a show of defeatism. I hope that, push come to shove, NATO will marshal its resources, both material and spiritual, to send Putin packing. All I’m suggesting is that we shouldn’t put all our eggs into the material wicker basket woven by Admiral Radakin.

Let’s not forget that it’s not weapons but men who win wars. And men need more than just weapons to emerge victorious.