Reading survey responses, Gudkov imagined this war as an ideal vehicle. The vehicle had headlights, which illuminated the Soviet Union’s future as a superpower. The vehicle also had rear lights, which cast a beatifying glow on the crimes of the regime that preceded the war. The vehicle’s heft conveniently obscured the outsize losses of the Soviet military and the disregard for human life that had made them, and the Soviet victory, possible. What Gudkov could not yet quite imagine were people like Lyosha, born in the year perestroika began but identified entirely with a war that had ended forty
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