The Invention of Russia

Russia, he asserted, would never become a second edition of Britain or America where liberal values had deep historic traditions. Russia had its own traditional, core values. These were patriotism, collectivism and derzhavnost – a tradition of being a great geopolitical state power that commands the attention of other countries – and gosudarstvennichestvo, the primacy of the state.

neck was displayed on glass-fronted bookshelves as a sign of belonging.

Bovin trained as a lawyer, held two graduate degrees and worked as a judge. His enormous size, hussar-style moustache and side-whiskers, his sense of humour and joie de vivre, made an immediate comic impression on his interlocutors. But behind this appearance was a man of great brain and decency.

the nineteenth-century trading galleries facing the Kremlin, which had been occupied by state offices in the 1930s, became the main department store in the country – GUM

British timber yards received logs which had markings and inscriptions made by the Gulag prisoners as it was the only way of communication with the outside world that was still available to them. ‘With suffering you get this timber’, read one such inscription.

We, the reformers of 1985, tried to destroy the Bolshevik church in the name of a true religion and a true Jesus not realizing yet that our religion was false and our Jesus was an imposter,’9 wrote Alexander Yakovlev.

There were tears in his eyes. “You see, Sasha, that is how it is.” Thus spoke a man, perhaps in the hardest minutes of his life. I tried to console him. But I myself was choking… A feeling that something unfair had happened was suffocating me.

did not just seem tactless – it was absurd. A historic event was not a staged performance. It could not be repeated, just as the empire could not be restored or the clock turned back.

The president of CNN, who had flown to Moscow to interview Gorbachev on his last day in office, held out his pen. Gorbachev accepted it and, with a journalist’s pen, signed his abdication from power.

rights and healthcare – and none of these could be imported.