Russia

• Mama writes
(in reply to the photo of evening Lviv drenched in summer sun):
Teach him Russian!
Your child must not be deprived of the right to learn the Russian language.

• I write:
But didn’t you forbid papa to teach me Romanian?
Who at that point decided our linguistic fate—yours and mine?

Gerontocracy is a relative concept. At his death in 1984 Yuri Andropov was only 69, decades younger than Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein and the other ancients currently presiding over the US Senate. What mattered was not the absolute age of the Soviet leadership but their generational cohort. Soviet history can usefully be understood as the story of the youth, maturity, and senescence of a single age group: people who were children in 1917.

In 2017 Strelkov came up with the idea of holding a televised debate with Alexey Navalny, who agreed to participate. One hundred and fifty thousand people tuned in. Strelkov’s principal accusations against Navalny included not just his betrayal of Russian nationalism (he claimed his opponent “never once referred to [ethnic] Russians, only citizens of the Russian Federation”), but also the claim that Navalny’s economic program was incapable of dismantling the “total system of corruption” that defines Russian life. As one of the moderators put it, “they’ve spent an hour calling each other Putin.”

This rhythm in Russia, of repression and violent revolution, is well known to Sorokin, who first emerged as a writer under Soviet rule in the 1980s, when he was no less irritating to the Kremlin. He’s not just a satirist but also a speculative fantasist, and he became angrily political after Putin came to power.