History Fiend

We ask four historians whether the demise of one of the 20th century’s superpowers was as inevitable as it now seems. Soviet poster dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution and IV Congress of the Communist International, 1922. Wiki Commons. ‘No one has suggested a convincing alternative scenario’ Rodric Braithwaite,  British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91) and author of  Armageddon and Paranoia: the Nuclear Confrontation  (Profile, 2017). People still argue about the fall of the Roman Empire. They are not going to agree quickly on why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did. Some think it could have lasted for many years, others that the collapse was unforeseeable. Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident scientist, foresaw it decades before it happened. Victory in war took the Soviet armies to the centre of Europe, where they stayed. The Soviet Union’s seductive ideology had already given it influence across the world. But after Stalin’s death in...

The global crisis wrought by the First World War prompted the birth of free mental health care. Photograph of the matron and staff of the Lady Chichester Hospital, Hove, 1921. East Sussex Record Office. Free mental health care began 100 years ago, after the First World War, when a handful of doctors and voluntary workers established clinics and hospitals that drew on the ‘talking therapies’ used to treat shell-shocked soldiers. One of the first outpatient psychotherapy units in Britain was the Tavistock Clinic, which opened on 27 September 1920 at 51 Tavistock Square in the Bloomsbury area of London. ‘My dream has come true’, said its founder, the Scottish neurologist Hugh Crichton-Miller. He and six other doctors worked  pro bono  to treat early signs of mental illness, referred to then as functional mental disorders. Crichton-Miller wanted ‘to bring modern treatments for such conditions within reach of those who cannot afford specialists’ fees’. Students, clerks and housewiv...