By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday

We have been utter fools.

We have treated Russia with amazing stupidity. Now we pay the price for that. We had the chance to make her an ally, friend and partner.

Instead we turned her into an enemy by insulting a great and proud country with greed, unearned superiority, cynicism, contempt and mistrust.

I have to endure, often several times a day, listening to people who are normally perfectly sensible and reasonable, raging wildly against Russia and Russians.

Once, I was just like them. I had the normal anti-Russian prejudice of so many Western people.

But, by great fortune, I am not like them now. I lived in Russia, I knew Russians as friends. I learned to distinguish between what was Russian and what was Communist.

And I saw something most people will never see – a pivotal event in history, when we could have changed the world for the better.

One of the most joyful moments of my life was the day Communism died in Moscow.

I could have sworn the sky was actually clearer and brighter, the people looked happy instead of downtrodden – even the revolting, corrupt traffic police, for once, went into hiding.

The litter bins were full of red-and-gold Communist Party membership cards, burning merrily in the late summer sunshine as they dissolved into grey ash.

So I drove my red Volvo through the liberated city, a lot faster than usual, proudly displaying the special yellow number plate (with its ‘K’ for ‘Korrespondent’ and its ‘001’ for Britain, top nation) which had up until then simply made me a target for bribe-hunters and officious cops who prevented me from going on picnics in the missile-crammed woods outside the city.

I even found myself singing the hymns of my childhood.

Just a few days earlier I had been sunk in the most abject gloom. Communism, after a long retreat, had struck back.

The reforming Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had been kidnapped in his Crimean holiday home.

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