Welcome to Litsy!

Dutch journalist looks back at 100 years of Russian history. Some memoir, his own history in Russia, from the slow collapse of the USSR to the rise of the oligarchs. Some much older histories, narratives from those who witnessed the revolution in 1917, and saw the new communist order establish itself. I could have done without quite so much self-involved reflection in places. However many of those on Putin seemed prescient (original pub 2017).

Sima was the daughter of perhaps the greatest revolutionary the Netherlands has ever known: Henk Sneevliet, one of the instigators of the Jordaan revolt, the only rebellion against the authorities in the Netherlands, where the proletariat fought for two days on barricades decked with red flags against the army....

She asked how things were going with my book. Just the week before, I'd told her that the project I had on my hands was threatening to turn into a sort of chronicle of our own Russian life together.
'We've just moved into the Akademicheskaya Hotel 2, winter 1989...'
'God almighty, Jesus ...' She was speaking Dutch, and it was pretty plain at that, 'have you only got that far? You still have to cover a quarter of a century!'

...my former business partner is still alive...it isn't that fact that makes it difficult for me to write about him, it's shame. The shame that in this life, which will ultimately prove to be a bloody battlefield for everyone, we lose friends and loved ones, because of misunderstanding, greed, lust, stupidity, cowardice, vanity, hate, betrayal, the desire to be glorified, the hunger for status, fame, power, and money, and sometimes love.

...in your foreign post, they always kept an eye on you...You were interrogated. By types like that president of ours now. At the time, he was responsible for exactly that kind of work as a spy in Dresden: following and interrogating people. Now he's once again a believer, namely a believer in the lie that he created himself. The lie that he's God the 'czar' who can steal left and right without punishment. And hand out punishments.

And it was precisely in these arteries that I was now walking and living, almost a hundred years later: an excellent starting point for a personal book about the Russian Revolution of 1917. You buffed up your own life with a little patina, borrowed an abundance of what others had written, with liberal citations, made up a bit if need be, and mixed it all together like the ingredients of a thick, hearty soup, et voilà...