Russia’s Unresolved Past: Exiled Russian Writer Vladimir Sorokin

I’m not the only one to have thought — and I have thought so for a long time now — that one of the key failures of the Russia that emerged from the wreckage of the USSR was the absence of any material accounting for the Soviet past. There was no Soviet Nuremberg. There are plenty of reasons for that, not least that so much of the old regime had survived in one form or another into the new era. This failure is just one reason for the current Russian war on Ukraine, driven as it is, in part, by a dangerously flawed view of Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet history.

Vladimir Sorokin may be Russia’s most famous living writer. He is not known for understatement, and his books are not, shall we say, PG. It is, in particular, worth reading his Day of the Oprichnik (2006), a disturbingly prescient satire of the way that Russia was going. He now lives outside of the country.

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Andrew Stuttaford

Andrew Stuttaford is the editor of National Review's Capital Matters.

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I’m not the only one to have thought — and I have thought so for a long time now — that one of the key failures of the Russia that emerged from the wreckage of the USSR was the absence of any material accounting for the Soviet past. There was no Soviet Nuremberg. There are plenty of reasons for that, not least that so much of the old regime had survived in one form or another into the new era. This failure is just one reason for the current Russian war on Ukraine, driven as it is, in part, by a dangerously flawed view of Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet history.

Vladimir Sorokin may be Russia’s most famous living writer. He is not known for understatement, and his books are not, shall we say, PG. It is, in particular, worth reading his Day of the Oprichnik (2006), a disturbingly prescient satire of the way that Russia was going. He now lives outside of the country.