It would be wrong to suppose that Gordon Brown’s future hangs on the result of this week’s by-election in Scotland. We have been here too often before — ‘make or break’ episodes that the least popular prime minister in recent British history needed to win if he was to avoid getting sacked by his increasingly desperate party. Somehow he survives, and even begins to prosper. The fact is that the Labour Party might well come first on Thursday at Glenrothes in Fife, beating the Scottish Nationalists who until a few weeks ago looked likely to capture this previously safe Labour seat and carry on their forward (or backward) march to Scottish separatism.

What has changed? The answer is Harold Macmillan’s famous phrase, “Events, dear boy, events,” which in this case means the worst economic crisis in living memory. A Labour victory in Glenrothes would suggest that many voters have been persuaded that Brown is the British politician best equipped to deal with bad times; that by pumping tax-payers’ money into Britain’s crashing banks — nationalizing them in all but name — he has shown the rest of the world how to save global capitalism from its stupid and selfish self.

I grew up in this part of Scotland, as did many of my ancestors, so, when I drove through it last week, many of its streets and settlements were familiar to me. Until the 1970s, this was mining territory: imagine a colder version of Dhanbad. Every town here, every village, every street owed its existence to coal. Out of the wages of coal came cooperative stores, bars, miners’ institutes, tramcars — and sudden dips in the streets, where seams being emptied far below had caused the surface ground to collapse. In my childhood, the horizons were marked with triangular spoil heaps, the whirring wheels of pithead machinery, and the steam of locomotives shunting coal trains. All gone now save the bars, where elderly men sometimes stand at the doors sucking on a private cigarette (the smoking ban inside is rigorously enforced) and remember how they used to make a living.

It would be easy in such a place to reflect on the booms and busts of industry; how quickly a country’s way of life can change. Instead, I found myself thinking about Russians. Near to where my father worked briefly down the pit as a young man in the 1920s, I saw a familiar terrace of houses named after the first astronaut: Gagarin Way. The name has made this particular village slightly famous, at least among collectors of oddities. During the Cold War, very few Western places would have dared to call a street (or anything else) after a Soviet hero, but the Fife coalfield had a long romance with communism that was still alive when Gagarin entered space in 1961, years after its influence (never very strong in Britain generally) had died elsewhere. The district was once known as ‘Little Moscow’ and in the person of Willie Gallacher, a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, elected one of parliament’s tiny number of communist MPs.

Remembering all this, I remembered what the word ‘Russia’ had once meant to me. It was interchangeable with ‘Soviet’ (how many of us then knew about Belarus or Kazakhstan?) and therefore with ‘communist’. Russians, before they were anything else, were communists. In the Fife of 50 years ago, the description wasn’t necessarily pejorative. We weren’t teenage Americans, after all. Communists, we knew, admired the comradeship in the poetry of our national bard, Robert Burns. They had chosen social equality over individual freedom, they built dams and sent men into space and (a witty line from a Peter Sellers’ film) watched lots of ballet in the evenings. Their armies under Stalin had won the Second World War. They had the bomb. Militarily, politically, they posed a formidable threat to what mainstream British politicians called ‘our way of life’.

Did we know about their addiction to vodka? No. Their party’s corruption? No. Their inability to make something as simple as a decent frying-pan because all their technology was devoted to perfecting missiles that would rival America’s? No again. We had mistaken political identity for deeper traits in the national character, as though a political system was the beginning and end of everything. The system, it turned out, was to last less than 80 years, but none of us foresaw that in the 1960s. Russians = communists full stop. Communism was in their bones.

Now we have to get used to a new idea, that Russia is a country of oligarchs. An oligarch is strictly defined as a member of a small ruling elite, but in Britain the word has come to mean a Russian who has got enormously rich — rich almost beyond computation — by being in the right place at the right time when State-owned Soviet enterprises were being sold off at bargain prices. According to Forbes magazine, Russia now has more than a hundred dollar billionaires with a combined wealth of at least $522 billion, a sum that has quadrupled in the past four years. What this means for Russia is startling inequality; BMWs and Prada handbags for the rich and shrinking life expectancy for the poor. What it means for Britain is the uneasy feeling that Russians own a lot of this country; football clubs, Mayfair apartments and country estates. And not just any old Russians, but those to whom the phrase ‘robber baron’ might be properly applied.

It was one of these oligarchs, the aluminium magnate, Oleg Deripaska, who entertained two leading British politicians on his yacht in the Adriatic this summer. Peter Mandelson, then the European Union’s trade commissioner, has always denied that his conversations with Deripaska had any effect on the EU’s decision to lower tariffs on imports of scrap aluminium. George Osborne, the Tory party’s deputy leader, has always denied that he solicited party funding, which would contravene the law forbidding donations from foreigners. Not much mud has stuck to Mandelson despite his blemished history as a minister in Tony Blair’s government (there was, for example, the awkward business of the passports for the Hinduja brothers). Osborne has had a much tougher time of it, thanks to the account of his former friend, Nat Rothschild, who was Osborne’s host at the time and has revealed details of his five trips to the oligarch’s yacht and the matters allegedly under discussion.

Osborne has now apologized for his ‘mistake’ in accepting Deripaska’s hospitality, and the story will probably die (in any case, only the most forensic reader of newspapers can keep up with its complications). But it has already increased the feeling that everything is up for sale in Britain. Tata runs Jaguar, Land Rover and most of the steel industry, the French have bought our nuclear power plants, Germany owns our water supplies and Spain our airports. Why not let the Russians fund Her Majesty’s Opposition — or even Her Majesty herself?

How different things were in Yuri Gagarin’s day, when financial skulduggery was confined to the small subsidies sent from the Kremlin to the struggling comrades at British party headquarters. The great fear then was that Russia would subvert us with ideas or conquer us with tanks. Nobody could have imagined that the time would come when it could tempt us with hard currency, or cripple us by the simple expedient of stopping our supplies of natural gas.

The good news for oligarch-phobes is that the stock market crash has wiped billions from their estimated wealth. Roman Abramovich, who owns Chelsea football club, is thought to be $20.3 billion poorer. Alisher Usmanov, a major shareholder in Arsenal, has lost $11.7 billion and Deripaska $16 billion. The figures are meaningless to most of us. No oligarch will starve. But looking at that neglected little street called Gagarin Way, named out of loyalty to a now-dead idea, I couldn’t help thinking that in the context of stock market crashes, every cloud has a silver lining.