Malashenko was no dissident. Solzhenitsyn did not interest him much. The book that made the strongest impression on him was Orwell’s 1984: Psychologically, it rang completely true. This country, this galaxy [described by Orwell] was not supposed to exist in reality, but it did. I lived in it, I tried to learn its double-speak in order to talk coherently and convincingly about the Soviet Union, but it was impossible. Our official dogma said that two plus two was ten. At the more liberal US and Canada Institute, we were (informally) allowed to say that two plus two was eight, sometimes that it
...more
