My high-school classmate Lena B. told me that one of the female characters in Doctor Zhivago was based on her grandmother. I had never heard of Doctor Zhivago.“What’s the big deal?” I said. “It’s just a book.”She was appalled. Lena moved in the dissident circles closely watched by the KGB...

Historically, mistrust of the government-controlled dispersal of information forced ordinary Russian citizens to rely on jokes in order to bring a measure of truth to the falsehoods manufactured by the State. In the wake of any newsworthy event, jokes sprang up like mushrooms after a rain.The criminal Soviet past, for...

My novel Breaking Stalin’s Nose is a book about a young boy’s 
discovery of truth, his loss of idealism, and his subsequent decision 
to walk away from the system he trusted. The boy’s transformation mirrors my own. I also discovered truth about the system I trusted, and I also walked...