I was watching a "history in colour" programme about the Russian civil war, and it took me through the formative years of the Soviet Union in 1917 to 1922. I was appalled at my own upbringing in the west for painting Communism as a bad thing, when the truth is that the Russians have never had Communism in anything other than name alone.

What they had before 1917 was Imperialism, and what they had after was also Imperialism, Communism never happened, the Russian people were cheated and they knew it.

There was a famous uprising against the new Bolshevik masters a few years later by heroes of the civil war known as the Krondstadt Sailors. They saw that the new masters were repeating the same Imperialist trends that went before, and this was not what they had fought for, so they fought again and unfortunately lost.

Communism was then lost forever and Russia to this day is not Communist but Imperialist, just like the west.

I learnt the other day that Communism is not what I'd been lead to believe by my teachers and by the media.