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 the1990s.

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 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.

Daniel Ziv

“No society should be guided by the ideology of gladiators. One of them always loses, and the winner is not capable of anything else than a Pyrrhic victory”

Victor Kogan-Yasny’s articles have, by current standards, been published in Russian for quite a long time now. The uniqueness of these works is that time has shown the accuracy and objectivity of his analysis. In analyzing the peculiarities of Russian politics in inseparable connection with European and world developments, and without being carried away by analogies, the author doubtless determines very precisely the place of Russia. Victor Kogan-Yasny’s involvement in practical politics certainly makes his conclusions even more credible. However, in my opinion, the author’s main achievement is his absolute intellectual honesty. I do not think I am mistaken in saying that, of all that has been published in Russia in recent decades, the political and philosophical works of Viktor Kogan-Yasny have indeed proved to be the most accurate and profound in their assessments and predictions. It is absolutely essential for anyone who wants to understand modern Russia to read, attentively and without haste, this wise and selfless book.

            Grigory Yavlinsky    Moscow