Vladimir Voinovich, Russia’s 82-year-old satirist, on why the rise of a KGB man was inevitable but why Russia’s decline and fall into authoritarianism doesn’t have to be.
Russian writers are fond of quoting the words of 20th-century poet and literary scholar Kornei Chukovsky: “In Russia, one should live a long life.” Novelist, poet and essayist Vladimir Voinovich, born in 1932 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, has certainly fulfilled that precept: He has lived long enough to see the end...
