I had to go back and snatch a photo, just to confirm the evidence of my own eyes – to confirm that there really is somewhere in the world, and it’s not his native Georgia or recidivist parts of Russia, where the name Joseph Stalin remains a point of pride, as though Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech, let alone perestroika, glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union hadn’t happened.

The truth about Gazan ‘journalists’

Is Badenoch cutting through?

Is your dog right-wing?

One of the biggest cities in China boasts a Stalin park, a Stalin statue, and – the subject of my snatched photo – supermarket tables and shelves stacked with Stalin-branded wine. Welcome to Harbin, a city of ten million people in the north-east of China, and one of the strangest places among the many strange places I have visited in my travelling lifetime.

A simple view of Russia and China as seen from the United States or Europe is of two giant, largely land-based, non-democracies that need to be kept apart, lest they form an alliance and gang up against us. There are many reasons, including their distinct geography and national interests, why I tend to think this is unlikely; after all, barely two decades of communist friendship came to a very sticky end with a fierce little border war in 1969. But Harbin, whose long history with Russia goes back to the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway in the 1890s, casts a rather different light on China-Russia relations today, and an at times jarring one, too.

Harbin (I had long wondered how this is rendered in Mandarin, and the answer is that it takes three Chinese characters, Ha-er-bin; as, by the way does Stalin, rendered Si-da-lin) conforms to a familiar pattern of Chinese cities today. If you arrive by train, as I did, you enter a vast industrialised landscape of warehouses, high-rises........

© The Spectator