Biography

Her great-grandfather was Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953-64).

In the autocratic cultures that I know,[Dick] Cheney would have stayed in power forever. In America, that's it and it's gone. In my part of the world, there would be a Cheneygrad, Cheyneystan, Cheney golden statue mausoleum. For me, Cheney is an oxymoron of democracy.

We are apathetic. People attribute this to fear, and I do think fear comes into it. In Russia, the state is all-seeing and it can harm you anytime it wants to. But there is more. Russia is very big and very difficult to control. Because of of that, it has an ideal of statehood that other modern countries left in their feudal pasts. In Russia, ideas of central power, the great nation, the large state, are much more important that individual happiness or achievement.

Putin is a favorite pastime for a lot of Western publications. They write about his megalomaniac displays of power: kissing tigers or saving dolphins or whatever.. a kind of James Bond of contemporary Russia. It's a very farcical way of showing him. But it's also tragic because in Russia people mock him and go to prison for that.