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I encountered Alina Rotenberg back in 2012, during the summer months. At the age of thirty-six, she was divorced, but her family name resonated deeply in Moscow: her former spouse, Igor, was the offspring of Arkady Rotenberg, a long-time friend and fellow judoka of Vladimir Putin. There were many women akin to Alina residing in Moscow. They possessed beauty, with their flawlessly smooth skin and conspicuously opulent attire displaying their affluence. Nevertheless, to the wider city, their beauty existed in spite of several factors: in spite of their divorced status, in spite of being deemed past their prime in their thirties, in spite of possessing a “character”—the Russian equivalent of being “difficult.”
Following Putin’s election as President in 2000, he initiated the establishment of a novel oligarchic stratum, bestowing lucrative, uncontested contracts upon old acquaintances or figures within the governmental structure. This is how Arkady Rotenberg, Alina’s ex-father-in-law, ascended to billionaire status. The post-Soviet elite wasn’t markedly different from its predecessor—and this was deliberate. Putin had enlisted in the K.G.B. during Leonid Brezhnev’s epoch, in the seventies, and, having exploited its power system to ascend to the nation’s upper echelons, he willingly replicated it. The villas and apartments, the drivers and the paramours adorned in foreign finery, were reinstated. However, this time, it transpired on a vastly different scale. Russia now enjoyed entry to global markets—a windfall for its exports and for the voracious desire of its élites for properties and premium goods. Amongst Russian women, there was a strong yearning to ascend into this extravagant realm, attainable solely by attracting a man who dwelt therein.
Within the constellation of Putin’s upper class, Alina’s family name indicated the degree to which she had climbed and the magnitude of her descent. She arrived for our rendezvous in a pristine white Audi coupé—her vehicle for the summer months, she informed me. (A Range Rover Sport served as her preferred conveyance during the winter season.) She was a captivating lady, with her dark, exquisitely styled hair cascading over her shoulders. A Rolex graced her wrist, and her neck and earlobes were adorned with precious stones and pearls. It was a humid, late-summer afternoon, yet for a former noblewoman of the modern Russian domain, there was no sparing of formality.
In certain respects, Alina’s narrative mirrored my own. We both hailed from Soviet Jewish lineages, the third cohort of women born into an ambitious societal experiment that commenced when the Bolsheviks seized governance and aimed to render the conventional middle-class family irrelevant. Vladimir Lenin posited that such families confined women, and his revolutionary allies—including his spouse, Nadezhda Krupskaya; his mistress Inessa Armand; and his compatriot Alexandra Kollontai—were charged with liberating them. Kollontai, the world’s first female cabinet minister, spearheaded the most radical transformations. In 1918, Soviet women obtained rights to higher learning, equal remuneration, no-fault divorce, child support (even for children conceived outside marriage), remunerated maternity leave, and entry to complimentary maternity care facilities. By 1920, the Soviet Union had sanctioned abortion. By the era of my mother’s and Alina’s births, female illiteracy, commonplace in imperial Russia, had been essentially eradicated. At the time of Alina’s and my births, women constituted over half the Soviet workforce and seventy per cent of the nation’s physicians. In families such as ours, girls were anticipated to attend university and seek employment. It was ingrained.
Alina was born in Lvov, within Soviet Ukraine, and relocated to Israel during her teenage years, amidst the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. In Israel, she acquired a degree in psychology and sociology from Tel Aviv University, and subsequently moved to England, where she studied organizational psychology at the London School of Economics. In London, she associated with a group of women similar to herself: astute, learned individuals in their twenties who held positions in the financial sector as investment analysts and consultants.
In 2001, she accompanied a Russian paramour to Moscow. Having matured around the assertive women of Israel and the liberated ladies of London, she was taken aback by the goals of Russian women. “I observe them often at the gymnasium, these very conspicuous overnight sensations,” Alina recounted to me. “Long, styled hair; very slender. These are physically appealing girls, typically lacking significant education, and generally from outside the metropolis. You suddenly witness them arriving in a Bentley, and you surmise, All right, she succeeded.” These were the girls to whom Alina repeatedly found herself losing to in the city’s fierce rivalry for men.
