But, in reality, it didn’t come into focus until 1999, with the outbreak of the second Chechen war and Putin’s rise to power, and, really, it didn’t acquire any momentum or self-awareness until October 2003, when Yukos oil chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint on a tarmac at an airport in Novosibirsk.
Technically, our current chapter of Russian history began on Christmas Day, 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Soviet Union dead. No Russian writer encapsulates the many incongruous feelings and forces-cultural, spiritual, metaphysical-still coursing through the post-Soviet moment better than Fyodor Dostoevsky. Henry Kissinger recently compared Vladimir Putin to “a character out of Dostoevsky,” which apparently delighted the Russian president.