Back in Moscow again, surprised at how happy I am to be so, I sit in my old office and read myself into the 'story'. For five years I followed its twists and turns, its lumpy, incomprehensible lurches to and fro, its characters creating and re-creating themselves in the space which the great collapse of 1991 had cleared for them. Now, to try to locate myself, I read the press clippings of events I could barely follow from a distance, and catch at what seem to be the signs of the pre-election times.

LRB 4 July 1996 | PDF Download