The shift is born of despair, as any prospects for international revolution recede. But if it is utopian to hope that international support is around the corner, how much more so is it to wager on the impossible – autarchic socialism?

Party activists are hounded in great numbers, forced to betray others, to confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations

did October lead inexorably to Stalin? It is an old question, but one still very much alive. Is the gulag the telos of 1917?

The party’s shift after Lenin’s death, from that plaintive, embattled sense that there had been little alternative but to strive in imperfect conditions, to the later bad hope of Socialism in One Country, is a baleful result of recasting necessity as virtue.

And in the traducing and misrepresentation of opponents

Those who count themselves on the side of the revolution must engage with these failures and crimes. To do otherwise is to fall into apologia, special pleading, hagiography – and to run the risk of repeating such mistakes.

What could be more inimical to any trace of teleology than those who take account of the sidings of history?