For starters, having an ideology that explicitly denies the existence of an invisible sky daddy is a bit of a handicap when it comes to assimilating the idea of nightmarish immortal aliens from elsewhere in the multiverse, given that the NIAs in question have historically been identified as gods (subtype: elder). For seconds, blame Trofim Lysenko for corrupting their science faculty's ability to cope with new findings that contradicted received political doctrine. For thirds, blame the Politburo, which, in the 1950s, looked at the embryonic IT industry, thought "tools of capitalist profit-mongers," and denounced computer science as un-Communist.

Proximate results: they got into orbit using hand calculators, but completely dropped the ball on anything that required complexity theory, automated theorem proving, or sacrificial goats.

But that was then, and this is now, and we're not dealing with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, we're dickering with the Russian Federation. (When we're not trying to save ourselves from the end of the world, that is.)

The Russians are no longer dragged backwards by the invisible hand of Lenin. Their populace have taken with gusto to god-bothering and hacking, their official government ideology is "hail to the chief," and Moscow is the number one place on the planet to go if you want to rent a botnet.

There's a pragmatic and pugnacious attitude to their overseas operations these days. Their ruling network, the siloviki, aren't playing the Great Game for ideological reasons anymore, even though they came up through the KGB prior to the years of chaos: they're out to make Russia great again, and grab a tidy bank balance in the process, and they're playing hardball because they're pissed off at the way they were shoved off the board during the 1990s—consigned to the dustbin of history, asset-stripped by oligarchs and bamboozled by foreign bankers.

And so, to the present. The whole of Western Europe—and a bunch of far-flung outposts beyond—are currently crawling with KGB foot soldiers. No longer the stolid gray-suited trustees of Soviet-era spy mythology, they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they have two things in common: snow on their boots and blood in their eyes. And if they're looking for something connected with our founder, and deploying supernatural weapons on our territory—

We need to know why.

6. Red orchestra

LET US TEMPORARILY LOOK ASIDE FROM YR. HMBL. CRSPNDNT'S work diary to contemplate a very different matter: a vignette of street life in central London. I am not, myself, a witness: so this is, to some extent, a work of imaginative reconstruction.