I was in St Petersburg for this, in a tiny flat near Narvskaya metro. It was miserably cold. There was very little food. It was thrilling, exciting, terrifying, confusing, wonderful. We had hope. https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC/status/1342576157594628098

How little food? I called my friend in Warsaw who was coming on NYE by train. I asked him if he had a pencil for my shopping list. I began: “Salt and pepper...”

“Oh,” he said. “It’s like that...”

That week the army sent truck around to pull down the “Land, Peace, and Bread” signs from all the bakeries, lest the several-block-long queues of people get too angry. Our biggest score was packs of vacuum sealed lasagna from Italy, with expiry dates of 1990 and 1989. $5 a pack.

The kiosks had chocolate bars and Bulgarian vegetable “ikra”, and everything else they had was booze. Not whisky or even vodka. Blue liquor from Finland. Like, bright, electric, raspberry icee, holy shit BLUE.

Meanwhile the elderly queued up outside all the metro stations selling literally everything and anything they owned, having seen their retirement savings savaged by the hyper-inflation that was just beginning and would rapidly worsen.

They sold everything: their shoes, their toothbrushes, their hats ... I looked at their faces and realized that for the oldest of them this was the second time in their lives they’d needed to resort to this. There was a system. They knew the drill.

The inflation was so severe we’d wait until the last day of the month to pay our phone bill so it went from dollars to pennies. Cash exchange kiosks regularly ran out of cash. It was an utter societal meltdown.

I’d rather not go through this again if I have a choice.

So when I see republicans minimizing the threat of Russia, playing down the seriousness of exactly how far desperate people will go to win, I get angry. The peaceful end to the Cold War is being squandered by fools with no sense of history and thus no vision of the future.