He then went into a long ramble about Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and secret CIA prisons, as if America’s faults somehow made Russia’s own abhorrent actions acceptable.

in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova

are familiar with hardship, suffering, and despair—not with success and certainly not with justice. Not surprisingly, this has engendered in many Russians a deep-seated fatalism that stipulates that the world is bad, it will always be bad, and any attempt to change things is doomed.

On October 1, 1939, Winston Churchill made a famous speech in which he discussed Russia’s prospect of joining the Second World War: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”

This was a huge morale boost, especially to the Russians on the team. As anyone who has read Chekhov, Gogol, or Dostoyevsky will tell you, and as Sergei himself once reminded us, Russian stories don’t have happy endings. Russians

Without knowing it, I’d stumbled upon one of the most important cultural phenomena of post-Soviet Russia—the exploding wealth gap. In Soviet times, the richest person in Russia was about six times richer than the poorest. Members of the Politburo might have had a bigger apartment, a car, and a nice dacha, but not much more than that. However, by

There’s a famous Russian proverb about this type of behavior. One day, a poor villager happens upon a magic talking fish that is ready to grant him a single wish. Overjoyed, the villager weighs his options: “Maybe a castle? Or even better—a thousand bars of gold? Why not a ship to sail the world?” As the villager is about to make his decision, the