The end of the USSR on 26 December 1991 closed a seventy-four-year period unlike any before in history. Competing visions for the future of humanity led to a global struggle that several times nearly ended in a nuclear holocaust. To generations of Westerners used to the relative predictability of the original ‘long twilight struggle’, the ‘new world order’ after the Cold War was unfamiliar and therefore unsettling. The only certainty in international affairs was now uncertainty, and decades-old concepts like “ideology”, “subversion” and “radicalisation” virtually overnight became relics of a dangerous time gone by.

Having paid a steep price tackling totalitarianism since 1917, the West complacently neglected those valuable lessons after 1991. In 1992, for instance, MI5 stopped monitoring political subversion. That same year, US political scientist Francis Fukuyama articulated a view others in American government shared, declaring ‘the end of history’ from an ideological standpoint. Historians the world over must have cringed at such euphoric triumphalism, understandable though it was.

Within ten years – during which Western powers largely focused on domestic affairs while some nations violently disintegrated, genocide unfolded and Islamicist extremism spread – even Fukuyama, to his credit, revised his opinions. On 11 September 2001, “ideology”, “subversion” and “radicalisation” roared back into mainstream discourse – and after a decade of concentrating on economic growth, the West was predictably short on ideas. Only after years of combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere as part of ‘the long war’ on terror did political leaders again acknowledge that in international affairs, ideology does matter after all.

Examining Bolshevik subversion and British responses to it from 1917 to 1929 reveals striking parallels with the present. A deep recession forced London to trade even with regimes as openly hostile as Moscow, dividing politicians and voters alike on how to balance the creation of much-needed jobs with safeguarding national security. Meanwhile, Bolshevik security organs increasingly isolated Russian citizens by proscribing interaction with foreigners and tightening censorship. Yet there are also crucial differences, which make Britain in the early twenty-first century less capable of handling the Russian State threat than in the early twentieth.