Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine this week is bad news for the hapless victims, but every ghastly cloud of ordnance detonated in anger must, one hopes, have a silver fulminate lining. Happily, for lovers of nostalgia, this blast of icy Arctic air sweeping in from Moscow is another last hurrah for the Cold War, together with its ubiquitous shrapnel of cultural-revolutionary kitsch.

Who among us of a certain age can claim not to have missed the chilled yet menacing aesthetic that accompanied the rise and the fall of the dictatorship of the proletariat east of the mighty Volga, and which has morphed onto the mafia state Putin lords over? John le Carre, Checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin Wall, the Lada automobile (Forbes magazine called it the “boxy stalwart of socialist motoring”), the Stasi and the KGB, Sputnik and Laika, the communist mongrel who on a flight into space in 1957 became the first dog with a valid reason to bark at the moon?..