No, the first — and only — humans ever to have discovered America were Russians. They did it 14,000 or so years ago, back in the late Pleistocene, following migrating herds of edible fauna across the landbridge that then connected the easternmost tip of Siberia and the westernmost point of North America. Here were monsters: dire wolves, short-faced bears, saber-toothed tigers. But there were also huge creatures of abundant dumbness and blubber. It was an Eden of unimaginable plenty. And as with space, the Russians crossed the frontier first.

Now, I realize it is a stretch to call these pioneering Paleo-Siberians “Russian” — existing as they did thousands of years before the idea of the nation state even existed. Still, as a foundation story, this tar-deep history at least lends some much-needed grandeur to the emerging ambition of Tsar Donald’s second reign — Make America Russian Again. How else to read the world’s richest and most powerful nation’s craven subordination to Vladimir Putin and its abandonment of America’s Ukrainian and European allies? The charitable interpretation is that Trump and the boy Vance are avenging the genocide that the native Americans, the descendants of those Siberian wanderers, experienced at the hands of the post-1492 Europeans. Now, they are pivoting back to their true mother country. And if they can grab back Greenland too, well, screw you Vikings — not feeling so lucky now, are you?

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As silly as all this may seem, it’s hardly less implausible than the current working scenario, recently outlined by Britain’s former defense secretary Ben Wallace. In this reading, Trump and Vance are “clueless” dupes — victims of Russian propaganda, wilfully naive. They have spent so much time in their MAGA feedback loop that they have come to believe every piece of post-truth fanned their way by Putin’s disinformation machine. Democratic ideals don’t matter; the sovereignty of random backwaters like Ukraine doesn’t matter. The rule of law, the free press, free trade, freedom of speech: all this is so much wokery. All that matters is money and power and the preservation of Trump’s ego as the world’s biggest bully, its Nelson Muntz, haha.

And if you find it hard to believe that the World’s Greatest Democracy could elect a leader that dumb — well the only remaining alternative is that Trump is doing all of this on purpose. He has seen what Putin has achieved in Russia and he wants the same for America — or rather, for himself. Since like a Tsar, Trump is the state, and the richer, the more powerful, the more famous he is, the better for everyone but especially him. Putin has not achieved personal hegemony by strengthening civil society, creating a well-functioning state or improving the lives of ordinary Russians. Instead, he has run Russia like a mafia boss, terrorizing his neighbours, destroying his enemies, demoralizing his opponents, distorting truths, and basically murdering dissent via conscription — so that the only person anyone has to turn to is him.

Hence, Trump employing his pet oligarch Elon Musk as chief saboteur. The mission of DOGE is, of course, not to make government efficient — remember, we now live in opposite-land, nothing is true and everything is possible. It is rather to get rid of the competent people, the useful programmes, the necessary functions. As the historian of Ukraine Timothy Snyder has argued, a weak state is easier to manipulate. This, Snyder says, is Trump First, a policy of “deliberate weakness” which ultimately puts Musk and Trump’s emotions over the lives of normal Americans.

The great intellectuals of the MAGA movement usually cite Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as a vision of how to dismantle a democracy. But Orbán, naturally, learned most of his antidemocratic tricks from Putin. As with Sputnik, Russia got there first. Chaos, in short, is the point. “For which Russian does not love to drive fast?” wrote Nikolai Gogol in the celebrated conclusion of Dead Souls. “Which of us does not at times yearn to give his horses their head, and to let them go, and to cry, ‘To the Devil with the world!’?”

And here is a point that us cosseted and complacent Westerners often fail to grasp. Russia is habitually portrayed as a backwards country, a place that has somehow failed to meet the demands of modernity. That, indeed, is the reality for millions of ordinary Russians, living in “monotowns” such as Ulan-Ude or Krasnoyarsk, at the mercy of malfunctioning infrastructure, arbitrary police power, local corruption, and a lack of viable futures other than enlisting. Much of Dead Souls is taken up with complaints about terrible roads and weird innkeepers and paralytic peasants. But a land so vast, so unruly, also makes an amazing laboratory for the future — the future never arriving all at once, but sporadically, in jolts and leaps. Russia was and remains the most avant-garde place on earth.

