The Ceausescu cult was fed by a job lot of Westerners keen to do business with the one Eastern European leader who could, it appeared, stand up to th… - John Sweeney

Perhaps Red Horizons is a scissors-and-paste job by an unsung, CIA-approved ghostwriter. The raw material reads like translated of Pacepa's debriefing conversations held in Romanian with his CIA case officers immediately after he defected. Pacepa often quotes chunks of Ceausescu's old speeches, freely available from Romanian embassies and in Western libraries, as 'remembered convervations'; occasionally he even quotes the text of Romanian decrees as spouting out of Ceausescu's mouth.

The Soviet Union could not afford to feed or house or care for its people, so it started to implode. Putin, the secret policeman in Dresden, never properly grasped the power of these three failures [the invasion of Afghanistan, the Chernobyl disaster, and the collapse of the command economy]. His tragedy – our tragedy – was that he had no first-hand knowledge of the three catastrophes. He was too high up in the secret police food chain to be sent to Chernobyl; too pathetically low to be sent to the fag-end of the failing war in Afghanistan; let alone to the fleshpots of the West where he would have seen the stark evidence of how ordinary people in New Jersey or New Brighton in the Wirral lived so much better than in Moscow, let alone Omsk or Tomsk. He never saw the comparative evidence of Soviet economic failure with his own eyes or, if he did, he was too brainwashed to understand what he was looking at.
Instead, from the bowels of Stasiland, he came to internalize a dark nonsense, that his country's collapse was due to Western trickery and domestic betrayal, rather than the simple facts that the Soviet Union had run out of cash and self-belief and purpose. It was a failed state, just like the Kaiser's Germany became a failed state after it launched its own stupid war in 1914. Like Hitler in 1923, Putin from 1991 onwards breathed a poisonous fiction, that his country had been wronged, that it 'had been stabbed in the back'. In truth, it fell apart because it had been wrong, it had stabbed itself in the front, three times over.

His tongue could not get round seemingly simple phrases like tutulor, a form of address meaning 'to everybody'. When Ceausescu said it, it sounded like 'everyboggy'. It is hard to put across to those who have not heard Romanian, a language waggishly described by the BBC's John Simpson as a 'mixture of dog Latin and Esperanto', just how uncouth Ceausescu sounded. To American ears, one must imagine a New Jersey drawl; to British ears, one should think of a Wolverhampton whine: provincial, but not interestingly so.