How much more pleasant it is, as long as you are not delayed by the wrong kind of snow, to travel by train rather than by car, certainly for long distances. On Friday I went by train from King’s Cross to Perth; it took six hours. In that time I managed to read much of Who Lost Russia? by former Reuter’s correspondent in Moscow, Peter Conradi.
Conradi discusses all the different features that led from seemingly promising East-West relations in 1990, when Andrei Kozyrev, the then Russian foreign minister, declared “Democratic Russia should and will be just as natural an ally of the democratic nations of the West as the totalitarian Soviet Union was a natural opponent of the West”, to the current climate of mutual suspicion and delicate diplomatic relations under President Putin.
