Everything I know about Russia, I learned from Fyodor Dostoevsky and Winston Churchill. Last week’s melodramatic events there reminded me of scenes of drunken chaos in “Demons,” the Russian novelist’s prophetic (and well-nigh unreadable) 1872 novel, with today’s two bloody-handed gangsters named Putin and Prigozhin as protagonists.
Both men would be well-advised to avoid tall buildings and open windows, is all I can say. Otherwise, Churchill got it right in a 1939 radio address about the Hitler-Stalin pact, with the Soviet Union joining Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. The British prime minister unforgettably described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
