The World

Putin massed 180,000 troops around Ukraine and demanded Ukrainian subjugation along with western withdrawal from eastern Europe. Biden warned against an invasion. Putin rolled ‘the iron dice’: on 24 February 2022, he announced a ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine: ‘To anyone who’d consider interfering from the outside … you’ll face consequences greater than any you have faced in history.’

Zelensky was asleep at home in the Ukrainian presidential compound when Russian rockets hit Kyiv. He and his wife Olena rushed to their two children. ‘We woke them up. It was loud. There were explosions.’ Zelensky decided to stay at any cost – and it was too dangerous to move his family as Russian commandos, landed by parachute, attacked the Triangle government district in a bid to assassinate him.

Moscow’s tanks raced towards Kyiv. Western experts and Putin’s epigones agreed on one thing: an era had closed, a new one had opened – and, within a few weeks, Ukraine would collapse …

 

 

* Crimea, home of Byzantine and Slavic, Genoese, Venetian and Ottoman entrepôts, was long the heartland of a Mongol khanate, ruled by the Giray dynasty, until 1783 when it was annexed to Russia by Potemkin. In 1853, Palmerston and Napoleon III invaded Crimea to challenge Nicholas I’s aggressive Russian empire. Its fall in July 1942 was one of the successes of Hitler’s summer offensive which almost won the war; but Stalin, suspecting that Crimean Tatars had welcomed the German invaders, ordered their deportation and replacement by Russian settlers. In 1954, Khrushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine.

* In 2015, Boris Nemtsov, opposition leader and Yeltsin’s deputy premier, was shot and killed near the Kremlin by Chechen assassins. In 2019, in provincial Tomsk, FSB agents poisoned opposition leader Andrei Navalny, again with Novichok; like Skripal, he barely survived.

* Yet American ingenuity was still rich: in 2020, Elon Musk sent a crewed SpaceX rocket into space, the first such private mission. He was already a galactic entrepreneur, launching satellites for internet communications. He was the creative maverick of the digital titans, a modern combination of Edison and Rockefeller, spiced with a touch of Cagliostro – born in South Africa, son of an Afrikaner entrepreneur and a former model – who started writing programs while living on a sofa and showering at the local YMCA. His Tesla electric cars made him the world’s richest man. Now he promised a ‘space-bearing civilization’, dreaming of ‘a self-sustaining city on Mars. That’s, I think, the critical thing for maximizing the life of humanity.’ This new galactic home for human families is far off – but no longer just science fiction.

* Not only had Xi visited America but his daughter Mingze was reading English and psychology at Harvard where she used a pseudonym but shared digs, cooked her own meals and attended lectures on Chinese history with a famed British professor.

* Lockdown did not stop conflicts outside Europe. In November 2020, in the latest skirmish in the disintegration of the Ethiopian empire, the high-handedness of the Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed alienated the Tigrayans, who had led the liberation from Mengistu in the 1990s. Abiy had fought Mengistu under the Tigrayans, rising to deputy intelligence chief. But now the Tigrayans returned to war. Abiy made an alliance with the Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki and attacked the Tigrayans, who counter-attacked and almost broke through to Addis before they were again pushed back.

CONCLUSION

There is such a thing as too much history. This may be a strange reflection for a historian who is just finishing a world history in a time of pandemic and European war. But the fetishistic obsession with curated versions of nations and empires in the past can blind one to the present and what really matters: people living today, and how they and their families wish to live. That is one of the reasons I chose to write this book through families – the measure of happiness for what one wants for one’s family defines what one wants for the world. Yet it is a balance. History matters: we long to know how we came to be who we are. ‘Life can only be understood backwards,’ writes Søren Kierkegaard, ‘but it must be lived forwards.’ History never dies; history is never history; it is kinetic, mutating and dynamic, a deathless arsenal of stories and facts to teach us how humans lived, but also to be deployed in the causes of today, good and evil, a mission complicated by the internet – that cesspit, treasure-trove and reliquary of hatreds and hobbies, truths, randomness and revels, calumnies and conspiracies. Yet it is our reverence for the legitimacy granted by history that gives it such lethal, propulsive power.