What happened to the Russia I loved?

I first came to Russia as a travelling English literature-lecturer in the late 1990s. This wasn’t a job given to me but one I’d devised myself, sending off snail-mail begging letters to different university departments all over the Former Soviet Union – Barnaul to Minsk – outlining my services and occasionally, weeks or months later, being taken up on the offer.

With a rucksack full of books, I’d catch a train – sometimes a days-long journey – to the next destination, where I’d be given a list of students to teach, a guided tour of the city and three weeks in a student hall of residence. Here cockroaches could outnumber humans 100-1, but there was always a bottle going round and someone with a guitar to supply entertainment in the evenings. And, oh, the conversations…

Russia then was a different country. Under Boris Yeltsin there was rampant crime and economic crisis, but also free speech and, among the young, an optimism about where the country might be heading.