At the end of last week, the Holodomor was commemorated in Britain. There was a service at Westminster Abbey. But the chief point to notice is that no important British government or opposition representatives appeared. Nor, with the honourable exception of Stephen Fry, did any of the celebrities who infest causes such as ‘Free Palestine’. Almost everyone knows, thank goodness, what the Holocaust was. But even now, although Vladimir Putin is trying a small-scale repeat, have most people heard of the Holodomor? (If you haven’t, read Anne Applebaum’s astonishing Red Famine.) It was the largely deliberate starvation of about four million Ukrainians by Stalin in 1932-33, bringing death at a rate rivalling even that of the Final Solution. The failure of the West to remember this and other horrors of the Russian/Soviet empire explains the current failure of peace in Europe. I am glad to say that the newish Foundation for the History of Totalitarianism is making the recovery of memory its business. 

A kind reader (whom I hereby thank because I have lost his accompanying letter) sent me a remarkable memoir, Arms of Valor by General Pavlo Shandruk, published in 1959. Shandruk fought for the Russian Imperial Army in the first world war. After the Russian Revolution, he joined the Ukrainian National Republic and fought against both the Red and the White Russians. When the republic failed, he was interned in Poland. In 1936, he joined the Polish army and fought against the German invasion which began the second world war, saving the 19th Polish brigade from a German trap which would have wiped them out. In the chaos of early 1945, he became commander of the Ukrainian National Army, reluctantly accepting German protection in order to resist Stalin’s advance. He narrowly escaped being deported to Soviet servitude when the war ended. In all these apparent tergiversations, his aim was consistent: an independent Ukraine. At the end of his book, Shandruk asks why the West, from the Russian Revolution onwards, never saw the importance of Ukraine’s struggle. The Holodomor was only the most grotesque example of the doctrine of ‘Russian indivisibility’. He concludes: ‘If the Ukrainian people had been given help in their struggle… there would have been no World War II because there would have been no Bolsheviks nor Stalin to help Hitler rise to power. There would have been no Bolshevism if the West had not permitted the Moscow imperialists to conquer Ukraine.’ Recent events show that the Moscow imperialists have survived Bolshevism, and are renewing the assault.

When I was a boy, I was fascinated by old people, and felt sad that my grandparents were all dead. I believed the old were repositories of wisdom. In adulthood, exposure to elderly anecdotage made me realise this was not always the case, but the fascination has remained. I like best the old who cherish memories enough to remember accurately, but also live vividly in the present. One such was Prue Penn, who died last week, aged 97. Her mind and memory were excellent to the end, and because she had been close to the late Queen, to the Queen Mother and to Princess Margaret all her adult life, she had a continuity of observation of that world which was almost unique. On the other hand, she was one of the very few of those born in the 1920s who mastered the internet and related devices, using them to maintain a wide friendship and an interest in what was new while she lived, for so long a widow, in rural Fife. After Prue died, I find I have several hundred emails and text exchanges with her. Here is a tiny selection – not, I hope, betraying any secrets – which gives the flavour. Prue found The Crown increasingly detestable, but its early episodes did prompt her to offer an overall assessment of the character of Elizabeth II: ‘The girl who plays HM [Claire Foy] is brilliant. She speaks like her and she has the same aura of dignity and self-assurance that HM has had all her life… You ask The Queen a question, she thinks before she answers and she always gets it right. She has wisdom.’ On personifying cars: ‘I have always had Mercedes cars named Henry 1st to 8th. As no further to go my new one is William 1st.’ Her number-plate, given by her courtier husband, Sir Eric, was always PRU 365, signifying devotion every day of the year. On being 90: ‘I must try to behave my age.’ Though she loved society and gossip and ‘big strong men with soft centres’, Prue was also religious and reflective: ‘Happy Easter. I hate the void between Good Friday and tomorrow. But it is good for us to feel the absence of all that matters.’ When Elizabeth II died, I emailed sympathy. Prue replied: ‘HM and I were born three months apart. We were in the departure lounge together but her flight has been called first! My Eric will be at the gate to ensure that protocol is properly adhered to. I feel deeply sad.’ I last saw Prue in late August. She could not rise from the chair from which she looked out over the North Sea near St Andrews, but her beauty and mischief remained. By that time, as she told me with a characteristic lack of illusion, she was longing for her flight to be called, too.

I once wrote that Olivia Colman (a later portrayer of Elizabeth II) has a left-wing face. I was berated for this. But look at how she acts Oblivia Coalmine, an extraction magnate in a new video for a Richard Curtis-backed campaign to force pension funds to shun fossil fuels. I defy you to disagree with my assertion.

On Tuesday, I attended the memorial service for Lord Cadogan, whose family owns much of Chelsea. A speaker related how Cadogan had been upbraided because some of his tenants were prostitutes. ‘I don’t see the problem,’ he replied, ‘They’re easy on the eye, they pay the rent on time and they’re not members of residents’ associations.’