Certainly, the 20th century was far more Russian in character than American — a point lost amid the Western triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War. Almost all of the West’s artistic leaps (African-American music aside) last century were initially taken by Russians: Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s Rite of Spring; Malevich’s Black Square; Stanislavsky’s productions of Chekhov for the Moscow Arts Theatre. The early Soviet filmmakers Eisenstein and Vertov revolutionized cinema. There has arguably never been a greater concentration of literary talent than the Russian “Silver Age” poets: Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Blok, Mandelstam. The Formalist literary critics — people like Shklovsky and Jakobson — pre-empted the French post-structuralists by decades with their concepts of “defamiliarization” and “laying bare the device”. Revealing how truth and meaning are constructed, it is little wonder that the worst Soviet artists could be accused of was “formalism”.

But these were just the artistic pioneers. The 1917 Revolutions unleashed the most avant-garde experiments in nationhood ever undertaken. “The streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes,” wrote Mayakovsky in “150,000,000”, his revolutionary poem. The Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization and collectivization would be — at the cost of unimaginable human suffering — an inspiration to Chinese communists and Western democrats alike. Free healthcare, social housing, and the advancement of women would soon be offered to Western voters as sweeteners for not turning fully Red. The Russians were also, naturally, the first people to put a dog and then a man and then a woman into orbit. Indeed, the three signature obsessions of contemporary Silicon Valley — colonizing space; living forever; and artificial general intelligence — were all core precepts of Cosmism, the quasi-spiritual scientific movement that influenced the Soviet space program. The Soviet elites were no less obsessed with gerontology than Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. They too dreamed of capturing Mars. Yet if “New Planet”, a 1921 painting by Konstantin Yuon is anything to go by, the Russians would have done so with a lot more style.

The conventional understanding is that all this breakneck pioneering came to a horrible halt with the fall of the Soviet regime in 1989. In reality, though, the ensuing chaos laid the conditions for a new experiment in capitalist authoritarianism of which Donald Trump is now the shining exemplar. This was where neoliberalism economics were pushed to their limits, oligarchs seized state assets, inequality and insecurity flourished, millions died from deaths of despair — and a vengeful strongman eventually emerged as the only person who could be trusted to keep things vaguely together. And, indeed, for all his disinformation experiments and his non-linear wars, Putin has brought a sheen of modernity to Russia. Hence, a dupe like Tucker Carlson can visit Moscow in a strange 21st-century echo of the visits that Western socialists once made to Soviet Potemkin villages — and be absolutely gobsmacked that there are Metro stations and supermarkets and iPhones and tasting menus.

Of course, for most of recent history, the idea that an American leader might envy his Russian counterpart would be absolutely absurd. Russia and America may both be continent-spanning nations with abundant natural resources and deep histories of slavery — but they have long endured like Cain and Abel, as the cursed and blessed sons. America has the dual aspect oceans, the navigable rivers, the benign climate, the easy-going neighbors, the abundant resources. It is playing Civilization on chieftain mode — to use an analogy from one of Musk’s favorite video games. Russian leaders, meanwhile, are stuck on deity mode, the hardest setting. Russia has trouble on every frontier; it has vast flatlands that make it easy to invade; it has huge tracts of uninhabitable permafrost; and it is shut out of the Atlantic — hence the obsession with Crimea as a window onto the Mediterranean. Russia’s citizens look upon America’s law courts, its civil society, its businesses, its opportunities, its lavishly funded universities, its blue jeans and rock’n’roll — and sigh.

