1987. I am in Moscow on behalf of the African National Congress (ANC) and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) to conduct a series of seminars on the history of South Africa's liberation struggles. My students are young men and women of all races, mostly of the ‘Soweto Generation’.

They are fresh from street battles with the police and are training to be guerrilla fighters. They are self-confident, self-assured, very sharp and questioning, anxious to learn. We have only two weeks together. I have planned to have two teaching sessions per day. They insist on three. They take nothing for granted, challenge everything and let no casual phrase or imprecision pass.

I enjoy the challenge. I try to convince myself that it is doing them good, although it is exhausting me.

My Russian interpreter has a request. Would I agree to a filmed interview for a TV documentary? I would, reluctantly. The interview takes place in a meeting room in the hotel. The director and crew speak no English. I speak no Russian. My interpreter is competent to deal with menus, travelling and shopping, but struggles with political concepts. The director knows little about me or about South Africa but thinks the interview will be useful for a film he is only thinking of making.

He wants to explore why people take political action which runs counter to their own class interests.

‘Take the Decembrists, for instance,’ he says. All I know about the Decembrists is that they were aristocrats and officers of the Tsar who staged a revolt against him in the late 19th century, challenging the feudal order which provided their own privileged position. I suspected that most of them had been executed.

I don't think he is giving me warning of my fate. He is just drawing a tentative analogy between Decembrists and white South African anti-apartheid radicals, though talk of ‘aristocrats’ and ‘martyrs’ seemed somewhat inappropriate.