When the movers and shakers of London, Paris or Berlin compared the rather vulgar Führer with Stalin and his works, it was no contest. In 1936, when that charming Herr Ribbentrop arrived in London as ambassador, it was just 18 years since the Romanovs had been machine-gunned in the cellar in Yekaterinburg and thrown down a mineshaft, and the Russian ruling class had either been hanged from lamp-posts or had fled for their lives to the West. Hitler and his gangsters seemed the bulwark against rampant Bolshevism. It took rare Englishmen – Churchill, of course, but also Duff Cooper and Anthony Eden – to see an evil in Hitler with which there could be no compromise.

As Haslam shows, the story of the early years of the Soviet Union was something of a study in failure. The important thing from the leadership’s point of view was to establish the revolution across the former possessions of the Romanovs (that was Stalin’s special determination), and then to export it. It took the crushing of the Kulaks and the purges to achieve the first goal, but exporting revolution proved considerably more difficult.

There were high hopes, in the immediate aftermath of the Armistice, that the first successful transplant of the Bolshevist rootstock might be in Germany; but there were splits and factions there, and the message itself became unpopular. Germany, unlike Russia, had prospered before the war because of capitalism; and there was not, even in the grim years after 1918, a critical mass of Germans willing to overthrow that system.

The Nazis were always nationalists, rather than socialists. Their ethos, which offered the Jews as scapegoats, did not gainsay capitalism. To all but the Jews and other “enemies”, capitalism promised prosperity, security and above all a recovery of the pride of the German people. The Marxist-Leninist message was cruder, more downward looking, and sought to remove the individualist spirit on which German genius and culture had always thrived. It could not match Hitler’s rabble-rousing message of national self-interest.

Other attempts to export Bolshevism, as Haslam shows, failed too. The General Strike should have provided an opening in Britain in 1926, but when a cheque arrived from Moscow to help the workers’ cause, Walter (later Lord) Citrine, the acting leader of the TUC, sent it back. Efforts to undermine parts of the British empire failed, too. After 1931, the Soviet Union tried to exploit the struggle between China and Japan over Manchuria, but Japan prevailed.