I picked up this book in the week Alexi Navalny died. It’s like a very tiny tribute to that remarkable and heroic tradition of Russian dissent of which he was an heir.
It begins: “So this bitch at OVIR says to me, “Everyone who leaves is allowed three suitcases. That’s the quota.” LOL! You know you are in for a good dictatorship story when it begins with encounters with bureaucracy. I myself have fond / horrifying memories of a certain 12 hour long queue to get a Zimbabwean passport in 2010.
The novel is structured around the stories of each of the items he was supposedly allowed to take out of Russia. It is both hilarious and sad. How hilarious is this:
Two hundred years ago the historian Nikolai Karamzin visited France. Russian emigres there asked him: “What’s happening back at home, in two words?”
Karamzin didn’t even need two words. “Stealing,” he replied.
A great book.