![]() Consider the following snippet from a conversation the author had with her own late father: Alexievich, an oral historian some critics have compared with America’s Studs Terkel. Far from getting it “right,” today’s post-Soviet Russia is run by a regime that combines many of the most noxious characteristics of both its Communist past, which lasted less than a century, and its czarist predecessor, going back to the medieval Duchy of Muscovy.Īll of which lends considerable poignancy to the bruised, battered and often broken lives depicting themselves in the conversational shards collected by Ms. Not only does Vladimir Putin frequently wax sentimental about the lost Soviet empire he has also reportedly put up a portrait of Czar Nicholas I, the most militarist, reactionary of 19th-century Romanovs, in his Kremlin offices. A quarter of a century later, if anything is thawing out of the ice, it is the old Russian tradition of an authoritarian state. ![]() But it takes more than the death of old tyranny to give birth to new freedom. ![]()
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