It was back in 2015 that Harvard professor Stephen M Walt voiced his fear that Russia’s emerging worldview was proving it to be “a throwback to the 19th century”. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, seven years before the invasion of Ukraine, he warned Vladimir Putin has “a 19th-century outlook that places territorial expansion ahead of peace on the list of national priorities”.
The accompanying illustration showed Putin dressed as the Michael J Fox character in Back To The Future, next to the time-travelling DeLorean, its gull-wing doors open. The barbaric campaign to bring Ukraine under Moscow's yoke now seems less an anachronistic throwback to the Great Game of the 19th century or even the Cold War, and more an ominous opening salvo in a new, dark era of Russia.
As statesmen and thinkers across the globe scratch their heads and desperately guess at where the war might be headed – escalation? prolonged occupation and insurgency? sudden, surprising peace? – that De Lorean would come in handy for a glimpse of our future.
A young, Russian-born Jewish writer who pondered the course of civilisation during the Second World War now comes to mind. Isaac Asimov was to become an extraordinary polymath, a towering figure in science fiction, and a respected scientist in his own right.
But in the early 40s, as Europe burned, this son of Petrovichi who emigrated to the US as a toddler was barely out of his teens when he started out on his most lasting work. The Foundation series of stories imagines a far future in which a galaxy-spanning civilisation is on the verge of collapse and a new dark age looms.
But there may be a way to salvage learning and shorten the coming barbaric era, thanks to a science known as “psychohistory” pioneered by the all-knowing Hari Seldon. The resultant series of books may not be anyone’s notion of great literature - long passages are all too evidently written in a hurry - but Asimov was brimming over with brilliant ideas (only fitfully captured in the recent Apple TV+ series).
His original inspiration was said to be Edward Gibbon’s History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, but it’s hard to avoid imagining that the thoroughly atheist Asimov owed at least some of his story to his Jewish roots. What is Seldon if not a sci-fi updating of a Biblical prophet? And don’t the runic speculations of psychohistory have at least a hint of Talmudic argument about them? The truth, of course, is that a real-life Seldon’s prognostications would be of no greater value than the wittering of a madman.
The DeLorean is parked forever in the present, and the future is unwritten: much though our mind may be whirring overtime during the current crisis to guess at what lies ahead. From a very young age, humans love to listen to stories and want nothing more to know than how they end, and that fruitless desire remains sometimes even amid the most calamitous events in the real world. Still, we can take comfort in a line from Foundation, when Asimov wrote: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
If that’s true, you know who will triumph in this catastrophic, needless war.
