Jonathan Hansler in Vodka with Stalin

EVERY so often the West thinks it’s tamed Russia. We keep fondly imagining that the land of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin, the land that Winston Churchill called “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” is suddenly going to turn transparent and cuddly.

Many people thought it would happen after the 1917 revolution. Lenin promised to make Russia not only cuddly, but fair as well. It didn’t turn out like that. By the1930s, Stalin was aping the most bloodthirsty of the Czars.

The West had a go in 1991, overthrowing the Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan and prime minister Margaret Thatcher congratulated themselves on finally taming the Russia bear. We’re only now learning just how wrong they were.

My play Vodka with Stalin, opening at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village on October 16, is about the delusion that westerners have about Russia. It’s the true story of a young British Jewish woman, Rose Cohen, who went to Moscow after the 1917 revolution, hoping to help build the better and fairer world which that revolution had promised.

She found out her mistake in the most painful possible way. She, her Russian husband and her baby, became victims of Stalin’s purges. She and her husband were shot, and their baby was sent to a grim orphanage where he was never allowed to mention the names of his parents, for they were “enemies of the people”.

And even then, her oldest friend, British Communist leader Harry Pollitt, was trying to believe that the Soviet Union represented a better and fairer Russia.

Russia hasn’t changed. Putin is simply Stalin, reimagined for the 21st century.

• Vodka with Stalin is at Upstairs at the Gatehouse October 16-27. Visit https://www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com/ or phone 020 8340 3488 for seats.