To think is the task

To think is the Task

Victor Kogan-Yasny is my cousin. He spent most of his life in the Soviet Union, living under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and then Gorbachev, whose period in office he remembers as the time when he started to be socially active, and as a time of great hope that was not realized.

In 1998, I knew him as a member of the « Memorial » and of the « Yabloko party » of Grigory Yavlinski.

Hence, he is anti-Stalinist, and considers the fundamental lack of condemnation of Stalinism in Russia, as well as outside, to be one of the main reasons for the breakdown of the pan-European unity that Gorbachev pursued in the 1990s.

For decades, he has analyzed the phenomenon of Neo-Stalinism. This he described in his « Notes of a provincial thinker » which we published in 2020.

Fortunately, a few months ago I came across his new notes on the Internet site « Rights in Russia » ; these I collected and am glad to now present them as this new book by Victor.

Those notes explain very efficiently the actual situation in Russia and around, as seen from inside the country.