From Memory to Denial in Russia
It is facile to claim that Russia under Vladimir Putin is simply reverting to type, that freedom was never more than a fleeting vowel in a history of hard consonants. Although the weakness of Russia’s liberal tradition certainly played a part in Putin's rise, so did the West.
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LONDON – My most painful experience in Russia was a visit to Perm-36, the only one of Stalin’s forced-labor camps to have been preserved, in 1998. I was in Perm, a city in the Urals, to take part in a seminar of the Moscow School of Political Studies. Founded by the remarkable Lena Nemirovskaya, the school’s purpose was to introduce young post-communist Russians to democracy, self-government, and capitalism.