She eventually severed ties with the paramour, began working for a wealthy magnate, and, in 2003, achieved a remarkable marriage with Igor Rotenberg. As his father’s riches expanded, Igor was groomed as his successor and entrusted with state contracts. Yet Alina appeared unable to comprehend the marital dynamics. “We enjoyed a favorable rapport for an extended duration, until my professional life gained traction and I commenced competing with him for recognition,” she stated. She had relinquished her corporate position and, akin to numerous élite wives, launched an interior-design firm. She believed that there were now two entrepreneurs within the household, but her spouse held a different perspective. Despite the growth of Igor’s fortune, Alina disclosed to me that she persistently emphasized her accomplishments and his deficiencies. She had received education abroad at prestigious institutions; he had attended St. Petersburg’s State University of Physical Education. She was sophisticated; he was an athlete. “Everyone was regarding him admiringly, and I was perpetually criticizing him,” she conveyed. “Eventually, he grew weary of it.” They divorced in 2009.
“It stemmed from my fault,” Alina concluded. If she could redo it, she would amend everything. “One must safeguard the male ego meticulously,” she elucidated. “It is fanciful to assume that a man requires an extraordinary woman. He requires a woman in whose presence he perceives himself as exceptional.” Igor had since remarried, to a woman Alina deemed to possess “questionable inner qualities.” And yet, “in her company, he perceives himself as a magnificent man,” she remarked. “I failed to grasp this previously. I consistently believed that he would revel in my triumphs, that he would declare, ‘This is my star. I am immensely proud of her. I am her owner.’ But that’s not the reality.”
In reality, Alina asserted, none of the extremely wealthy men within her circle had espoused educated, career-oriented women such as herself. They wedded women akin to Igor’s second spouse. Two years subsequent to Alina’s and Igor’s marriage, Igor’s father, Arkady, married Natalia, a twenty-four-year-old peroxide blonde. She served as a dance instructor from Kurgan, an impoverished, remote locality beyond the Urals. Natalia had transitioned from a run-down apartment building to the Moscow and London mansions of one of the world’s wealthiest individuals. To Alina’s astonishment, Natalia, who was five years her junior, never appeared self-conscious concerning her origins. “She exudes absolute confidence in her entitlement to everything,” Alina conveyed. “Someone once inquired whether she could have imagined possessing a three-hundred-foot yacht, and she replied, ‘Yes.’ How? How did she envision it? She comes from a large family, and they all resided in a cramped apartment.” Whenever Natalia telephoned her spouse, Alina confided in me, Arkady invariably answered the phone, even during meetings with Putin.
As a trained observer of psychology, Alina had meticulously noted the tactics that seemed effective for these graceful, youthful women. For instance: “A man values a woman substantially more if she continuously extracts gifts from him,” she noted, “and he esteems her far more than the woman who declines everything.” Alina cradled her teacup, partially awestruck. “They procure everything through this method,” she expressed. “I believe girls should be instructed in these matters during their youth. It holds great significance. And it’s inconsequential whether the girl is intelligent or not, because one can possess a girl who attends university, obtains a Ph.D., and is exceedingly accomplished, yet she will lose to these alluring young women who will abscond with her spouse before she can count to three.”
Feeling superior to these women, Alina cautioned me, was a shallow comfort. “Everyone mocks them for flaunting designer bags with diamond clasps, but they are progressing admirably,” she remarked, shaking her head. “They are geniuses. Absolute geniuses.”
Several months afterward, on a crisp evening in September, I sat cross-legged with a group of a dozen women upon the floor of the Academy of Private Life, adjacent to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Street. Our educator was Olga Kopylova, a middle-aged psychologist sporting a blond bob. “A man doesn’t frequent places where he is criticized, or demeaned, but instead where he is told that he is exceptional, a deity, a beacon,” Kopylova conveyed. The Academy of Private Life was hosting an open house, and Kopylova and her fellow instructors were present to elucidate how these busy Muscovite women might attain contentment in their personal relationships.
