The Tragedy of Property
by Maxim Trudolyubov, Polity, 226pp, £17.99
In the mid 1990s I did a stint in the BBC’s Moscow bureau. It was high summer, some of the resident correspondents were away on leave and nothing much was happening. They were dog days, stiflingly hot, and Moscow seemed a defeated, depressing and occasionally violent place. Boris Yeltsin was the man in the Kremlin’s high tower but it would be stretching a point to say he was “in charge”– he had a serious drink problem and it seemed to me that Russia too was suffering from a permanent hangover.
