I was 19 when Vladimir Putin became president of Russia and restored the Soviet national anthem. I was 24 when he called the fall of the U.S.S.R. the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Now I’m 44, and I know he will continue the war against Ukraine. He does not want any peace deal—not because he hopes to re-create the Soviet Union, but because war and propaganda are the tools that keep him in power.
I knew countless people crushed and hollowed out by the fall of the Soviet Union. They were impoverished; their world had imploded. My uncle, a People’s Artist of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic and soloist of the Ashgabat Opera, was forced to abandon all his possessions and flee with his family—just to survive. The former first secretary of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan had turned into a mad dictator, banned opera, and repressed all the artists. Until the end of his life, my uncle made ends meet by singing in a church choir in a small town in central Russia. It wasn’t just the material foundations of many people’s lives that were destroyed—everything they believed in, had been raised on, and lived for was annihilated.