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But the politics of envy cuts both ways. There is the more straightforward envy that the have-nots hold towards the haves, for their ease and security and luxuries. A far less examined but more potent political force is increasingly the envy of the haves towards the have-nots: for their perceived virtues, for the poetry in their souls, for their resilience and stubbornness. One of the strangest aspects of modern America is that no class seems quite so consumed with envy as the billionaires who now crowd around Trump, who have benefited from the easy-setting US economy only to find that their billions do not, after all, purchase them the unbending admiration of the masses, nor the power they desire, nor the immortality they crave. I doubt very much that the average resident of Columbus, Ohio or Gary, Indiana would find much to relish about life in Tomsk or Nizhny-Novgorod. But it’s not hard to see why an American would-be autocrat would look to an actual Russian autocrat and think: damn. Look at his weapons. Look at his gold. Look at the fear he inspires.

Russians have their pride too. Just as Americans tend to see their country, albeit without much evidence, as some uniquely free place, so Russians often cherish an image of themselves as a uniquely spiritual people — the tough ones, the hard ones, the ones who can withstand suffering. The ones who, unlike Americans, are never protected from the consequences of their actions and are a good deal less naive as a result.

Gogol saw far enough into the future to perceive an age in which his backwards nation had finally taken the lead. “Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me!” he wrote at the end of Dead Souls, picturing his homeland as an out-of-control troika, rushing headlong into the snow. “But no answer comes. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!” Whether the rest of American society will stand aside quite so obligingly as Trump and Vance, we shall see.

The most dangerous moment only became public knowledge many years later. Toby Ord’s The Precipice, about existential risks, goes into it in disconcerting detail.

At the time of the crisis, a flotilla of four Soviet submarines was patrolling the waters around Cuba. One of them, B-59, was detected by a US Navy surface fleet, which started dropping warning-shot depth charges into the water, in an attempt to force it to surface.

B-59’s batteries were low. Its air conditioning system had failed. The internal temperatures had reached something like 50°C and the carbon dioxide levels in its atmosphere were near-poisonous; crew members were frequently falling unconscious. The ship was too deep to hear radio traffic, and had been hiding for days, so did not know if war had already broken out. The explosions from the depth charges were like someone hammering on the hull.

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And, crucially, B-59 – and all three other vessels in its flotilla – carried a secret weapon: a torpedo with an atomic warhead, comparable to that of the Hiroshima bomb.

The captain of the ship, frantic and stressed, wanted to use that weapon on the fleet harassing them. He needed his political officer’s consent — and he got it. That would have been enough, on any of the other three vessels, to authorise launch. But “by purest luck”, as Ord puts it, B-59 also carried the flotilla’s commander, Captain Vasili Arkhipov. Arkhipov persuaded his brother officers to bring the submarine to the surface instead.

We don’t know what would have happened if Arkhipov had been on B-4 or B-36 instead of B-59 that day. Maybe they would not have launched their nuclear weapon; maybe it would not have led to nuclear war. But it very easily could have. Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defence, later said that a nuclear attack on US forces would have led to a full nuclear exchange.

Kennedy afterwards said that the Cuban missile crisis, at its peak, had had “somewhere between one out of three, and even” odds of leading to all-out war. He said that without knowing about Arkhipov’s role. Perhaps he exaggerated anyway, but it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that we came within a bad dice-roll, perhaps even a coin-flip, of utter catastrophe.

It is against that backdrop that I would like to talk about the Doomsday Clock.

Last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight. The clock has been maintained since 1947, when several nuclear scientists and other thinkers, including several who had worked on the Manhattan Project itself, had the sudden realisation, in the wake of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that for the first time humanity held in its hands the power to destroy itself. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Bertrand Russell, and Einstein himself were among the signatories. The clock is a metaphorical representation of how close the world is to destroying itself through technological progress. When it was unveiled its hands were set to seven minutes to midnight.

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It has, in the 72 years since its creation, never been closer than two minutes to midnight – until last week, 22 January 2020. The Bulletin’s scientists say that the twin threats of global instability and climate change are behind its decision.

