If Russian secret services did meddle with the US election as officials had warned, and as US intelligence agencies now believe “with high confidence”, then it has serious consequences for US domestic politics – widening divisions within political and intelligence circles and within the electorate itself.

But the US election does not stand alone. This is just the latest in a series of episodes worldwide that will probably alter the way we think of post-1989 contemporary history.

Last month, the European parliament backed a committee report about hostile Kremlin-inspired anti-EU propaganda which has utilised thinktanks, news outlets, and internet trolls. Russia has been known or suspected around Europe for years of giving to and getting support from illiberal nationalist-extremist parties, such as Ukip, the Front National, the AfD in Germany, Hungary’s Jobbik and Golden Dawn in Greece. In the Czech Republic two successive presidents, Václav Klaus and Miloš Zeman, have had warm ties with Russia, have shown considerable support for Russian companies, and have been sympathetic with its anti-western foreign policies. In Hungary, both the government of Viktor Orbán and the largest opposition party, Jobbik, are Eurosceptic, illiberal friends of Russia.

If it could be conclusively proved that Russian espionage agencies worked in the US to acquire and use secretly obtained information to influence the outcome of the presidential election, then it is worth mentioning that there are further cases where such hacks proved to be factors in turning the tides politically. Whoever managed to secretly record the private conversation between the then Polish central bank governor and the minister of interior in 2014, then less than two years later recorded the exchanges between Polish government ministers in a Warsaw restaurant, did a great job in weakening the incumbent Civic Platform, which then lost the 2016 elections to the Law and Justice party of illiberal-nationalist Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

In a similar incident, the 2006 release of a secret recording of the Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s speech to Socialist party members was a factor in Orbán’s overwhelming victory in 2010.

Analysts have come to realise that the Russian bear is not as toothless as it seemed just a couple of years ago

Prior to the Crimea occupation, analysts routinely denied what is now almost commonplace thought, that the cold war came back with Putin’s more assertive foreign policy. But it is worth taking one further step: the cold war never ended in the first place.

According to one of the most eminent scholars of the era, Mark Kramer of Harvard University, the two defining features of the cold war are the fundamental clash of political ideologies (Marxism-Leninism versus liberal democracy) and the highly stratified global power structure characterised by two pre-eminent states (superpowers), the US and the Soviet Union. By this definition, the cold war era definitely finished about a quarter of a century ago. No matter what Moscow is doing now, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and Marxism-Leninism is not a defining character of Russia. However, this definition need not be altered too much to include what came after the iron curtain fell.

Analysts have come to realise that the Russian bear is not as toothless as it seemed just a couple of years ago. Despite alleged western superiority in conventional and nuclear weapons systems (a hypothesis no one would like to test, of course), Moscow in recent years has manifested its exceptional potential in asymmetric and cyberwarfare, which now seem no less useful than western military hardware. And its effective espionage capability is clearly a heritage of the Soviet era.

As for ideology, while communism has lost its original appeal (in fact, prior to the collapse of the communist bloc), the legacy of communism is now having a renaissance – Stalin himself is perhaps more popular nowadays than following his death, when his crimes were highlighted by Nikita Khrushchev. But the true ideology of Moscow, which the current Russian regime clearly promotes worldwide, is illiberal nationalist authoritarianism: the centralisation of power in the hand of an autocratic leadership which promotes itself as the guarantor of the realisation of the “national interest”.

This is not so far from the ideology of the post-second world war decades, nor is the belief that liberal democracy, open society and human rights are nothing more than propaganda tools and ideological fig leaves designed to hide the raw political and economic interests of the western liberal political elite.

Both the power and the ideology component remained. It may be that 50 years from now people will talk of a continuous cold war since 1945 between a liberal-democratic west and an illiberal-autocratic Russia (whose role may eventually, and gradually, be filled by China). In that case, the Boris Yeltsin years in the 1990s will seem just a short period of détente, somewhat like the years following Stalin’s death, when commentators also (mistakenly) felt relieved for a while that the cold war had ended for good.