Until recently, the restaurant on Leningradsky Prospect, opposite the monumental Sovyetskaya hotel was called 'Antisovyetskaya'. Portraits of famous Soviet cultural figures, known for their dissident ideas, decorate its walls.

Dear Mr. President,

Your September 10 article on Russia's challenges is laudably frank and incisive in its analysis and call for sweeping reform.  You voiced the belief of many in Russia, and among its friends abroad, that a better life requires more freedom, diversity, and dynamism.  Since you gave less emphasis to how Russia should achieve the lofty goals you set forth, we will offer a few suggestions in response to your gracious open invitation for ideas.

Denis Corboy is director of the Caucasus Policy Institute at Kings College London and was European Commission ambassador to Georgia and Armenia.  William Courtney was US ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia.  Kenneth Yalowitz is director of the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and was US ambassador to Belarus and Georgia

Whatever path the country takes, Russia's history and traditions must be respected and built upon.  You are right to eschew "permanent revolution" and seek a considered, gradual reform process.  As you caution, and as Mikhail Gorbachev learned two decades ago, powerful internal forces will oppose change.  Building a broad and durable constituency for reform is essential.

Your overall direction is farsighted - Russia must modernize, and in doing so deepen its ties with the advanced democracies and in some areas emulate them.  Europe and America lack monopolies on ideas for reform but between their experiences and Russia's own, important lessons have been learned.  The most important is the value of open debate and competitive institutions.

You are right that Russia possesses enormous advantages, including "a huge territory, colossal natural wealth, substantial industrial potential, [and] an impressive list of brilliant achievements in the sphere of science, technology, education, and art."

These strengths will enhance productivity and the quality of life if they are invigorated by economic competition built on an open economic and political environment.  They will also require greater investments in health and education, a more equitable division of constitutional powers, and new ways to stimulate individual initiative.

Let us look at a few ideas as to how Russia can achieve these aims.

First, do not under-value "the habit of existing on raw materials exports, in effect exchanging these for finished products."  Russia will continue to accumulate wealth faster by developing its natural resources than by any other path.  But more competitive internal markets, diminished government control and subsidies, and sharply reduced corruption are vital enablers.

For example, breaking up Gazprom and Rosneft into smaller, competing units, and ending subsidized internal prices for energy, would lead to more efficient energy markets and higher productivity.  The new companies would generate far more savings and investment for growth than the two lumbering and wasteful giants ever could.

A challenge is to ensure that the returns from raw materials exports do not disappear into private foreign bank accounts, and that control of the new firms does not fall victim to Kremlin intrigues.  Depoliticizing the energy sector would also make Russia a more reliable energy supplier to Europe.

Second, you point to "age-old corruption that has drained Russia from time immemorial," because of "the excessive presence of the state in any remotely important sphere of economic or other social activity" and the chronic lack of initiative and technological innovation.

More "checks and balances" are the best way to reduce the heavy burden of corruption on Russian economic life.  Tools for doing this include effective legislative oversight of executive power, a free press which exposes corruption and governmental malfeasance, an independent judiciary which holds corrupt officials and business executives accountable, and independent non-governmental organizations (NGO's) which have specialized expertise and can educate and rally public opinion against corrupt practices.  These institutions and organizations "compete" against abuse of governmental power and against each other, lessening risks that watchdogs themselves could be corrupted.

Third, you called attention to demographic and health crises, including a declining population and virtual epidemics of cardiovascular disease, AIDS and TB.  These challenges may well prevent Russia from meeting your goals for labor supply and a healthy military corpus.

Solving these problems will require systemic changes in diet, lessening the scourges of alcohol and smoking, and improving primary medical care and prevention.  Demographics and disease are a greater threat to Russia than any external enemy.

Coercive, top-down approaches, as in the anti-alcohol campaign of the Gorbachev era, ought to be avoided.  Building wide public support will be critical.  Hence, the government should rely mainly on public education, open discussion, greater investment in the health sector, and reform in the delivery of medical care with a new emphasis on prevention.  