Now. It would be unfair to say that the Bulletin’s scientists should have moved the hands of the clock closer when Vasili Arkhipov was arguing against starting a war. They couldn’t have, because they didn’t know. And in fact the whole of the Cuban missile crisis was initiated and resolved within a few days, too quick for the clock to respond. The Bulletin only adjusts its hands twice a year.

But Arkhipov’s intervention was just one of several such flashpoints during the Cold War. A perhaps more famous one came two decades later, in September 1983, when Lt Col Stanislav Petrov saw what looked like five US missiles approaching Russia on his early warning radar screen. Reasoning that a US strike would feature thousands of rockets, not five, he decided it was a false alarm, and didn’t tell his superiors. If he had, it may well have caused a war.

There are several others. US radar equipment in Greenland mistook a moonrise for a nuclear explosion; luckily Kruschev was in New York, so NORAD reasoned that he probably wouldn’t bomb himself. A B-52 crashed with two bombs on board; one came close to detonating. The failure of a relay station in Colorado caused Strategic Air Command to lose contact with NORAD; SAC got the entire nuclear bomber force ready for takeoff before they realised the error.

The whole of the Cold War is a story of us rolling the dice, time after time, and it never quite coming up snake-eyes. The hair-trigger mechanisms for deployment and the sheer power of the nuclear arsenals – plus the air of constant paranoia – meant that a terrifyingly small number of technical problems or human errors could have caused an accidental nuclear war and, potentially, given what we know about nuclear winter, the end of humanity.

Not that we’re safe now. The US still has hundreds of nuclear weapons. So do the former Soviet states, in decaying institutions. North Korea has developed the bomb and it seems Iran is trying to. But there aren’t two huge and belligerent nations squaring up, each with their fingers on the trigger of enough weapons to devastate most of the major population centres of the globe. If a nuclear war were to start with North Korea, it would be a disaster of unprecedented proportions; tens of millions would die. But if it had started in 1962 or 1983, it would have been a death toll of billions, and it’s not clear that anyone would have survived at all.

And, of course, climate change has the potential to — is likely to, in fact — cause enormous hardship for billions. But the IPCC’s central estimates are of devastating economic and environmental impacts and millions of deaths, not extinction-level incidents. They could be wrong; the impacts of six degrees of warming or more are largely unknown. But six degrees of warming is well outside what is expected, even if the world carries on emitting greenhouse gases at current rates.

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We always think we live in the most deadly time. Lots of Americans look back to the 1950s as a golden age of safety and security – but as Dan Gardner, the author of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, points out, at the time they were petrified (understandably!) of the new atomic weapons, and looked back nostalgically to the safety and security of the 1920s. “Hindsight bias” is the tendency we have to assume that whatever happened was inevitable and whatever didn’t happen could never have happened, so we think all the threats that we survived — and the Cold War had many of them — were never threats at all.

It is, though, absolutely ridiculous that the Doomsday Clock considers the very real problems of modern society — Trump being mad, Putin being machiavellian, the climate getting dangerously warm — as in any way as great an imminent and deadly threat as, say, the moment in 1952 when the USA and USSR tested their first thermonuclear devices within a few months of each other. And, yet, the Bulletin put that at just two minutes to midnight. This is not scientific risk assessment: this is PR.

You could argue that because it’s just PR, it doesn’t matter. It raises awareness of nuclear annihilation and climate change so that’s a good thing, right? But it does matter. The Bulletin’s announcement got (unearned, in my view) global media attention. It sounds serious and scientific – the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists must be using some objective measure of Global Danger! – and it scares people.

Hindsight bias being what it is, we don’t need any extra help to believe that we live in the most dangerous time ever. And people are already scared, of crime and violence and climate change and war and coronaviruses; I think it is actually OK for people to be less scared, and to remember that very recently, the world was a lot scarier.

If you doubt that, ask yourself if you would choose to swap positions, right now, with Vasili Arkhipov – in the dark, hot confines of a submarine hundreds of feet below the surface of the Caribbean sea, with American explosives clanging against the thin hull, wondering whether the world is already ending.

