| Last winter, many people in Moscow doubted that Putin would start a war. But now, as one journalist and political analyst said, “the country has undergone a moral catastrophe.”  Illustration by Doug Chayka Keith Gessen was born in Moscow, and immigrated to the United States as a child, in the early eighties. Since the mid-nineties, he’d been returning to Moscow about once a year, and noticing that “the city kept getting nicer, and the political situation kept getting worse,” as he writes in a new essay. During his first years back, “Nothing was holy, and everything was permitted.” Now “Moscow was clean, tidy, and rich; you could get fresh pastries on every corner. You could also get prosecuted for something you said on Facebook.” Gessen speaks with friends—some who stayed in Moscow after the war began, and others who fled—about the post-Soviet period and the era of Putinism, and he provides an illuminating glimpse of life within and beyond an increasingly repressive political regime, where some observers fear there is room for things to still get worse. We’ll be publishing new pieces all week to mark the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine. Subscribe today to support our journalism » | 
No comments:
Post a Comment