There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.
Clearly independent journalists – domestic journalists – run a high risk if they dare to take on serious investigative work.
I actually have great hopes for the future.
I’m a journalist – I’m not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one – a joyfully consuming one.
Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.
I have to always remember, writing is really hard.
I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.
I left Gorbachev’s office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.
Russian is such a tough and complex language that I am happy enough to understand everything and read most things pretty well, but, without constant practice, my speech is not what I wish it was, and I would sooner write in crayon than write a letter in Russian.
I’m not sure it is possible to describe just how hard it is to acquire a reputation as a drunk in Russia.
In the lobby, an old woman with legs wrapped in elastic bandages mopped the floor with filthy water. She kept missing the same spot, over and over. There was the overpowering smell of disinfectant, bad tobacco, and wet wool. This was the smell of Russia indoors, the smell of the woman in front of you on line, the smell of every elevator. Near an abandoned newsstand, dozens of overcoats hung on long rows of pegs, somber and dark, lightly steaming, like nags in a stable.
But the symbolism of the miners’ strike was extraordinary. The miners embodied the vanguard of the proletariat, a bastion of Bolshevism in the old days. To look out at the great crown of them in Lenin Square was to see a kind of poster for what had once been called “the masses.” And now the masses were walking off the job and declaring that socialism had not delivered anything – not even a bar of soap.
For decades, the massacres at Kalinin, Starobelsk, and Katyn had been a symbol for the Poles of Moscow’s cruelty and imperial grip. For a Pole merely to hint that the Soviet Union was responsible for the massacres was a radical, even suicidal act, for it made clear the speaker’s point of view: the “friendship of peoples,” the relationship between Moscow and Warsaw, was one based on violence, an occupier’s reign over its satellite.
She gave Stalin the letter and asked him to deliver it; for a moment, at least, one of the great murderers of the twentieth century played mailman for a young girl in love.
In the introduction, Amy Butler the senior minister at Riverside and a friend of Clinton’s, referred to the Trump Administration as a source of anguish and confusion, and everyone nodded solemly’.
Just before his exile, Solzhenitsyn wrote his “Letter to the Soviet Leaders.” “Your dearest wish,” he informed them, “is for our state structure and our ideological system never to change, to remain as they are for centuries. But history is not like that. Every system either finds a way to develop or else it collapses.” And with that, Solzhenitsyn was gone.
I think it is a more courageous stance to abandon honestly something which has been devalued by history instead of carrying it to the end in your soul.
Most of the people I knew were doing one thing but considered themselves to be something else: all the waitresses I knew were really actresses, all the Xeroxers in the Xerox place were really novelists, all the receptionists were artists.
Perhaps one day Russia might even become somehow ordinary, a country of problems rather than catastrophes, a place that develops rather than explodes. That would be something to see.
For a teenage girl, finding the balance between childhood fearlessness and adult vulnerability can be tougher than landing a triple axel.
Without recognizing it, we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change. I believe that we are at the end of nature.