A German friend had come along. “Long live great Russia!” chanted the crowd, and Gudkov sensed his friend tensing up. He noted that Germans are hypersensitive to expressions of nationalism, but Gudkov himself was unconcerned about the crowd’s sentiment. Now he wondered if he should have paid more attention to the tone, and to the linguistic sleight of hand of the slogan. It had started as “Long live democratic Russia,” but in the course of a few hours the word “democratic” had been dropped in favor of “great.” Had the ideas of freedom and democracy really been forgotten no sooner than they had
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