It constituted a considerable undertaking. During World War II, approximately twenty-seven million Soviets perished, predominantly men within their prime reproductive years. Hoping to reconstruct and repopulate the nation, Nikita Khrushchev spurred women to marry and bear as many offspring as feasible, yet there were insufficient men available for matrimony. Those who managed to return from the conflict often returned wounded, physically and psychologically. These men were likewise urged to marry—and remain married. Divorce became exceedingly arduous to secure. Consequently, countless women were compelled to settle for bearing children with men who were married to other women—a situation endorsed by the state. By the twenty-first century, the male demographic had long since rebounded, but a sentiment, nearing panic, persisted that suitable men—unmarried, respectable, with well-paying employment—were a jeopardized species. As one Russian female friend informed me, “Men are akin to public restrooms: either occupied or soiled.”
Numerous Russian women experienced time keenly, as if possessing precise knowledge of the duration remaining until their physical allure—their primary aktiv, one’s dominant asset—ceased to be competitive within a ruthless marketplace. Until then, they capitalized upon their natural endowments, investing to the fullest extent in attire, cosmetics, and aesthetic procedures. (Women in Moscow frequently questioned me concerning the perceived neglect of their American counterparts in “taking care of themselves.”) During the financial turmoil of 2008, Russia endured the most severe impact among the G-20 nations due to the economic downturn, yet cosmetics sales remained unaffected. Russian politicians, predominantly male, habitually touted Russian women as the planet’s most exquisite, as if they, akin to oil and gas, represented another natural endowment to be exploited during the nation’s resurgence to superpower prominence.
Among themselves, Russian women fiercely contested for male dedication—a commodity even scarcer than the men themselves. Anticipating faithfulness within matrimony was regarded as puritanical and impractical; infidelity was simply inherent to men, women declared, implying that, within this nation that had previously diverted untamed rivers and depleted entire seas, a man’s essence remained immutable. In fact, maintaining mistresses was a status symbol: the number of women (and illegitimate offspring) a man could afford to sustain. One Moscow banker I knew, undergoing his third marriage at the age of thirty-six, related a real-estate undertaking that his bank contemplated financing: an exclusive gated vicinity featuring homes priced at ten million dollars in the core, allocated for the spouses and legitimate progeny, encompassed by a circle of smaller, more modest residences, valued at around two million each, designated for the mistresses and their illegitimate children. This arrangement would prove more convenient for everyone, elucidated the banker, who disclosed that he consistently vacationed with his spouse, two former spouses, and all their children, despite each subsequent spouse having initially served as a mistress.
And yet, notwithstanding the meager, tentative reward awaiting at the culmination of this competition, it was a competition that Russian women relentlessly pursued: initially to secure a husband, subsequently to fend off the other women undoubtedly scheming to usurp him. The Academy of Private Life was established to satiate this demand, itself an outgrowth of the failure of the Soviet feminist endeavor. By the late nineteen-eighties, Soviet women were accustomed to returning home following an exhausting workday to oversee unmechanized households and procure increasingly scarce sustenance and attire for their offspring, for whom they bore primary accountability. These women, in the words of historian Greta Bucher, “had to enact each of her roles—worker, mother, and homemaker—as if it were her sole occupation.” And as if it were her occupation exclusively.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 merely amplified their hardships. Confronted with deprivation, instability, and salaries unpaid for months, men and women responded diversely. Millions of Russian men, unwilling to undertake lower-status labor, reclined on the couch and resorted to alcohol. Women, conversely, filled the void. Former school principals scrubbed lavatories; physicists became cashiers. As their men faltered—and divorce rates soared—women did whatever it took to nourish their families. All of this left numerous women yearning to become a stay-at-home spouse sustained and shielded by an affluent and masculine man. As Elena Zdravomyslova, a sociologist and feminist scholar in St. Petersburg, contended, with regard to motherhood and a profession, the liberation of women from “the double burden” can “be viewed, at least partially, as a liberation of women.”
This novel ideal, which Zdravomyslova termed “civilized patriarchy,” furnished the Russian woman with numerous advantages, the chief one being choice. She could, theoretically, remain at home, or pursue employment for personal fulfillment and self-actualization. She could make reproductive decisions while her spouse earned the income, sheltering her from the unforgiving realities of the Russian workplace. A family reliant on a single breadwinner is “what everyone desires here, as they never possessed it,” Zdravomyslova remarked. A century after Kollontai and Lenin denounced traditional, economically motivated marriage, it had evolved into women’s ultimate aspiration.
