The World

* 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.