* 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.