According to The Guardian this morning, the main committee on foreign affairs of the House of Lords reports that the United Kingdom is guilty of sleepwalking into the Ukraine crisis. The Foreign Office relating to Russia has diminished significantly, the Lords claim. The committee chair, Lord Tugendhat, blames the government of a “catastrophic misreading” of the mood that led to the crisis. By the way, the same verdict holds for the European Union, where competing national interests make meaningful policy toward Russia hard to achieve. According to the article, the Foreign Office is getting lost partly because of the loss of language skills by its staff. In short, Russia has been misread for way too long. I skipped much of the article, but I remembered being pretty amazed by the British specialists in Russian affairs in the Seventies, when I was reading a lot about the Soviet Union and its allies. There were untold scholars in Britain at the time who knew a great deal about socialism, including socialist planning that was in my focus at the time. Back then, I was stunned by the imperial touch of everything I managed to find in the libraries of both Harvard and MIT, where I was studying at the time. Much of that literature came from the Fifties and Sixties. By now, the British empire is history, and the American empire has never acquired the intellectual acumen of its imperial predecessor. As for the European empire, it has never existed, anyway. The report from the House of Lords made me kind of nostalgic, I must confess.