Russian doctor who treated Navalny after poisoning has died

[Hekate]

10. In my youth I read any number of Russian novels & short stories from different eras...

Solzhenitsyn was very popular in the 1960s. I was assigned Lower Depths in college. And so on.

More recently I read a lengthy memoir of a very observant Englishwoman who lived in Russia for about a decade prior to the Crimean War.

There is a common thread among them all: melancholy, misery among the lower classes, gaiety of a sort among the upper classes, and ultimately an all-pervading fear of the government and its spies. The Englishwoman was sent home for her own protection, and her memoir was published anonymously for the protection of everyone she was friends with or had even met while living there.

It was not just about the Tsar. It was not just about Communism. It’s not just Putin. It’s Russia.