Sinned against, too

摘要

Last autumn, this reviewer travelled across the Russian far east, a mostly impoverished region which sends its taxes to Moscow and its sons to serve in the brutal federal army, and gets little in return. He half-expected to find that distance and resentment were weakening the bonds between the region's residents and their country. Nothing doing. For all they have suffered, far-easterners are umbilically attached to the motherland. Geoffrey Hosking's patiently compassionate account of the Russian experience of the Soviet Union explains how this mysterious, atavistic feeling both survived and was exploited by the Soviet Union's rulers.