At the Academy of Private Life, Kopylova expounded upon how that aspiration could be realized. Kopylova asserted that every woman cycled through four distinct states of being: the little girl, the temptress, the sovereign, and the khozayka, or the lady of the house. Kopylova queried her pupils as to the implication if a man ceased presenting gifts. “It signifies that the state of the little girl is suffering, that the girl lacks sufficient presence,” she proclaimed. “Because the girl motivates the man to action, to displays of chivalry.” Alternatively, Kopylova inquired, what if one were capable of attracting a man but unable to retain him? That undoubtedly indicated the weakening of one’s internal khozayka.
“This signifies a man,” Kopylova stated, hoisting a dry-erase marker to symbolize a phallus. She enveloped it tightly with her manicured hand. “A man possesses a special apparatus that indicates his trajectory, his orientation. Thus, if he suddenly perceives a woman as attractive, his apparatus promptly signals the direction in which to proceed.” However, Kopylova elucidated that it was feasible to confound a man’s apparatus. “When we perpetually assert, ‘I’ll undertake it myself,’ or when we proffer advice—often imprudent advice, let’s acknowledge—a man interprets it as you assaulting his masculinity.” A woman deemed overly assertive, Kopylova contended, risked transforming her feminine vitality into masculine vitality. “A man can discern, on an intuitive plane, that you possess a member and he possesses a member,” she stated. “Can you engage in intercourse with him? Impossible!”
Undoubtedly, the school’s expert instructors eagerly assisted women in restoring genuine feminine equilibrium. The Academy of Private Life, boasting having served upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand women, maintains several national branches and an extensive curriculum of courses: Flirtation from A to Z, The Art of Walking Beautifully, Mysteries of the Jade Cave: How to Utilize Your Intimate Muscles, How to Play the Magic Flute: The Art of Fellatio. (These latter two offerings garnered the most significant interest during the open house.) Across all courses, the pedagogy constitutes an awkward fusion of customs, melding Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Slavic paganism, Siberian shamanism, and Asian spiritual practices, interspersed with facets of Jungian and American pop psychology.
Following the elucidation of the four feminine states, Kopylova revealed that an imbalance could be rectified solely through realigning one’s chakras, an ancient Hindu concept. “I encountered a young woman who earnestly sought to gift her paramour an expensive new automobile,” Kopylova recounted, exemplifying how a stray chakra could misfire. “Naturally, it’s within your prerogative, but bestowing expensive presents upon a man definitively precludes you from being his girlfriend. You embody his mommy, and men refrain from coitus with their mothers.” Towards the session’s conclusion, she was promoting a particularly convenient dildo, available for purchase at the academy for merely twenty-two hundred rubles—ideal for practice in the Magic Flute class.
One evening, soon after the open house, I visited the Academy of Private Life to conduct an interview with its founder. Larisa Renar possessed a gentle demeanor, with dyed copper tresses and sizable blue eyes. She donned a flowing, diaphanous gown and the Medallion of Women’s Strength—an intricately designed pendant, worn by many of the academy’s instructors, adorned with four gemstones signifying the four states of femininity.
As Renar served me tea, I inquired about the genesis of her academy, established in 2000. “I believe that the fundamental issue lies in the fact that modern society, not exclusively within Russia but universally, compels women to adhere to male standards: to emulate men, to behave as men, to resemble men,” she commenced. Within Russia, this predicament was particularly acute. “Women bear all responsibility,” she elucidated. “A woman makes all decisions. She earns the livelihood. And numerous Russian women are excessively proactive, excessively autonomous. It correlates with historical occurrences, with wars and revolutions during which men were slain, leaving women with no alternative but to assume leadership positions. My generation of women, those born in the sixties—it is decidedly simpler for us to accomplish everything ourselves and to avoid dependence on men.”
I conveyed to Renar my concurrence. By that juncture, I had resided in Russia for several years and had been romantically involved with a Russian man for some duration. This specific man presented me with floral arrangements and paid me touching compliments; he held the door and drew out my chair in restaurants. By all external indications, he was prosperous and attractive, yet in my presence, he transformed into a needy and manipulative child. His inability to render difficult decisions or refrain from succumbing to a sentimental, clinging intoxication had metamorphosed me from his girlfriend and lover into his maternal figure and disciplinarian. I loathed myself for the person I had become in his presence: a nag, a possessive girlfriend who awaited his slumber to peruse his telephone, a woman rendered bitter and resentful beyond my years.