The country that produced Lech Walesa, the most charismatic figure of anti-Communist resistance in the 1980s, now has one of the most viscerally nationalist and xenophobic governments anywhere in the world. That is quite a statement: the competition for that mantle (think Trump; think Bolsonaro in Brazil; think Orban in Hungary or Italy’s Salvini) is intense.

In one crucial way, Poland stands apart from these others. The popularity of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has dominated politics since its landslide election win of 2015, has arisen in a place where the economy, on the face of it, is a soaring success. Poland has been one of the best performing countries anywhere in Europe for the past 30 years. GDP per capita growth has been the best of all the post-Soviet states.

Since accession to the EU in 2004, average yearly earnings have doubled between 2004 and 2016 (adjusted slightly down for inflation). The minimum wage has more than doubled. Unemployment has decreased by over 12 percentage points. Indices on absolute and relative poverty have also improved. In 2017 Poland had the highest economic growth in the EU. There has not been a single year of economic contraction, not even during the 2008 crisis that followed.

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Yet, in 2015, the moderate Civic Platform lost power, the PiS winning both parliamentary and presidential elections, seizing an absolute majority in the lower house, giving it the authority to challenge constitutional norms.

It seems to run counter to received wisdom, that the populists should take root when the economy is doing so well. But perhaps the glowing economic story is not all that it chieems. After all, GDP figures don’t count for much if you’re not earning much to begin with. When George Osborne used to talk about sharing the proceeds of growth, many from those Brexit-voting towns that had fallen by the wayside wondered “what growth?”.

In fact, much of the economic upturn in Poland has been uneven. Working hours are the longest in the EU and while notional employment is up, much of that comes through the gig economy. A quarter of the workforce is on temporary contracts.

The core vote for PiS can be found in predictable places – with the older generations in rural and small towns, among people with lower education levels, and staunch Catholics with conservative moral views. Geographically it is strongest in the east and in coal mining communities, where the industry has declined by two thirds since the end of Communism. Intriguingly the party has also gained support among a small but not insignificant band of so-called “hipster Right”.

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A generation of EU membership, and free movement, has given Poles a taste of wealthier countries (remember the supposed one million “Polish plumbers in the UK”?). Average wages in Poland are still three times lower than the EU average. Graduates collided with reality when entering the labour market. And the emerging middle class convinced themselves they were Europe’s lackeys.

The PiS has been artful in capitalising on the discrepancy. It has built a narrative of “Poland in ruins”, focusing on negative perceptions of public life and unfulfilled expectations, and omitting inconvenient facts about a higher standard of living and the well-over £120 billion Poland has received from EU funds. Andrzej Duda, the PiS-backed President, recently called the EU “an imaginary community” that brings no benefits.

Duda has been head of state since 2015, initially with the ultra-conservative Beata Szydlo as his prime minister. But she was replaced in 2017 with Mateusz Morawiecki, reportedly at the request of the man behind Duda’s throne, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. As party leader, but with no formal role in government, Kaczynski pulls all the strings, demanding loyalty and rarely giving it back.

As with Trump, as with Bolsonaro, it is the culture war that resonates, and history has left a deep suspicion of both Russia and Germany. Relations with Russia are complicated. Unlike other far-Right, nationalist movements, there is little evidence that the Kremlin is operating behind the scenes – notwithstanding suggestions that Russia might have been involved in the 2010 plane crash that killed Jaroswlaw’s twin brother, Lech Kaczynski. The historic enmity is too strong, and public opinion wouldn’t wear it. Now there are even signs that the official media are warming to Moscow.

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The asylum crisis provided PiS with the perfect opportunity to revive its fortunes ahead of the 2015 elections. Mixing xenophobia with the rhetoric of martyrdom, Kaczynski described refugees as carriers of cholera, dysentery and “other, even more severe diseases”, which is where Germany comes in.

