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“... Up until the late Fifties, Mikhail Bakhtin was completely unknown in his own country. Then a group of graduate students at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, who had come across the first version of his book on Dostoevsky (1929) and wondered about his fate, discovered to their astonishment that he was still alive and teaching at an obscure institute in the Russian provinces ...”

“... to talk to several credible candidates for the title of “great man” or “great woman” – Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, Václav Havel, Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher – but none matches Karol Wojtyla’s unique combination of concentrated strength, intellectual consistency, human warmth and simple goodness.’ Too many dinners of this kind are ...”

“... Give up your lost cause! The train has already left the station and, as that great neo-Marxist Mikhail Gorbachev was later to forewarn, those who have failed to board it will be punished by history. Appeals to ‘iron necessity’ are also designed to counteract the immemorial tendency of the oppressed to capitulate in resignation. The workers need ...”

“... Fate of Marxism in Russia we get one explanation of the reasons for the present disorder. Of all Mikhail Gorbachev’s associates, Alexander Yakovlev was the one most wedded to perestroika and glasnost. Yet he now presents a political landscape so blasted by Marxism-Leninism as to seem almost incapable of supporting healthy life in the next decade. In ...”

“... a set of framed photographs of former heads of state. They go as far towards the present as Gorbachev. The host says he has a picture of Yeltsin too, but he is not ready to put him up as a target. And as for current officials, he says, we lack the proper historical distance. Critics have pointed out that the mayor’s office has a photograph of Putin on ...”

“... account of the affair. He was already working on the project in the early Eighties, before the Gorbachev thaw and, despite many obstacles, was able to gather a surprising amount of oral evidence from a variety of sources – the village schoolteacher, Pavlik’s schoolmates, former OGPU agents and Tatyana Morozova, Pavlik’s ‘hero mother’. Set beside ...”

“... was reattributed to Soviet or Russian scientists. In Soviet textbooks Michael Faraday became Mikhail Faraday. The Zbarskys, unlike the majority of their neighbours, escaped the Great Terror of the Thirties. At one point there were secret police seals on 34 of the 36 flats in the élite tenement where they lived. Late in life, Zbarsky junior was shown a ...”

“... Budapest within 24 hours, and the Moscow Politburo sent two of its heavyweights: the hardliner Mikhail Suslov and the flexible Anastas Mikoyan, who opposed military intervention from start to finish. The heroic memories of the Hungarian uprising are largely based on the next three days, when brave and ingenious urban guerrillas succeeded in fighting to a ...”

“... Khodorkovsky in court in 2005 In Moscow, the second trial of the former oil and banking tycoons Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev has now been going on for nearly a year. The trial itself, which is doggedly examining a series of esoteric and possibly imaginary economic crimes while skating over more serious – and also possibly imaginary – suggestions of violent criminality, has not been very interesting ...”

“... that could be said of the population as a whole. Official anti-semitism has been in decline in the Gorbachev years: there is less of the systematic discrimination against Jews in higher education that was so evident in the Seventies; there are fewer generalised attacks on ‘Zionism’ in the press (and fewer caricatures of Jews with hooked noses and crinkly ...”

“... of stars is striking by comparison with Soviet times. Defections were once intermittent. Under Gorbachev, the trickle became a flood, as performers realised what (relatively) high earnings were available even on minor international circuits. The Moscow Conservatoire, until the Eighties the best musical school in the world, producing a high proportion of ...”

“... and so much corrupt wealth for the few. Alexander Yakovlev, the great liberalising force of the Gorbachev years, thanks to his brief in the Politburo – Ideology – took the podium first. His limp is one of the rare memories nowadays of the Great Patriotic War. The Communists and nationalists who grew to hate him in the late Eighties were always slightly ...”

“... questioned, falls back on statist solutions; Ryzhkov, too, is more frankly statist than he was as Gorbachev’s prime minister. None, except perhaps Ryzhkov, has a clue about modern economic practice and none has thought it necessary to learn. They are unlikely to clash with the Communists on the basics of economic policy. They have different concepts of the ...”

“... saw the government’s basic concern as ‘caring for people, free hospitals, good education’. Mikhail, similarly, ‘had always thought’ that the ‘actual idea’ of socialism was ‘profoundly correct and that this was how things should be … I had realised,’ he said, ‘that there were distortions … But I thought that if we managed to get rid of ...”

“... vocabulary was crude and his grammar barbaric. Brezhnev could scarcely put two sentences together. Gorbachev spoke with a provincial southern accent. The less said of Yeltsin’s slurred diction the better. To hear a leader of the country capable once again of expressing himself with clarity, accuracy and fluency, in a more or less correct idiom, comes as ...”