Why doesn’t Stephen Fry boycott the Saudis as well as the Russians? 

Call me sentimental, but I’ve never seen a better opening ceremony than the Sochi one, evoking Russia’s great past in literature and in many other things. The ballet sequence was tops, especially the acrobatics by the black-clad dancer portraying the cruel officer in War and Peace who seduced Natasha. All those hysterics about boycotts and terrorism, they were just hypocritical sensationalism by those PC jerks that seem to be running our lives nowadays.

We westerners are averse to any discipline, impervious to duty, and disinclined to belong to a nation. We owe allegiance only to ourselves and love only ourselves. Not so over in Russia, where there’s a mystic connection between the nation and every single man and woman born there. Never underestimate the love of Russians for the land of Pushkin and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov. I could go on and on. As it happens, I’m reading Brian Moynahan’s Leningrad book, reviewed in The Spectator last month. The gallant Wehrmacht troops couldn’t believe the ferocity of the defenders. And all the time, while starving and dying in the bitter cold but bravely resisting the Germans, Stalin’s evil agents were arresting and shooting innocent people for slights towards the regime, real or imagined.

I’ve always insisted that, had the Nazi machine following the Wehrmacht blitzkrieg acted in a humane manner in Ukraine, the Russians would not have fought as fanatically as they did, especially in Leningrad and Stalingrad. Now I’m not so sure. Borodino in 1812 was actually a tie, and Napoleon’s troops committed no atrocities, yet the Russian soul resisted and it was a soul that had known only enslavement. When black American grunts shot their officers in Vietnam, the usual suspects gave them the benefit of the doubt, using past slavery as the excuse.