Luke Harding is back in Russia. Not literally. Russia expelled him years ago, and he seems to have no great desire to return while Vladimir Putin remains in power. But imaginatively, intellectually, professionally, he never really left.
There is something wonderfully familiar about the figure. Another Englishman heads east. Oxford behind him, notebook in hand, looking for the secret everybody else has missed.
Harding has spent much of his career explaining Russia to Britain. He reported from Moscow, wrote about Putin, espionage, Trump and Ukraine, was harassed by the FSB, expelled by the Russian state, and continued writing about Russia from outside it.
He dislikes Putin’s Russia enormously.
That may be the point.
Britain’s relationship with Russia has rarely been adequately described by liking or disliking. Lacan had a better word: hainamoration.
Hatred-love.
An attachment in which hostility does not extinguish fascination but intensifies it.
Harding hates what Putin has made Russia. John le Carré spent half a lifetime imagining Moscow Centre. Victorian readers found depths in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that England imagined it had somehow misplaced. British Communists once saw Moscow as the future. British intelligence officers studied Soviet intelligence officers. British oligarch lawyers later discovered Russia as a source of extremely lucrative clients.
The costume changes.
The attachment remains.
And Poland has spent an uncomfortable amount of its history standing between the two.
Every few years Britain rediscovers Poland.
Usually Russia has something to do with it.
Poland becomes the country that understood Moscow first. The country buying tanks while western Europeans discuss strategic autonomy. The country whose paranoia turns out, retrospectively, not to have been paranoia at all.
Britain and Poland are close again. In May 2026 they signed a new security and defence treaty identifying Russia as the principal long-term threat to Euro-Atlantic security and promising deeper military, industrial and intelligence cooperation.
Good.
But Poles have heard declarations of British friendship before.
And there is another relationship behind this one.
Russia.
I have increasingly wondered whether the recurrent Polish story of British betrayal can be understood by looking only at Britain and Poland.
Perhaps there has always been a third person in the room.
Poland has been Britain’s ally, responsibility, buffer, embarrassment, cause and occasionally hero.
Russia has been something larger.
An imperial rival. A civilisation to decipher. A literary obsession. A revolutionary hope. A spy’s adversary. A market. A threat.
Almost an equal.
Poland, rather often, has been geography.
The mirror
Behind Britain and Russia sit two older figures: England and Russia.
I do not mean timeless national characters. That way lies cultural nonsense. I mean accumulated fantasies through which cultures imagine themselves and their opposites.
The English fantasy is the island.
The Russian fantasy is the continent.
England imagines itself through understatement, privacy, procedure, commerce, irony, administration and invisible power.
Russia appears as vastness, sacrifice, suffering, collective destiny, historical will and visible power.
England says that nothing terribly dramatic is happening while quietly constructing an empire.
Russia announces that history itself has arrived.
These are caricatures.
Cultural fantasy usually is.
What matters is why the caricatures remain useful.
Perhaps each imagines that the other possesses something it lacks.
England looks at Russia and sees depth.
Russia looks at England and sees control.
England imagines Russia has soul.
Russia imagines England knows the secret of power.
The Russian stereotype of perfidious Albion is almost flattering. The Englishman smiles, makes tea, invokes procedure — and somehow half the world ends up coloured pink.
Power exercised while pretending nobody particularly wanted it.
From Moscow this can look like genius.
Russia supplies the inverse fantasy.
Nothing is hidden.
Everything matters.
God. History. Revolution. Death. Mother Russia. The abyss.
England had drawing rooms.
Russia had Dostoevsky.
The relationship is not simply geopolitical.
It is narcissistic.
A mirror.
And Poland repeatedly finds itself caught inside the reflection.
There is a structural reason for this.
England and Russia could both become strangely invisible inside the larger political structures they dominated.
England disappeared into Britain.
Russia disappeared into the Russian Empire and later, in a very different political form, into the Soviet Union.
English institutions became British institutions.
Russian institutions became Soviet institutions.
London could speak for Britain. Moscow could speak for the Soviet Union.
The centre became so normal that it stopped appearing to itself as a centre.
Poland had almost the opposite historical experience.
It repeatedly had to insist that it existed at all.
That difference matters. England and Russia could imagine themselves not merely as countries but as systems.
Poland more often had to fight to remain a country.
The other player
The nineteenth-century Great Game makes the hierarchy unusually clear.
Britain feared Russian expansion through Central Asia towards India. Officials followed Russian troops, railways and intentions across Persia and Afghanistan.
Russia was dangerous because Russia mattered.
It was another enormous imperial system moving across the board.
The peoples between the two empires were more likely to become squares on it.
Great powers recognised one another as subjects.
Smaller countries appeared as geography.
At the same time that British officials feared Russian armies, English readers fell in love with Russian minds.
Herzen lived in London. Turgenev visited. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov became objects of intense fascination.
Russia seemed to possess what England imagined it lacked: suffering, enormity, moral seriousness, soul.
Again, accuracy is almost beside the point.
Russia was useful as England’s opposite.
And therefore intimate.
The relationship changed dramatically after 1917, but the fascination survived.
The British government feared Bolshevism. Parts of the British working class saw revolutionary Russia as the future.
Poland discovered what this could mean very quickly.
In May 1920 London dockers learned that the Jolly George was carrying munitions for Poland during the Polish-Soviet War.
They refused to load them.
For the dockers, workers’ Russia was under attack.
Imagine that from Warsaw.
Poland had returned to the map after 123 years and was fighting for the survival of the new state.
British workers looked east and saw the Russian Revolution.
Poland was not necessarily hated.
It was simply less interesting.