Greater openness to immigration from poorer neighboring countries is likely to be the only way a dynamic Russian economy can meet its labor needs.  It is time now to begin preparing your countrymen.  A continued pattern of overt, sometimes ugly, discrimination will only hurt Russia.

Fourth, you are right to call for legislation to "ensure comprehensive support for the spirit of innovation in all spheres of public life and the creation of a market in ideas, inventions, discoveries, and new technologies."  In Europe and America, generous government financing of research and development is paired with competitive, peer-reviewed mechanisms to allocate funding.  Keeping politics at bay in decision-making will help Russian science.

Equally important is an economy which can quickly apply the fruits of research and development in innovative ways.  For example, nanotechnology researchers probably never dreamed their labors would lead so quickly to a product with such world-wide market penetration as the iPod.

Fifth, your call for "competition among open political associations" is vitally important.  Independent political parties and free and fair elections would go a long way to enhance political stability, and lead to governments which expose and prosecute corruption irrespective of the political influence of perpetrators.  This is a great strength in the European and American political systems, buttressed by frequent alternations in political power.

Some in Russia equate competitive politics with the "chaos" of the 1990s, and even the "Time of Troubles" four centuries ago.  But history shows that political competition, as it develops, tends to marginalize extremist views.  This is sorely needed in Russia, as the wave of neo-Nazi criminal acts shows.  Competitive politics are what makes advanced democracies so stable.  Russians are well educated and more than ready for democracy.

Finally, you speak of doing "everything possible to normalize the life of people in the Russian Caucasus."  Calming tensions there will require a secure environment, political openness, and better economic opportunities.  Multi-candidate elections, security without abuses, and improved agriculture will help a lot.  Moscow city authorities should crack down on the harassment of people from the Caucasus and Central Asia who sell in farmers markets.

These are times of change in the world economy.  New creative and competitive energies will be released, and uneconomic activities will be punished by markets.  Economic and political reform can position Russia to take stronger advantage of the new opportunities.

America and Europe not only wish Russia well in its reform effort, but believe they have a stake in its success.  A secure and prosperous Russia will be less likely to have conflicts with its neighbors, and be a valued economic partner and source of innovation and ideas from which the whole world will benefit.  

No one in the journalist world seemed to have had any warning that Medvedev would be gripped with a "sudden passion" to write. There was no mention in the morning papers that the article was going to come out. But several Internet publications immediately reacted, and also posted the article on their sites. Its appearance was picked up soon afterwards by the democratic radio station "Ekho Moskvy".

The most surprising thing was that Medvedev's article was only posted on the official presidential site http://www.kremlin.ru/ at midday. All this combined to make it look as if the appearance of the text on the Internet was spontaneous, which gave an aura of sincerity to Medvedev's address to Russian citizens.

But what was behind all this? What did the text actually contain?

As I am finishing a book about the history of Russian reforms since the time of Mikhail Gorbachev (since the mid-1980s) at the moment, it all felt very familiar.  It was as if I'd suddenly gone back a quarter of a century, to the time of my youth, of naïve hopes, empty shops and the rusting iron curtain.

I don't know whether the similarities are obvious to young Russians, who don't remember the events of 1985 very clearly, or to my contemporaries, for whom the events are not fresh in their minds. But it seemed to me that Medvedev's text might almost have been written at the time of Gorbachev's perestroika.

I should remind you that it was then that the leader of the Soviet Communists Mikhail Gorbachev began tentatively to undermine the system that had existed since Lenin's day, and remove conservatives from the political leadership of the USSR. In 1985, it seemed that he was only trying to improve the effectiveness of the Soviet system, while with every year changes took place which turned this system into its opposite - into a society with elements of a market and democracy.