Yet I realized that, within Moscow, he represented the best option available to me. Other women openly yearned for him; one attempted to kiss him publicly. “Men are not easily found,” my grandmother chided whenever I lamented his conduct. Furthermore, as she and my Russian female friends emphasized, he genuinely cherished me. What was the significance of my ceasing to cherish him? Numerous of those Russian female friends espoused the belief that my tribulations would dissipate upon my marrying him and bearing a child. “Divorce is always an option!” my grandmother stated, offering reassurance. After all, I was nearing thirty and, apparently, the twilight of my existence.
“Indeed, men have been subdued,” Renar stated. “This scenario wherein a woman is robust, yet not in a feminine manner but in a masculine manner, and a man is feeble—this role reversal is what has engendered women’s discontent.” The remedy, as Renar delineated within her 2015 publication, “Make Your Husband a Millionaire,” lies in channeling your feminine energy to inspire your man to become affluent and successful. Renar herself functions as a prosperous businesswoman, and she indicated that she perceives it as commendable for women to pursue careers. Nevertheless, she remained wary of modern feminism, given its disruption of the natural equilibrium between the sexes. “A man furnishes women with a home, physical security, and a woman provides him with pleasure, enjoyment of sex, beauty,” she expressed. “Consequently, we should exhibit willingness to follow our man, to proclaim, ‘You are in charge, you are correct.’ ”
Eleonora and Leyla never attended the Academy of Private Life, yet they comprehended its teachings instinctively. Akin to me, they were both born in 1982; Leyla in Ufa, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Bashkortostan, Eleonora in what was then designated Leningrad. They hailed from the Soviet middle class, from families of engineers, accountants, and factory employees who, amidst the stagnation of the eighties, perceived themselves as, effectively, impoverished.
Both women experienced provincial existences until they encountered men substantially senior to themselves. Leyla’s was a Frenchman, an art aficionado twice her age, who encountered her within one of Moscow’s refined nightclubs and commenced to educate her thoroughly. There were days spent in Parisian galleries and museums, interspersed with nocturnal quizzes. “Resembling Pygmalion,” Leyla conveyed to me. Eleonora met the offspring of a prominent Moscow family in St. Petersburg. He enlightened her regarding luxurious hotels, elegant dining, and silk napkins. “Resembling ‘Pretty Woman,’ ” Eleonora reminisced.
Following Leyla’s separation from the Frenchman, she capitalized upon that education and became an interior designer, the quintessential profession for a glamorous Russian devushka. Despite her affection for her vocation, she yearned for the financial assurance afforded by matrimony, and acquired it with exceptional speed. Subsequent to encountering a charming man through an acquaintance, she swiftly determined that he satisfied the majority of her criteria. Ten days hence, he proposed. What tactics did she employ? “I believe my aptitudes aided me: conviction, marketing, management,” Leyla stated. “I effectively promoted myself and succeeded in presenting myself favorably.” If it had constituted love with the Frenchman, Leyla conceded, this relationship represented “cold calculation.”
And yet circumstances had not unfolded as she had envisioned. During our meeting, she guided me through the meticulously decorated apartment she shared with her spouse, who also functioned as her superior within the design enterprise they managed jointly. He was absent, having departed for the entirety of the summer, despite periodically contacting her to remind her of his lack of obligation to her. While recounting this, Leyla, who had informed me of her aspiration to embody “an unyielding woman” akin to Margaret Thatcher, began to weep. “When I entered into matrimony, I hoped for solid ground beneath my feet, for a husband to serve as my solace, yet I possess nothing,” she declared. “We have been married for two years, and for the past six months, I have been realizing that there exists solely myself, my work, my intellect, my ambition, and nothing further. There is absolutely nothing encompassing me.”
She remained uncertain regarding her readiness for divorce. The women within her social circle who had secured affluent husbands “will undoubtedly remain with them,” she asserted, even in the face of overt infidelity or families established with their paramours. Her friends likewise engaged in extramarital affairs, typically with men over whom they exerted some degree of authority: bodyguards, drivers, or hachiki, a racial slur directed toward men originating from the Muslim North Caucasus. Leyla furnished a generalized depiction of a man along these lines—perhaps named Mahmoud, perhaps from Dagestan. One such man disclosed to her that he sought women akin to her friends: affluent, married, and neglected. They were perfectly low-maintenance, he affirmed, and desired merely one element from him. Alina Rotenberg likewise remarked that numerous of her friends, even those espoused to billionaires listed on Forbes, enjoyed dalliances with the occasional Mahmoud.