David Lloyd George made the hierarchy explicit a year later during the Upper Silesian crisis.
He lectured Poland about its behaviour and its supposed debt of gratitude to the powers that had helped restore its independence.
Then he turned to Russia.
The register changed.
Russia was broken, exhausted and badly governed.
But it was enormous.
Rich.
Gallant.
It would recover.
It would become powerful again.
It would matter to Europe and the world.
The real question was whose side Russia would eventually be on.
That is almost the whole argument.
Poland is discussed as a problem of behaviour.
Russia as a problem of world order.
It isn’t that Lloyd George loved Russia.
He took Russia seriously.
That distinction may explain more than the language of betrayal does.
Moscow knows
The fantasy also crossed class lines.
British workers could imagine Soviet Russia as history’s future. A decade later, young men from the centre of the British establishment became Soviet agents.
Philby. Burgess. Maclean. Blunt. Cairncross.
The Cambridge spies were not fools.
That is what makes them interesting.
Russia did not attract Britain only through ignorance. It repeatedly attracted people who thought themselves unusually capable of seeing beneath appearances.
Moscow possessed the secret.
To understand Russia was to understand what everybody else had missed.
Harding belongs, in an entirely different moral and political register, to that tradition.
Not because he admires Putin.
Because Putin’s Russia remains a place that must be decoded.
Oligarchs. Spies. Money. Security services. Influence. Trump. Ukraine. The Kremlin.
The visible event is never enough.
Something lies underneath.
Russia rewards interpretation.
And therefore rewards the interpreter.
This does not mean Harding imagined what happened to him. The FSB harassed him. Russia expelled him. The regime he describes is authoritarian.
A Lacanian reading does not claim reality is fantasy.
It asks a more interesting question:
Why does reality fit the fantasy so well?
Why does the encounter feel already written?
The imperial traveller crosses the Khyber Pass.
Smiley enters Karla’s labyrinth.
Harding reaches Moscow Centre.
Different centuries. Different politics. Different moral circumstances.
But a recognisable English pleasure remains.
Somewhere out there is a formidable Other.
And I am the man who can read him.
Poland enters
Then comes 1939.
Britain guaranteed Polish independence and declared war when Germany invaded.
The simple claim that Britain abandoned Poland in September is therefore wrong.
Britain did go to war.
It then fought Germany for nearly six years.
But Britain could not prevent the destruction of the Polish state. And when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on 17 September, Britain did not declare war on Moscow.
The contradiction only became sharper after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
Stalin became Britain’s ally.
Poland became an ally of Britain whose territory was partly occupied by Britain’s other ally.
There was never going to be a tidy ending.
Poles fought throughout the Allied war effort. Polish pilots defended Britain. Polish intelligence contributed enormously to knowledge of Enigma. Anders’ army fought at Monte Cassino. Maczek’s armoured division fought through Normandy and liberated towns in Belgium and the Netherlands. The Polish Underground State fought inside occupied Poland.
Then arithmetic took over.
Britain needed Stalin.
Not sentimentally.
Militarily.
The Soviet Union had absorbed devastation on a scale Britain had not and Soviet armies stood across Eastern Europe.
Churchill could distrust Stalin and sympathise with Poland simultaneously.
He could not remove the Red Army from Poland without beginning another war.
So Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union discussed Poland without the Polish government at the table.
In July 1945 Britain withdrew recognition from the Polish government-in-exile in London and recognised the new government in Warsaw.
This is what Yalta came to mean in Poland.
Not simply a conference.
A lesson.
When Britain’s relationship with Russia becomes sufficiently important, Poland discovers where it stands in the hierarchy.
Maczek behind the bar
The lesson acquired an almost indecently perfect image after the war.
London’s Victory Parade took place in June 1946.
Polish forces that had fought under British command did not march as the Polish armed forces.
The diplomatic reason was obvious. Britain now recognised the government in Warsaw. The Polish forces in Britain remained associated with the government it had stopped recognising.
Some Polish airmen were invited.
They refused when their army and navy comrades were excluded.
British MPs protested.
That qualification matters.
“The British excluded the Poles” is true only if “the British” means the British state. British people themselves objected.
The state is not the nation.
But the state made the decision.
And then there was General Stanisław Maczek.
His armoured division had fought through western Europe.
He could not safely return to communist Poland. The Polish authorities stripped him of his citizenship. He remained in Scotland and lacked the pension he might have received had he formally been a British general.
So Maczek worked as a salesman and a barman.
The image is almost too neat.
The victory has been celebrated.
Europe has been divided.
Stalin controls Poland.
And the Polish general is behind the bar pouring whisky.
I called Poland the bridesmaid earlier.
The metaphor is wrong.
Poland had not been hoping to marry Britain.
It had expected an alliance to mean something.
Karla
I grew up with another Russia.
John le Carré.
George Smiley.
Moscow Centre.
Karla.
What is extraordinary about le Carré’s Russia is the respect.
Karla is not a cartoon villain. He is Smiley’s opposite and therefore his double.
He thinks.
Waits.
Understands weakness.
Believes in his system more completely than Smiley believes in his own.
The Russian enemy has to be formidable because the adversary confers seriousness upon us.
He must understand the game.
He must possess depth.
Defeating him must cost something.
Again, the mirror.
Russia becomes the place where England encounters qualities it officially distrusts in itself: passion, conviction, sacrifice, ideology, cruelty, history.
Smiley represents the inverse fantasy.
Small.
Polite.
Understated.
Apparently weak.
And enormously powerful.
England and Russia look at one another and each finds an exaggerated version of something missing from itself.
Poland stands between them, still asking a more literal question.
When you said ally, what exactly did you mean?
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