So, farewell 2021 — or was it 2020 all over again?

Amid the perpetual purgatory of the pandemic, it feels as if time has been forcibly paused: we stand powerless in the path of sweeping government restrictions, constantly reminded of our duties to the state, and unable to travel freely.

Such feelings have been common throughout European history, perhaps in its most extreme form in the Soviet Union, whose collapse was marked on Christmas Day thirty years ago with the purging of the hammer and sickle from the Kremlin. 

For an ideology that claimed to be revolutionary, we forget just how backward-looking — and static — the Soviet state was in its death throes. When the former dissident Václav Havel assumed the Presidency of Czechoslovakia after the Union’s demise, he moved into the former residence of his Soviet tormentors: Prague Castle. Much to his surprise, he couldn’t find a single clock anywhere. Then he realised the Soviets had no need to monitor time: they believed their success was predetermined. It had stood still, not just there, but across the whole country. Arguably across the entire Iron Curtain. 

The whole aesthetic of communism was sterility: the same charmless party apparatus with buttoned-up coats and colourless expressions. Its ideology was fixed, wedded to impenetrable texts authored by the state’s long-dead architects. To adapt was seen as a betrayal of cast-iron principles. Ironically, this was itself a falsehood — far from being a man of principle, Lenin’s success was as much born of pragmatism at the sharp point of bayonet as it was of immovable doctrines. 

No, it was not the death of revolutionary fervour, but its restoration, that did for the Soviet Union. When President Gorbachev assumed power, his policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) — whilst blissful relief for the millions living under socialism — started an avalanche that eventually destroyed the entire system. 

In short, the values of the Soviet leaders had eroded. Whilst still seeing themselves as the inheritors of a great tradition, they became its gravediggers. Had the Soviets wanted to send tanks into Berlin in 1989 — as they had done in Warsaw and Prague in 1956 and 1968 respectively — they had the military power to do so. But the new leaders, thankfully, no longer had the nerve or the confidence in their own principles. 

As the historian Tony Judt summarised: “In the story of Communism’s demise, the remarkable flowering in Prague or Warsaw of a new kind of opposition was only the end of the beginning. The emergence of a new kind of leadership in Moscow itself, however, was to be the beginning of the end.” 

This matters because, in the final vestiges of the festive season, we can think more deeply about the dangers of moving too fast. Politicians and pundits call for new restrictions, new leaders, new initiatives. Everything is ‘radical’, ‘unparalleled’, ‘unprecedented’. The hyperbole of advertising has infected us all. 

Yet to play along with this is to indirectly play into the revolutionaries’ hands — to accept a vision of the world where the only way to invoke change is through radicalism. Fundamentally, too many sensible people are fighting on the enemies’ terms, forgetting that to accept the rhetoric of revolution is to accept their version of the future. 

The essence of conservatism is not revolution or radicalism, but moderation and evolutionary change. Brexit was achieved through just that principle — democracy, not extremist action. The image of Margaret Thatcher as the ‘Iron Lady’ — a moniker gifted to her by the Soviets — is revealing. In reality she was much more cautious: a true conservative. Her ‘radicalism’, if that’s the right word, was forced on her by her enemies. 

If the allure of the root-and-branch reformist hadn’t pervaded, perhaps Tony Blair — or should I say ‘Sir Tony’ — would never have been able to build the legal apparatus (the Human Rights Act, for instance) which has so handicapped successive Conservative governments. Likewise, he could never have been as bold on immigration had it not been culturally acceptable to be so. Iraq and Afghanistan may never have happened were it not for his moral certainty. 

The instinct to start afresh, to wipe the slate clean, is endlessly attractive — after all, it’s easier to sell a product if you promise it offers something new. But incremental changes are ultimately far healthier in the long run — like traditions that evolve slowly over time. 

The supreme irony of the Soviet Union is that its ideology permitted neither further revolution nor the gradual reform we are blessed with in Britain. It was like a fire, lit in haste, burning through its reserves until, in a final gasp of flame, it put itself out.

In 2022, therefore, we should beware the rhetoric of the radical, discard the talk of unparalleled transformation, and remember the dangers of accelerated change. In short, we should celebrate what makes our political system one of the most successful in the world: its ability to manage time without ever seeking to control it.