Books for Americans about Russia usually
have been written in libraries or in the com-
fort of Western-style apartments in special
Moscow ghettoes designed for carefully
monitored journalists and diplomats.
Now comes a book by a young lawyer
who lived in Leningrad and studied Soviet
law in the university where Tchaikovsky.
Stravinsky, and Lenin studied for the bar. The
author s graduate-student status permitted
him the fi-eedom to roam at will this most
cultured of Russian cities--a privilege en
vied by Western correspondents. He was able
to live with the Soviet people rather than
merely observe them. They became his
"companions in hardship and laughter."
There was student life in the dormitory at
25 Sbevchenko Street, with his roommate
Zhenya, who never quite got around to finish-
ing his thesis. He moved among intellectuals
and dissidents, traveled throughout the na-
tion, toured with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band,
and knew incidents of a darker sort he was
arrested for taking pictures in a grocery store,
there were border searches, underground art
exhibits, and KGB reprisals against friends
who were human rights activists.
In sum, what he found was a people of
considerable warmth and curiosity, feartully
tangled in red tape, short of food, and hob-
bled by inefficient burcaucracy and agri-
cultural disasters, and, at another level, a
political hierarchy of men in their seventies
with no plan of succession and a "missing"
generation of leaders leaving a potentially
violent human vacuum for the near future. It
is a revealing view-from-the-inside of a Rus-
sia in trouble.
發表於2024-11-07
An American in Leningrad 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
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An American in Leningrad 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載