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For a professional writer in the Soviet Union, it works this way. First, you have to have something to say - that's the main thing. Second, it's a matter of who publishes you. If your book has real stuff in it, readers will ferret it out, even in a Siberian journal.

I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage, and I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy.

I read Russian literature a lot.

You read 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor because you're interested in the Second World War or Russia or whatever.

The readings of Soviet society are as many as the experts you speak to. In my view, it's a society that is overdue for measures of democratization and organization.

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Having spent the greater part of my life under a Communist dictatorship, I am very familiar with the Bolshevik mentality according to which an author in general, and an eminent author in particular, is always guilty, and must be punished accordingly.

I had studied Russian in college. I had gotten into it first through literature and then just really found it kind of fascinating; of course, this was during the Cold War. So they were kind of the other great enemy that you grew up hearing about.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.