Naive as he is about finding fish, he writes well about the Russians he meets, from his friend Yuri Brodsky who has spent 25 years cataloguing the history of the first Soviet gulag on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea to Fyodorovich, a trapper, who survived the camps in Siberia and stayed on to live like a hermit in the boundless far eastern taiga.

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The Bush White House was slow to realise that the Soviet system was falling apart and clung too long to its well-established links with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader.

ECONOMIST: The world in their hands | The

After graduating from Wellesley, she was introduced to the Soviet Union in 1929 by joining a group riding horseback in the Caucasus Mountains under the leadership of anthropologist Leslie White.

WSJ: Philanthropist Who Backed International Studies