On the grimy walls of the Ivanovo Machine Tools Factory, a declining Soviet behemoth once venerated as a model of Socialist efficiency, hangs a solitary display of safety guidelines. In a series of fading illustrations, it instructs workers how to behave in the event of a Nato nuclear attack: don your gas masks, head for the nearest shelter and dispatch messengers on horseback to warn outlying villages. Sergei Ivanov, the visiting joint first deputy prime minister of Russia, might not have seen the posters as he strode on to the factory floor, in Ivanovo, a gloomy city 220 miles north...