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The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street
The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street: A Russian Adventure | Pieter Waterdrinker
6 posts | 1 read | 1 to read
In 1988, at the age of 26, Pieter Waterdrinker was at home in the Netherlands one day when a man knocked on his door and asked him to smuggle a shipment of bibles into the USSR. The resulting adventure would lead to a lifelong journey into Russia and its history. Waterdrinker would eventually find himself living in Saint Petersburg, with his Russian wife and three cats, on a street which a hundred years earlier had been the epicentre of the 1917 Russian Revolution. In The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street he tells its story, from the fall of the Tsar to the collapse of the USSR, blending history with memoir to create an ode to the divided soul of Russia and an unputdownable account of his own struggles with life, literature and love. "Words by Waterdrinker are as amazing as a superior circus." --Elsevier "How evocatively Waterdrinker can write! A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, he makes this violent period of history shine once again." --Zin
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review
charl08
Mehso-so

Dutch journalist looks back at 100 years of Russian history. Some memoir, his own history in Russia, from the slow collapse of the USSR to the rise of the oligarchs. Some much older histories, narratives from those who witnessed the revolution in 1917, and saw the new communist order establish itself. I could have done without quite so much self-involved reflection in places. However many of those on Putin seemed prescient (original pub 2017).

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charl08
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Sima was the daughter of perhaps the greatest revolutionary the Netherlands has ever known: Henk Sneevliet, one of the instigators of the Jordaan revolt, the only rebellion against the authorities in the Netherlands, where the proletariat fought for two days on barricades decked with red flags against the army....

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charl08

She asked how things were going with my book. Just the week before, I'd told her that the project I had on my hands was threatening to turn into a sort of chronicle of our own Russian life together.
'We've just moved into the Akademicheskaya Hotel 2, winter 1989...'
'God almighty, Jesus ...' She was speaking Dutch, and it was pretty plain at that, 'have you only got that far? You still have to cover a quarter of a century!'

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charl08
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...my former business partner is still alive...it isn't that fact that makes it difficult for me to write about him, it's shame. The shame that in this life, which will ultimately prove to be a bloody battlefield for everyone, we lose friends and loved ones, because of misunderstanding, greed, lust, stupidity, cowardice, vanity, hate, betrayal, the desire to be glorified, the hunger for status, fame, power, and money, and sometimes love.

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charl08
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...in your foreign post, they always kept an eye on you...You were interrogated. By types like that president of ours now. At the time, he was responsible for exactly that kind of work as a spy in Dresden: following and interrogating people. Now he's once again a believer, namely a believer in the lie that he created himself. The lie that he's God the 'czar' who can steal left and right without punishment. And hand out punishments.

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charl08

And it was precisely in these arteries that I was now walking and living, almost a hundred years later: an excellent starting point for a personal book about the Russian Revolution of 1917. You buffed up your own life with a little patina, borrowed an abundance of what others had written, with liberal citations, made up a bit if need be, and mixed it all together like the ingredients of a thick, hearty soup, et voilà...