There is something about Angela Merkel that sets off Polish nationalists. She stands accused variously of supporting illegal migration, tolerating Nazis and introducing permissive social reforms (how those might be reconciled is anyone’s guess).

Merkel’s calmness under fire only exacerbates a sense of resentment and envy, towards Germany, and increasingly towards all things Brussels (which is seen as an offshoot). Each time the European institutions warn Poland that its government is defying its rules, it provides the populists with ammunition.

At the heart of the battle is the PiS’s assault on a free media and judiciary. National television is now a Soviet-era propaganda tool. Dozens of journalists have been fired, in several cases because they refused to broadcast fake news stories about the opposition. State TV dropped its annual coverage of the country’s biggest charity event, which raises millions each year for sick children, because its organiser also campaigns for sexual minorities. Senior figures in public radio and television will be appointed, or dismissed, by the treasury minister rather than the national broadcasting council.

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In October 2018, the European Court of Justice demanded that Poland stop a policy that was forcing dozens of supreme court justices to take early retirement, allowing the government to pack legal benches with loyal supporters.

This announcement followed an unprecedented move in December 2017 to trigger a so-called Article 7 procedure aimed at blocking its efforts to limit judicial independence. If fully implemented, it would deprive Poland of voting rights. More punishment, more victimhood. But it’s hard to see what else the EU can do, short of kicking Poland out, which given the state of Brexit could lead to other populist regimes in Central Europe, such as Hungary, choosing to go.

The Hungarian model of self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy” is rarely far from mind when considering Poland. As with Viktor Orban’s regime in Budapest, the Polish government has initiated a series of populist (and popular) economic reforms, including reversing an increase in the pension age, increasing the minimum wage and introducing a programme for house building. It is quite prepared to break the EU’s borrowing rules, revelling in the prospect of another battle. Poland gladly takes billions of euros from the EU, whose cultural values its government holds in contempt.

But the schism in Polish society is more pronounced than ever. Last month, the Left-leaning mayor in the northern port city of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz, was murdered while addressing a charity auction on stage.

The town was the birthplace of Solidarity and has long been a bastion of liberal opposition. Adamowicz, who was first elected mayor in 1998, turned the city into a haven of liberal democracy and tolerance, where immigrants were welcomed, and gays and lesbians did not need to feel threatened. He was denounced for being a criminal who would let terrorists into Poland.

The 27-year-old assailant had a history of mental illness and violence but no clear political motive.  True to form, state media showed little remorse or sympathy for Adamowicz. Initially they blamed the opposition for stoking tensions – although such was the backlash that even they were eventually compelled to tone down their line.

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So against this backdrop, what hope does the PiS have in this key election year? Will it consolidate its power over the various votes (European ones in May, followed by parliamentary elections in the autumn)? Or will its power surge falter? There were tentative signs last October, in regional elections, that not everything was going its way: it failed to take control of a number of areas it had targeted, particularly in Warsaw and other big cities.

Civic Platform, on the other hand, fared moderately well, tapping into middle-class fears regarding the PiS’s direction. But the centre in Poland is suffering from the same problem as it is elsewhere in Europe. In country after country social democracy and Christian democracy have been associated with tired ‘elites’, turning off voters. In Poland, though, it appears there is room for disruption, and an interloper is gaining momentum. This week, Robert Biedron who is Left-wing and gay, launched a new party: Wiosna (which means Spring).

In a country where the Catholic Church holds sway, you might think that a party targeted at progressive Poles, with liberal policies regarding abortion and homosexuality, would be a non-starter. But Biedron is garnering support by being unashamedly different, and appealing to those appalled by the Right and ignored by the liberals. Could he become the next Macron, as he seeks to be? Or will he split the anti-nationalist vote in the forthcoming elections? That remains to be seen.

For now, the trajectory is still in the direction of the PiS, particularly as the state media and the judiciary can now be relied upon to do its bidding. There is, it seems, more life in the Polish populists yet.