Eleonora, whom I engaged in conversation with over coffee at a Moscow restaurant, initially appeared to be an anomaly, given her unmarried status at the advanced age of twenty-nine. A rosy-cheeked real-estate agent, she had dedicated the morning to inspecting an out-of-town warehouse while adorned in heels and a refined cashmere sweater. Within Moscow, real estate can constitute a strikingly lucrative vocation, and Eleonora exhibited no haste in entering matrimony. However, when the moment arrived, she asserted that she desired a man who was “stronger”—by which she implied a man who earned a greater income than herself. “It remains inherent to Russian women to seek shelter behind a man’s protection, irrespective of their degree of success,” she declared. “In the presence of a man, a woman will consistently prefer to occupy the second position.”
This appeared peculiar to hear. Eleonora reminded me of my female acquaintances residing in New York: beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious individuals, cherishing their careers and earning a substantially good livelihood therein. However, unlike them, she would willingly relinquish it all instantaneously. Renar would have endorsed this sentiment, I surmised.
I initially encountered Renar mere months subsequent to Putin’s triumph in his third Presidential term. He has retained his position on the throne since then, weaving a legitimizing ideology rooted in conventional gender conventions, Orthodox Christianity, and Russian neo-imperialism. In recent years, the “global L.G.B.T. movement” has been branded as an extremist one, thus equating gay Russians with ISIS terrorists. Abortions have become increasingly challenging to obtain, while domestic violence has been decriminalized. Putin’s cabinet ministers now encourage young women to eschew higher learning and bear offspring—as many as feasible. As Putin has dispatched hundreds of thousands of men to perish in attempting to conquer Ukraine, he has reintroduced Stalin’s Order of Maternal Glory, military-style accolades for women who generate an astounding number of offspring. (Stalin himself borrowed the notion from Nazi Germany.) In the militant reprisal of the latter Putin era, men are men, women are women, and men preside.
This appears not so divergent from Renar’s perspective, yet upon my subsequent meeting with her in 2015, I ascertained that she had struggled to implement her teachings within her personal life. She had once possessed a marriage coveted by the majority of Russian women. Her spouse was a handsome and intelligent older man, a pioneer within the post-Soviet advertising sector. He had facilitated her pursuit of her aspiration to enroll in a psychology Ph.D. program and procured a building in St. Petersburg to house the enterprise that ultimately evolved into the Academy of Private Life.
Yet she had been unhappy. On the scale of affection that she had developed, the fifth and paramount level depicted two individuals who loved each other so completely that their hearts forestalled their bodies from lusting after any other individual. The majority of affection worldwide falls short of this ideal, Renar conveyed to me. She and her spouse’s affection, for instance, had resided on the second level, wherein one selects their mate not with their heart but with their intellect. At this level, Renar expounded, one’s desire for others does not vanish. Consequently, he engaged in extramarital affairs, she engaged in extramarital affairs, and in this manner, they resembled countless other Russian couples “who perpetually seek a superior partner, ceaselessly assessing their options,” Renar remarked.
As the academy flourished, Renar increasingly questioned her marriage. “I contemplated, Good heavens, how is this unfolding?” she reminisced. “I am intelligent, I am beautiful, I am alluring, I have mastered every sexual technique conceivable. I am attempting to cultivate myself. I dedicate myself to our family.” Upon her request for a divorce, her spouse regarded it as folly. This represented the closest proximity to happiness attainable by any married couple within Russia. Aspiring for more could merely culminate in isolation, a far more dire predicament for a Russian woman than discontentment. Nonetheless, he complied.
During my latest conversation with her, Renar was romantically involved with a man a decade her junior, which clearly gratified her. “I anticipate marrying again, undoubtedly,” she conveyed to me. “I will solely espouse a man not based on his affection for me, nor due to his satisfaction of items on some checklist, but solely when, within myself, I possess the conviction that this man is the optimal man for me.” ♦
This excerpt is derived from “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
