“... had disappointed them.’ Many people didn’t even bother to sell them. ‘Volumes of Gorky and Mayakovsky piled up in the dumpsters. People would drop the complete works of Lenin off at the paper recycling centre.’For people who still identified with Soviet values, it was an agonising time. ‘I’ve fallen behind,’ one woman said, invoking the old ...”

“... of Sheremetievo airport and the ring-mail burnished rust of the ceiling’s empty pilchard tins. Vladimir Stabnikov is waiting for us. I have met him before, in England and in the Soviet Union. Small, thick-set, black-eyed, densely-bearded, restlessly rubbing his hands, inexplicably powerful, grinning indefatigably, he wafts our party into the VIP ...”

“... know the force of words/the alarm they sound … so often unpublished, unprinted’ – lines by Mayakovsky that turned up after his suicide. Why won’t Serge acknowledge that his writing is a suicidal mission? Without a party card, he’s unpublishable, unprintable, fatally exposed as an oppositionist. Liuba throws the volume of poems at him. In the ...”

“... Pasternak the rule; not to speak of those who sided with the revolution (Platonov, Babel, Mayakovsky) – the human sciences were badly affected. Of those who stayed, the Formalists and their kin survived best: Shklovsky, Tynyanov, Eikhenbaum; Voloshinov and Bakhtin; Propp. Political science, sociology, economics, literary history were another ...”