HE was a great talent, one of his obituaries said, but also a “rare scoundrel”. For more than six decades Vasily Lanovoy somehow dominated every stage he trod, every scene he shot.

The Moscow-based actor, his matinee idol good looks long faded, died last year, aged 87. He left an astonishing artistic legacy. But also an ugly political one, not least thanks to his history of overt anti-semitism.

As Putin maintains his murderous assault in Donbas, I keep thinking about Lanovoy, and about one of his greatest roles, as Leonid Shervinsky in the classic 1976 Soviet TV mini-series Days of the Turbins.

Why? Because the star’s on-screen creation illustrates historic Russian prejudices about Ukraine which – for me at least – explain the current war.

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Some Russians, including Putin, do not think Ukraine is a nation. They resent its statehood, its sovereignty, and they denigrate its language and culture.

Putin may exploit this attitude. But Days of the Turbins shows he did not invent it.

The three-part mini-series is set in Kyiv in 1918, months after the Bolshevik revolution in far-away St Petersburg.

The former third city of the Russian empire is now the capital of a nominally independent Ukraine, led by a Cossack chief or Hetman whose rule is propped up by an occupying German army.

However, the Kaiser had lost the Great War on the Western front and his troops are heading home. A rebel Ukrainian army threatens the Hetman. So too, further afield, does the Red Army of the Bolsheviks.

This is a defining episode in the story of 20th century Europe. One of its witnesses was a young doctor and officer named Mikhail Bulgakov, a product of Kyiv’s Russian-speaking intelligentsia.

He distilled the events in to a semi-autobiographical novel, White Guard, and its theatre adaptation, Days of the Turbins. I think this brilliant work (a favourite of Stalin despite its focus on anti-Communists) reeks with contempt for the very idea of Ukraine.

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Take Lanovoy’s Shervinsky in the 1970s TV version. He struts on to the screen, decked out in a pristine white parade uniform, a Cossack Cherkesska with ornamental cartridge holes on the chest.

Shervinsky is an adjutant to the Hetman and looks the patriotic part. As enemies advance on a barely defended Kyiv, he is asked to report. In Ukrainian. He cannot do so.

In this classic scene, he tries to guess at words and stutters and stumbles until the Hetman, with a contemptuous wave of the hand, tells him to speak Russian.

The insinuation: Shervinsky is a fake Ukrainian; and he is not alone. Clips of his attempts to talk to the Hetman are now a Russian nationalist meme on social media.

There was push under the first period of independence to promote Ukrainian in public life. Urban elites were encouraged to speak the language of the rural masses. Some, like the fictional Shervinsky, did not know how.

Bulgakov’s characters are not impressed with this “Ukrainisation”. Some mock the language, rather in the way some of the more zealous online British nationalists talk of Scots today. One refers to the promotion of Ukrainian as a “damned comedy” and insists there are only two real forces in what he calls Little Russia: the Red and White armies.

Spoiler alert: the Bolsheviks won; Ukraine lost its independence. It became a republic of Soviet Union, which, were it to have survived, would be celebrating its centenary at the end of this year.

As he wages his war, Putin is often accused in the West of trying to recreate the USSR. This is mistaken.

In fact, the Kremlin hardman thinks the Communists were wrong to formally recognise Ukraine as a nation and continue a policy of promoting Ukrainian language and culture right in to the 1930s.

Last year Putin published an essay in which he essentially claimed Russia and Ukraine were one people and raged against Soviet-era Ukrainisation. He sounded like a man more in tune with Bulgakov’s White Guard than with the Bolsheviks.

The president was accused, by real historians, of schoolboy errors. But his his take is now effectively state dogma.

Kremlin TV stations broadcast a diet of nonsense about how Ukrainians are really just Russians duped by foreigners in to a fake identity. In 1918 I guess the baddie outsiders were the Germans. Today it is is Nato.

Many Russians, even exiled opponents of Putin, are uncomfortable with the latest phase of Ukrainisation, now sometimes called De-Russianisation.

Earlier this month Ukraine – whose Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is a native speaker of Russian – announced it would cut the teaching of Russian-language literature, including Bulgakov.

This was a direct response to Putin’s invasion. The warmonger is doing more than anybody to drive Ukraine out of what he calls the Russky Mir, or Russian World.

His latest attack has spurred several Ukrainian towns to pull down statues of Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet. These monuments are now seen as a symbol of Russian cultural and linguistic hegemony, of “enemy" art.

So, kind of, is Days of the Turbins. It remains on YouTube, with albeit sketchy English subtitles. I think it is worth a watch, and not just because it helps set out the historic roots of Kremlin’s Great Russian Chauvinism.

The series, despite its square format and 1970s production values, is a masterpiece with a stellar cast.

Lanovoy is just one stand-out. The actor in 2014 became a cheerleader for Putin’s annexation of Crimea. That earned him a lifetime ban from entering Ukraine and scathing obits. Why such anger? Well, partly because Lanovoy was an ethnic Ukrainian, born to Odesa farmers and schooled under the Nazi occupation.