A spectre is haunting Britain: the spectre of Stalinism. I don’t know if you’ve spoken to a young person recently – me neither – but if you stalk one or two on social media, a clear mental picture begins to emerge. I’m imagining earnest arguments in the student union about whether Lavrenty Beria was more effective than Felix Dzerzhinsky. WhatsApp groups brainstorming five-year-plans. Tearful scenes in the multiplex over The Death of Stalin. To you and I, it’s political satire. To millennials, a tragedy!

To be clear, because the line between satire and sincerity is a little hazy at the moment, none of this is really happening. At least, not in any meaningful way, though one of the features of millions of people uploading half-formed thoughts online every second is that you can find evidence for anything if you look hard enough. Imagine what the NKVD, the Communist party’s secret police, could do with that!

Tt’s also worth stressing that just because a passing liberal says something anti-capitalist, it doesn’t mean they want to burn the rich

But the notion that millennials are sleepwalking into tyranny, if not enthusiastically creating one, is gaining momentum, so to speak. And once you take in the youth support for Jeremy Corbyn plus scary polls showing half of millennials are turning away from democracy plus a single decontextualised tweet by freelance journalist Abi Wilkinson, who wasn’t actually arguing … Oh, never mind. Well, you too might begin to worry.

The latest flashpoint came following an interview between Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe, and historian Anne Applebaum, hosted on Tim Montgomerie’s Unherd website. Applebaum saw the collapse of communism first-hand, and is alarmed at our failure to teach Russian (not to mention British) history properly. She is rightly damning about the old generation of western Marxist, who sought to diminish Soviet crimes. (I’ve had it gently explained to me before now that the USSR failed because Vladimir Lenin didn’t kill enough people.)

Applebaum now worries that the lessons of the cold war have been forgotten. “[We] have a younger generation who have rediscovered Marxism and some Soviet policies but have no understanding of the atrocities or what they led to in the Soviet Union and have no real interest in that as far as I can tell. You know, if you say, ‘Well goodness this is what was done by Stalin and or even this is what was done by the far left in the 1940s,’ they say: ‘Well, So what? This is a new era and we want to try it again.’” Montgomerie reckons she’s right. “Blood will flow,” he warns.

Now, to be clear, millions and millions of innocent people have been tortured and killed under communism, many through active persecution, many through catastrophic policy failures (as Applebaum argues happened with the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33). The historical evidence suggests that death on mass scale is both a feature and a bug of communist regimes. Read some effing Solzhenitsyn!

However, to claim that anything slightly socialist points towards the gulag is disingenuous at best, dangerous at worst, and all over a bit dim – the right’s version of claiming that all Tory voters hate the poor. The Conservative MP James Cleverly offered a lovely example recently responding to Corbyn’s call for stories from those affected by the public sector pay freeze with a call for stories from the victims of communism. (Cleverly’s Law: “As any debate about Labour policy continues, the chances that a passing Tory will compare Jeremy Corbyn to Stalin approaches 1.”)

But it’s also worth stressing that just because a passing liberal says something “anti-capitalist”, it doesn’t mean they want to burn the rich. It might simply mean they don’t like capitalism in the feral, ideological form that currently prevails.

Given today’s evident iniquities – no wage growth for 15 years; terminally declining public services; eight men owning as much as the poorest 50%, it’s no wonder that millennials are wondering what redistribution and regulation might look like in the modern economy.

Likewise, just because someone goes: “Ah, screw democracy,” it’s not a reliable indicator that democracy is doomed. The widely shared poll about millennials turning away from democracy actually shows faith in democracy is remarkably stable, with young people mildly flirting with “expert-made decisions”. Ah, but we are aware of the expert threat by now …

The crucial lesson from history is that Soviet Russia collapsed because western social-market capitalism was so obviously doing a better job of providing for its people. If we can reform that, we may spend a little less time worrying about Soviet ghosts.

• Richard Godwin is a freelance journalist