“... vocabulary was crude and his grammar barbaric. Brezhnev could scarcely put two sentences together. Gorbachev spoke with a provincial southern accent. The less said of Yeltsin’s slurred diction the better. To hear a leader of the country capable once again of expressing himself with clarity, accuracy and fluency, in a more or less correct idiom, comes as ...”

“... economy was very interesting for us. R.B.: From reading your book I gather that the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin had an influence on you? B.K.: Yes, he did. He died in the Seventies and no sooner was he dead than everybody began to study his writings and to appreciate his theses on the necessity for a dialogic structure in true art – that is to say, for a ...”

“... to $30 per barrel to less than $10, leading to serious problems for the Kremlin’s finances. Gorbachev’s government was forced to borrow heavily in order to import food, and industrial investment shrank , which further depressed output. This spiral of debt was an important factor in the escalating economic crisis of the USSR’s final years. It’s an ...”

“... I write, the news from Putin’s Russia arrives in little packages done up in the same prejudice. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the young billionaire who was suddenly thrown into jail last year on suspicion of tax fiddling after he had funded parties opposed to President Putin, has made one of those abject prison-cell confessions which recall Darkness at Noon. How ...”

“... cemetery in the distant suburb of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, where Lang read out a message from Mikhail Baryshnikov and ballerinas filled the grave with pointe shoes. Nureyev had ordered that his tomb, an unusual monument covered with a superb mosaic rug, should be placed at a distance from that of Serge Lifar, but it was still perhaps too close for ...”

“... as the Kurman gap after the Soviet demographer who tried to account for it to his superiors. (Mikhail Kurman was arrested a week after presenting his report in March 1937, and was released from prison ten years later; the census results themselves were not published until 1990.) Davies and Wheatcroft have concluded that ‘excess deaths’ for the period ...”

“... Nobody guessed that reunification and the death of the GDR were only a few years away. After 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev’s astonishing grants of civil freedom in the Soviet Union encouraged opposition groups in East German cities to act more openly. For the last time, Moscow was undermining the GDR leadership – but now because ...”