Academician I.R. Shafarevich is a world-famous mathematician specialising in algebra and number theory, a member of the Royal Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Andrei Sinyavsky may dismiss his ideas as 'ridiculous' and suggest that he has no significance except as a stalking-horse for the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, but the excitement generated by his musings on Russian society, and especially by his essay 'Russophobia' which appeared last year in Nash Sovremennik, would seem to indicate that many Russians respect his role as an ideologue of contemporary Russian nationalism.

LRB 19 April 1990 | PDF Download