But let us return to Medvedev. The first important point his article makes is to admit that mistakes have been made. This is a cautious affirmation, one that does not undermine the foundations of the system. Medvedev points out the problems that have been revealed by the crisis, the "drop in production that is greater that in other economies (my italics - DT) during the present crisis. The excessive fluctuations of the stock exchange. All this proves," the Russian president concludes, "that we certainly did not do everything that was necessary in previous years. And we certainly did not do everything correctly."

Many Russian readers probably did not realize that in saying this he was taking issue directly with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and with the report of the Russian government on results of activity for 2009. Putin, who presented the report at the Duma on the 6^th of April, declared: "A severe slump is being experienced by practically all industries of the world economy. In some places, things are better, in some they are worse, but on the whole the situation in the Russian economy is fundamentally no different (my italics - DT) from world tendencies".

In Russia, official Kremlin propagandists constantly emphasize the fact that Medvedev is Putin's successor to the position of president, that he is his younger comrade, and that there can be no disagreements between the two leaders. However, Medvedev's article demolished this notion. And significantly, this is taking happening thanks to an initiative taken by the president himself, and not during a press conference or interview, when things might get said in the heat of the moment which shouldn't have been.

Medvedev is not setting out to confront Putin directly. But at the start of perestroika Gorbachev did not directly oppose his predecessors, either. He was giving the Soviet intellectuals, who were used to picking up on Aesopian allusions, the chance to fill in the blanks for themselves.

Medvedev not only discussed the economy in his article, but also political problems. He noted that "democratic institutions have on the whole been formed and stabilized, but their quality is very far from ideal". This also looks like an attack on Putin, who - even if ironically - in one interview called himself such an absolute and pure democrat that since the death of Mahatma Gandhi he did not even have anyone to talk to.

Medvedev's assessment of the state of Russian democracy is very similar to the early theses of Gorbachev, who showed his confidence in the correctness of the socialist democracy, but proposed to strengthen it. In the spirit of Lenin, so to speak.

Medvedev is essentially saying directly that in future, Russia must move to a parliamentary democracy, where the "leaders in the political struggle will be parliamentary parties which regularly replace each other in power". He is practically repeating the theses of the democratic opposition. But where this is something that  the opposition wants to happen today, for Medvedev it is a task for the future. For the moment, according to the president, we must be satisfied with the fact that "political parties have received fresh opportunities to influence the formation of executive power in federation regions and municipalities".

We should remember that under Gorbachev, democratization also began in 1988-89 with the construction of a very unusual system, in which elections were not actually equal, secret and direct, as is customary in modern democracies. That is to say, Gorbachev was prepared to experiment with democratization, but he was afraid to start building a real democracy right now.

It is characteristic that Medvedev is categorical about one thing: we cannot return to the "democratic 1990s". In this, he agrees with Putin, who in recent years has said again and again that in the 1990s capitalism established itself in the country under the guise of democracy, serving its own selfish interests, and also those of its foreign (primarily American) sponsors. Medvedev does not dare to make a drastic break with his older comrade.

In Gorbachev's early years, he too rejected a return to capitalist democracy. The feeling was: why should we move backwards? We will do everything better than under capitalism, we will build socialism with a human face.

Another feature very characteristic of Medvedev is the way he declares a new way of thinking in international relations. He talks of the need for rapprochement with western democracies, something that Putin has not discussed seriously for many years. Medvedev also stresses that "petulance, arrogance, insecurity, mistrust and especially hostility must be eliminated from Russia's relations with leading democratic countries".

As Vladimir Putin has essentially been responsible for creating the parameters of Russian foreign policy since 2000, and foreign ministers have simply been the obedient followers of his policy, words about petulance and arrogance can only apply to Putin. And indeed, some Russian analysts have noted that Putin's behaviour betrays the marks of his difficult childhood, and his unwillingness to forgive insults by other boys, a subject I have written about in detail for openDemocracy.

Another view of Medvedev's: "We must be able to interest partners, and involve them in joint activity. And if we need to change something in ourselves, get rid of prejudices and illusions, in order to be able to do so, and then we must do so." In the mid-1980s, the idea of the need to change something in ourselves was first expressed not by Gorbachev, but by Boris Yeltsin in his speech in the 27^th Communist party congress.  This was very much in the spirit of Gorbachev's perestroika.

