Current Affairs of Russia Book Review! (I Love Russia)
A couple weeks ago I finished Elena Kostyuchenko's " I Love Russia ". It drew my eye at the book store. It had a compelling cover (a half naked child, hunched over in front of a Lenin statue). The inside flap gave more. This book is about the hard stories in Russia. Elena worked for one of the last few independent Russian newspapers, but neither she nor the newspaper are in the country any longer. Reading the book made it clear why. Within These Pages, Many Things... The book itself reads like an assemblage of Elena's stories, her journalism. It's title "I Love Russia" becomes significant over time. She's talking about the Russian people, the geography, the history, but mostly about those on the fringes who, to quote Jimmy Stewart, are the rabble that "do most of the working and paying and living and dying" in Russia (Moscow and Saint Petersburg, by far the two largest cities, account for only about 15% of the Russian population). ...