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raison d’être
It should be untouchable.
With the help of Mozhayev’s walks and insights I begin to understand how radically every new regime rebuilds the past. Lenin and Trotsky ripping up the memory of the tsars, Stalin ripping up the memory of Trotsky, Khrushchev of Stalin, Brezhnev of Khrushchev; perestroika gutting the whole Communist century and every time the heroes turn to villains, saviours are rewritten
as devils, the names of streets are changed, faces scrubbed out from photographs, encyclopedias re-edited. And so every regime destroys and rebuilds the previous city.
‘The worst is when people owe you money,’ Grigory told me once as we drove through the woods outside Moscow in a new, silver, sports car. ‘As long as you owe them, they’ll never kill you. But if they owe you they’d rather kill than pay. I dream of being able to go outside without bodyguards. A normal life.’
Under siege from psychic spies and airborne fungi, audiences are kept in a constant state of panic and medieval ecstasies.
German ex-chancellors,
In the primitive wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was common for just two sides to fight. Two countries. Two groups of allies. Now four coalitions collided. Not two
against two, or three against one. No. All against all.