Now let us try to compare the specific picture of the changes which Medvedev is now announcing with the changes Gorbachev was announcing a quarter of a century ago.

Right at the start of perestroika in the USSR, the issue of combating drunkenness came up. Quite recently, it came up once again, and Medvedev gives it pride of place in his article. Under Gorbachev, the war on drunkenness was virtually the only large-scale campaign of his first two years in power.

But there is also another important similarity between Medvedev's approach and that adopted under perestroika. People do not remember that well today that along with the anti-alcohol campaign, the head of the Soviet government Nikolai Ryzhkov did his best to speed up socio-economic development. And the way being proposed was by developing machine-building, i.e. through technology alone. It was only in June 1987 that the issue of changing the economic system was raised. Before that what we mainly heard about was the wonderful breakthroughs that would be achieved by advanced technology combined with sober workers.

And now Medvedev has outlined the five strategic vectors of economic modernization. Typically, he says nothing about the issues that are being discussed by economists. Medvedev, as a new-wave technocrat, simply paints a picture of a bright future where Russia will become a leading country in all key spheres of high technology: new types of fuel, nuclear technology, information technology, advanced satellites, and breakthrough in creating medical equipment. But how are we going to achieve all this, given the raw materials focus of the country, and our dependence on world oil prices, which I have written about in detail in another of my articles? Medvedev does not offer us any insightful discussion about this.

As we may recall, in the 1980s Gorbachev meant to raise Russian automobile construction to a world level by developing the Volga automobile factory (VAZ), without any foreign investments and equipment. To this day, VAZ produces very poor cars that are inferior to western models. Medvedev also forgets about the poor quality of the automobile industry, and immediately talks about more advanced technology.

And in conclusion. How did Soviet citizens see the structure of society during the time of perestroika? On the one hand, there were supporters of perestroika, and on the other there were opponents. This naïve approach pitted good against evil on different sides of the barricades. All the officials and appratchiks were declared to be opponents of perestroika, and the entire people headed by Gorbachev were declared to be supporters.

What does Medvedev write? "People will try to interfere with our work. Influential groups of corrupt officials and "entrepreneurs" who do not engage in any actual enterprise." Once more, we can see an attempt by the political leader to identify himself with the people, and marginalize his opponents.

Even yesterday it was perhaps still hard to imagine to what extent Medvedev would strive to copy Gorbachev's path. He was afraid to oppose Putin, and only took symbolic steps to consolidate his popularity in intellectual circles - a subject I have also written about for openDemocracy.

As we sit in one of Moscow's fashionable neo-Tsarist restaurants, an old friend reminds me that there are only three Cs that matter: Chelsea, Cartier and Courchevel. The economic crisis has affected his real estate business, but not so much that he has to forgo life's many luxuries. In any case, the oil price is already beginning to rise and the economy is easing itself out of recession, so his confidence remains undiminished. For the past 20 years of globalised gluttony, Russia's embracing of conspicuous consumption has been the most pronounced of any emerging market. Some of its manifestations are particular, notably its unhealthy mix of nationalistic hubris and resentment of outsiders, what I have long called "the politics of envy".

Yet Russia's embrace of materialism to the detriment of so much else, shares many characteristics of other countries. In a year of travelling to research my book, "Freedom for Sale", I looked at eight countries, four of them notionally authoritarian - Singapore, China, Russia and the UAE - four notionally democratic - India, Italy, the UK and the USA. Why, I wanted to know, is it that so many people are willing to give up their freedoms in return for the promise of either prosperity or security? Why are people so reluctant to cause trouble, even where they have legal protection for free expression? Or to put it another way: why are the middle classes so easily bought off?

