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“... In October 1920​ , Gaito Gazdanov, then a young soldier, returned to his armoured train in the Crimea to find that it had been captured by the Red Army. He escaped in November by crossing the Black Sea to Constantinople with some of his fellow soldiers. He was one of more than 150,000 refugees – the sad remains of General Wrangel’s defeated White Army, along with any civilians who managed to make it on board – on a fleet of 126 ships ...”

“... In​ 1983, Sergei Dovlatov told an interviewer that the literary situation in the Soviet Union was worse than ever. ‘If under Stalin talented writers were at first published, subsequently vilified in the press, and finally executed or destroyed in camps,’ he said, ‘it’s now the case that no one is executed, almost no one is put in prison – and no one is published ...”

“... When​ Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930, some Soviet writers interpreted it as an act of protest: stifled by political censorship, he couldn’t go on. In the decades since, the suicide of the great poet of the Revolution has been seen as the Soviet Union’s point of no return. This is the view taken by the Swedish scholar Bengt Jangfeldt in this biography, the first significant non-Soviet Life of the poet: ‘The bullet that penetrated Vladimir Mayakovsky’s heart also shot to pieces the dream of communism and signalled the beginning of the communist nightmare of the 1930s ...”

“... On reaching the militarised zone, most were turned back by Polish forces. Writing at the time, Sophie Pinkham argued that Alexander Lukashenko had engineered this ‘spectacle of confrontation’ between vulnerable migrants and unyielding border guards as a vengeful response to Europe’s criticism of Belarus’s human rights record. Some refugees ...”