We are approaching the centenary of the First World War. A hundred years ago this year, Europe was thrown into a bloody conflict that could have been avoided through a political solution. Imperial diplomacies had failed the peoples of Europe, who paid for it with the lives of a whole generation.

In the mid-1920s, the Soviet government embarked on a campaign to “engineer human souls”. How? It unleashed the full power of the state machine to fundamentally alter the behaviour and values of Soviet citizens. Never had there been, as Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz put it, “such enslavement through consciousness” as the mastery over human minds was almost obsessive inside the Kremlin.