Fathers as much as mentors — Igor was also a father figure as well as a mentor. I saw them as similar, but in my mind they probably figured as dissidents. Igor was not what was called a dissident in the Soviet Union because he was a critic from within the system, but in a broader sense one could regard him as somebody who was always ‘agin the government’, like my father. It interested me, the comparison between what that meant in the two systems, because it was a somewhat heroic role in the Soviet Union — it was a given that you were on the side of right. There was a sense that that was a matter of bravery, whereas in Australia you might try to cultivate a heroic mode, but the people around you only thought it was a bit ridiculous.

But I wanted to find out what the Soviet Union was like. On the Left, they hoped it was good, but they didn’t know anything. And on the Right, they hoped and affirmed that it was bad but also didn’t know that much. So, I was really curious to know — what can this be like?

When I went to America, I got involved in arguments about the ‘totalitarian’ model, because of what I saw as inbuilt political bias. In other words, once you call something totalitarian, you have explained that it was bad. I started to object on principle as a historian to the idea that anything can be run fully from above. It then became interesting to think about what was going on below, so I decided to try and write social history, which nobody was doing at that point.

Labour history was very important for Marxist historians of the Soviet Union, such as Moshe Lewin, Ronald Grigor Suny, and Diane P. Koenker, and they felt that labour history had a peculiar importance in the Soviet context because, after all, the power had been taken on behalf of the workers. Now, from the work I did on education, I became interested in the question of social mobility, because I couldn’t understand the phenomenon of ‘proletarian preference’, a term which is in all the educational materials. I battled and battled to try and work out what it was. Finally, I decided it was ‘affirmative action’ on behalf of workers, but also on behalf of minorities, small nationalities, women, and so on. So, I developed this picture of what happened to the promise of the revolution — not so much a nice, straightforward betrayal, à la Trotsky, of the working class, but rather delivering that promise in a way that no theoretically literate Marxist could accept. In other words, saying ‘what we’re offering workers is upward mobility’.

Because of the extremely interesting phenomenon of its collapse — unpredicted by everybody. From the point of view of being a Soviet historian, there was a completely unexpected shift in perspective — the ground moved under you when it turned out that what you were writing about was not an ongoing thing like you had assumed, like it or not, but it was a finite thing. It was an episode. Once it’s an episode, it’s got a birth and a death, it’s got a life story. I was interested to see what the shape of that life story would be.

I was very struck by the way the Soviet Union broke up, which is that the leaders of the republics took their republics out. Now that’s interesting, as it runs counter to the natural story, which is ‘the oppressed people of the Soviet Union rose up and overthrew their rulers’. Given that the leaders of the republics led them out, it became clear to me that republican and regional leaders ought to have been a lot more present in my picture of how the Soviet Union was run.

Well, of course, there’s retrospect there making it look better. I experienced that era as somebody who was going to the Soviet Union for a couple of weeks to a couple of months, more or less every year, right through it. What was particularly striking was that it was stable to the point of tremendous boredom. And secondly, this extremely boring person goes around saying basically we’ve done everything, we’ve achieved ‘developed socialism’, or ‘really existing socialism’, or whatever. What interested me there is that if you make a checklist, that’s not such a wildly ridiculous claim, but certainly anybody with an emotional investment in socialism is likely to feel it’s a parody.

They were nice films as well. They didn’t make great demands on you. You’re right. I suppose I like ironic outcomes — that a revolution that started with such passionate conviction should end up in that. But I didn’t put that there to annoy socialists; it’s something that I also think is partly true.

Again, the fact of the Soviet Union’s collapse and that it separated into its national republics does appear to impose an imperial and colonial frame on it. But the term ‘empire’ was not used really at all — except on the right in American Sovietology — until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then suddenly everybody, including on the Left, is talking about it as an empire because of the feeling it must have been an empire if it could break up into constituent parts. I’m not taking a position that ‘no, it wasn’t’; I’m just trying to point out that’s a bit complicated. First of all, empire, at least in a Marxist sense, is meant to describe an exploitative relationship, where the metropolis is meant to be profiting at the expenses of the colonial peripheries. It is by no means clear that this happened. In fact, I think that was not the case, at any rate latterly in the Soviet Union. I don’t really know how much it would stand up earlier. If you think about investment during the first and second Five Year Plans in the late 1920s and early 1930s, for example, there’s a lot of investment outside the heartland.

Russians felt that very strongly, rightly or wrongly. I would have been quite surprised to hear it at first but in the eighties it became more or less common currency, and that’s partly because Russian nationalism increases among the writers and so on. ‘We are subsidising all kinds of people, we’re subsidising those Central Asians, we’re subsidising the Eastern Europeans, and what do we get out of it? Are they grateful? No.’ The initial reaction to the breakup of the Soviet Union — this is impressionistically based on things people were saying — was that it’s very bad and very regrettable, but on the other hand, it does take a burden off Russia.

I don’t think they even let them know.

No, absolutely. But the war is the making of the Ukrainian nation, finally, and on top of that, it’s a multinational nation, with Russian Ukrainians being bombed just like any ethnic Ukrainians.

I read the comments in the press about how that argument of Putin’s was self-evidently ridiculous. But there’s a certain relation to reality in the sense that that was the first stable Ukrainian state in more or less the boundaries now — not counting Western Ukraine, which gets added later — created by the Bolsheviks, and no doubt in part for the reasons that Putin is suggesting. After all, they were very anti–Russian chauvinism. Putin’s attitude to Lenin is, of course, interesting in that most Russians who like Stalin like Lenin too. I can’t really think of anybody else who takes a position that is more or less pro-Stalin but is anti-Lenin. And on quite rational grounds. I mean, Lenin is the nation-destroyer, right? And then Stalin is the nation-builder.