To Western leaders and voters facing crises such as New York's near bankruptcy, the UK's strike-prone Winter of Discontent or terrorist chaos of the deutscher Herbst, the US, Japan and EEC's strengths in relation to Brezhnev's USSR were less obvious in 1978 than they were in 1988.

When we hear grand predictions over the economic resilience of Putin's Russia in relation to a supposedly failing Europe, it's worth keeping all those predictions of Soviet triumph made in the mid-1970s in mind.