“The Soviet Union was amazingly effective at producing propaganda and telling lies, but what was needed here was the ability to build houses in a hurry, and that it was something it could barely do and certainly couldn't do well....

The question most puzzling even to my ten-year-old self was why the authorities were lying like this when everybody around me knew the truth. What kind of pathetic attempt at deception was this? If you are going to lie, you should at least be expecting to benefit from it in some way. You claim to be sick and you don't have to go to school; that at least makes sense. But what was the point of these lies? Describing the way the Soviet Union worked, Vasily Shukshin, a Russian writer, memorably said, "Lies, lies, lies . . . Lies as redemption, lies as atonement for guilt, lies as a goal achieved, lies as a career, as prosperity, as medals, as an apartment . . . Lies! The whole of Russia was covered with lies, like a scab." An excellent description of the situation.

If the Chernobyl disaster had never happened, I would probably have heard less talk of politics. It would certainly have been less personal, and my political views would have been slightly different. But things happened as they did, and many years later, when I was a grown man, I watched the newly appointed acting president of Russia, forty-seven-year-old Vladimir Putin, on television, far from sharing any enthusiasm about the country's new "energetic leader," I kept thinking, He never stops lying, just as it was in my childhood.”