Why are some Russians still in denial about their troubled past?

Few books change your life but one that heavily influenced mine was Among the Russians (1983), Colin Thubron’s travel book about the late Brezhnev-era USSR. Catching me as a 20 year-old, it launched me on a lifetime of living and travelling in the former Soviet Union. Returning in 1999 from a long trip to Minsk, Kazan and Volgograd I reread it, marvelling at how uncannily it evoked my own experience of the country. Other travel books merely informed you about Russia – this one, dense with metaphor and luminously described human encounters seemed, in its 200 or so pages, to transport you there and make you feel it. You couldn’t quite remember afterwards whether the experiences were Thubron’s or your own. Pronounced by Count Nikolai Tolstoy a ‘magnificent achievement’, lit by a strange magic, it was a foundational text for so many of us who went on to make Russian culture part of our lives.