I first went to Russia in the late 1970s. I have been a regular visitor since, including two spells of working as a correspondent, in the mid 80s, and during the heady years of the early 90s. I saw the Soviet Union in stagnation and not-so-blissful isolation, when the verb "to buy" was less important than "to get hold of". The joke was "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us". In the Yeltsin years, as Communism collapsed and uncertainty was the only certainty, Russians enjoyed unprecedented freedoms.

 One summer evening recently I was approached by some tourists in the centre of Pskov  to ask where they could find the nearest supermarket.  I was taken aback: the Pskov  Kremlin, the Trinity Cathedral, the streets of old Pskov, the fascinating ancient white- stone churches, the many period houses in varying states of disrepair - all this is in   walking distance.

In this book Susan Richards does something that foreigners in Russia hardly ever do: she looks for the effects of the latest political upheavals not in the capitals but in the provinces. She also sets out to explore uncharted waters in two other directions, following not just the fortunes of the state, but the fates of individuals and going to the roots of the Russian fascination with the irrational. Her book is so well written and so imbued with a deep and intimate understanding of Russian culture that it reads almost like a novel, but it also carefully documents how ordinary people's lives are affected by shifts in politics.

Crushed hopes

Richards' friends from the city of Saratov, on the Volga, and the nearby town of Marx  start off in 1992 with a belief in liberal democracy and in a new beginning for Russia  that would change  the lives of its people for the better. As she presents snapshots of their condition over the following 16 years the author is unflinchingly honest - even for the most persistent of them, the changes for the better, when they do come, come at a tremendous price and not with the support of the state, but rather despite the obstacles the state puts in their way. In 2008 the future looks bleak, and not just because of the world financial crisis. The question of why the country as a whole has yet again failed to transform itself, why the state is unwilling to shake off the legacy of its imperialist and oppressive past, which has been detrimental primarily for its own people, cannot be  answered within a single book.  The answer would probably require more detailed analysis of Russian politics in the last twenty years than the brief italicized summaries of events which preface the chapters in "Lost and Found in Russia", but this is not the task Susan Richards sets herself. Her way is to observe the hidden areas of Russian life and analyse what she sees as a friend and as a westerner.

Unfortunately, official Russian propaganda has done a lot in recent years to assure its citizens that for a westerner to be a friend is impossible in principle - "the West is against us".  Even more worrying is the fact that the Western press more often than not dismisses attempts by Western authors to see what's wrong with Russia as "anti-Russian".  In real life, of course, the popular assumption that an absence of democracy is only bad from a Western point of view, while Russians actually do not mind it at all, is much more anti-Russian than the shudder experienced by real friends of Russia at any fresh blow that the Russian state deals its citizens. Susan Richards shows as well as anybody that one can sympathise with ordinary Russians and feel that they deserve a better lot, and yet be critical of the policies of its decision-makers.  Moreover, her sympathy is not blind - visiting her friends regularly for more than a decade and a half she tries to make sense of their lives.

The price you pay

The book chronicles the fates of Anna, a brave and talented journalist who fights fraud and corruption; Misha, a budding manufacturer and later a farmer; Natasha, who tries to find her place in the world by moving across the vast country... These three have something in common - the memory of a suicide of a close relative.  In fact all the people in the book have some tragedy in their past, which casts its shadow on their present and makes the hardships and pressures of everyday life even harder to bear. And it is hard. The persecution of journalists scares Anna for some time into writing bland articles; overall corruption makes Misha waste energy on unnecessary legal battles; Natasha struggles with her alcoholism. Eventually Misha's efforts to become a businessman pay off and he becomes seriously rich, but his health suffers and he turns to drink. Anna's articles sparkle again, but her existence becomes more and more hand to mouth, and Natasha and her husband resume publishing an independent free newspaper, "The Messenger", while living in the Crimea, a potential hot spot since Russia would like to wrest it from Ukraine.  Susan Richards is dismayed at her friends' defeats and proud of their achievements... And it is being so close to them that enables her to see much more than foreigners usually would.

Behind the façade

Unlike many she is not duped, for example, by the outward prosperity of Putin's years. This is how she describes Saratov in 2004:

Although Russia's economy was growing steadily, Saratov had regressed to another century. Old wooden buildings were leaning at tipsy angles along the piss-reeking streets. Headscarved women sat begging, intoning interminable prayers. Homeless men with matted hair, faces burnished by alcohol, rummaged through overflowing rubbish bins. Yet every now and then an immaculately modern girl would emerge from one of the topsy-turvy houses and pick her way to work down the ruined road.

And this is 2008:

We were sitting in a traffic jam. These days there were traffic jams all day long in Saratov's city centre; 4x4s and gleaming jeeps like ours sat nose to nose as far as the eye could see. There was plenty of time to register the new dress shops, the Irish pub, the shopping malls, restaurants and the rash of stylish little cafes. Time enough to register that, with a few, dazzling, exceptions, these frontages had been attached to buildings that looked more derelict than ever.<...>The roads had improved. Clearly, this had been necessary to expedite the escape of the jeep-owners from the sight of the limbless war vets, lurching drunks, and piles of rubbish, bedraggled high-rise blocks, overloaded trams and hollow-eyed grannies begging beneath hoardings advertising holidays in Australia costing only $4.000.

This idea of a "frontage" and what's behind it has a much broader meaning in Russia than just the devastation behind the glitter of the buildings' facades. It is not exactly a "Potemkin village", as it would be untrue to say that the prosperity was all false and only erected to impress. Nevertheless this "frontage" is only a thin layer over the distorted and unreformed mass of the past. This becomes even more apparent when Susan Richards sets off on a journey to explore the minds of the people around her. In the heads of Russian citizens seemingly moving from their recent Soviet past to the new life that began with perestroika, she discovers to her surprise medieval or even pagan beliefs and prejudices hardly affected by decades of Soviet "militant atheism". The relentless Soviet system merely drove them inwards and people preserved them inside themselves, as hidden fragments of individualism beyond the control of the state. The new freedoms, chaos and uncertainty of the beginning of the 90s made these concealed and half-frozen convictions thaw and flourish - and they found plenty of fertile soil:

The Moscow metro was plastered with bright advertisements for the Bhagavadgita; smiling American missionaries were plying their trade in the street like hookers; in the bookshops, the long forbidden works of Gurdjieff and Madame Blavatsky were walking off the shelves; the Moonies and Scientology were thriving. Among the home-grown cults, there were six prophets in Moscow that summer who claimed to be the second coming. Vissarion was one of them.

Irrationality as freedom

One of the author's friends, the artistic Vera, goes to join the Vissarion cult in Siberia. Later, Anna, the brave journalist fighting corruption, finds refuge in the Orthodox Church. But the mysterious world of myths and strange creeds extends much further than that.  In 1992, in Zarafshan, near Tashkent, Susan Richards meets a Russian engineer, a former communist, who tells her about his encounters with UFOs. After this she misses no opportunity to explore the "collective unconscious" and travels widely in search of it. She spends several days in Burny, a remote Siberian village near the river Tunguska, with Old Believers, who broke with the official Orthodox Church after the schism in the 17^th century,  listens to a talk about Cosmism and time-energy by a Novosibirsk professor, visits Vera among the followers of Vissarion  in the Sayan Mountains and even goes to Mordovia to see a local  healer, the hilarious Nina Stepanovna, who however punishes her  with a "curse", presumably for being too nosy. Not once does Susan Richards allow herself to mock the people she meets - she is obviously resolved to get as close to their beliefs as possible.  In an attempt to become less rational and western she keeps a record  of her dreams and once even hears cedars singing. And yet naturally she is unable to make a leap of faith - once she returns home the fascination of the mystery vanishes.   She has however to admit that it is very much alive for quite a few people in Russia.

Why? The explanation that springs immediately to my mind, as someone who lived in Russia for two thirds of my life, is the desire to escape. To escape the brutality of life, the determinism of Soviet ideology, the confusion of the post-Soviet years and more importantly, the helplessness of the individual being trodden down by the state. A society which has no room for protest or individual initiative has to turn to its imagination.  And of course this helplessness and confusion drives people to trust healers, hypnotists, "extrasensors", and to fear extraterrestrials. Far from dismissing it as backwardness, Susan Richards tries to find the rational reasons for behaviour that is often irrational.

More than once on my journey I had felt as if my sanity were under assault. Now gazing into the night I felt clear. At the moment, things were inside-out and back-to-front in Russia. But the craziness was not to be found in the obvious places. The people seeing those visions in Zarafshan were not the really crazy ones. Nor were the Old Believers, even if they did bury their televisions in the frozen earth. <...> The true insanity had been there in that awesome experiment which Russia and its colonies had undergone, that imperial mission to collectivise the human soul; to own and control everything, from the natural world to every last word printed in the empire.

Today this was the country doing cold turkey, drying out from that experiment, from an addiction to control, to secrets, secrets, secrets. Things might seem to be all over the place, but people were recovering. Before the country could start to develop the first vestiges of a civil society, or institutions which respected the concept of the individual, much more time was going to pass and many more of these toxic secrets were going to have to be drained out of the poisoned body of the state.

The recovery of the people then lies in their ability to make personal choices, no matter how bizarre these choices may seem.  Not much else is available. Turning to religious sects or to the Occult is tolerated, while joining a social or a political movement is bound to bring serious trouble, as these are likely to be either manipulated or suppressed,  as they have always been throughout Russia's history. Still, these are personal choices, and they ultimately mean freedom.

"Conventional wisdoms"

However, the chapter which ends with the above words is describing 1997-1998. Ten years later it's much more difficult to talk about a recovery.  It seems that the number of toxic secrets - like unresolved murder mysteries - has increased dramatically and the ability of people to make individual choices, at least where their judgements are concerned, has become seriously damaged by tighter controls over the press and ubiquitous state propaganda. Coming to Saratov after the Russo-Georgian war of August 2008, Susan Richards admits that for the first time in all those years she was apprehensive of her reception there. And some of her friends did indeed turn out to have swallowed the official line on the war.

Moreover, towards the end of the book it seems that the official line has rubbed off on the italicized summaries of Russian politics that begin each chapter. In the chapter on 2005-2007 it says: The president had not merely restored order; he had restored Russia's self-respect.  Whose words are those? On the next page we hear it said, "a shade defiantly", by another friend of Susan's, who has turned pro-Putin.  But is this double "restoration" a fact? Or in the chapter on 2008: For all the Cold War rhetoric, there was no ideological divide any more. Can the Susan Richards who writes in her last pages about the "aborted hopes for a new Russia, one which would at last come to prize its own people, rather than hoisting itself up on their bones" really believe that the divide between the Western liberal democracies and the Russian state on the value of a human life is not ideological?

Or are these "conventional wisdoms", as the author calls them when acknowledging that she and her friends have bowed to the accepted notion that their hope for Russia at the end of communism was naïve? Another one is the conviction, apparently sincerely shared by Susan Richards, that NATO should not expand right up to Russia's borders. In the general anti-American climate of the day many well-meaning people forget that the initiative to join NATO has always come from smaller countries, desperate for the protection of the West. The fear of annoying Russia's rulers might only lead to sacrificing these countries to them.

What remains?

Susan Richards is not afraid to think aloud and express contradictory views that reflect the feeling of the moment. On page 244 she writes "At the start of my travels Anna and I both hoped naively that the fall of communism would change something in Russia. In retrospect, of course, liberal democracy never stood a chance."  But fifty pages later, at the very end, she muses: "Surely what was wrong [with this hope'] was just that it was not stubborn enough. Hope is sacred, the fine point of the fulcrum of change".  And yet, the reason liberal democracy has not taken root in Russia is not the lack of hope, but the fact that those who held power and called themselves democrats did not in fact bother about the people, and an oppressive order survived under the guise of democracy.