Here are some excerpts from a great read on Medium about modern Russia:

ALMOST EXACTLY FOUR YEARS AGO I WAS SITTING IN A TINY kitchen in Kyiv with two guys named Sasha, drinking beer and taking bong hits of some very weak Ukrainian pot. The tiny kitchen was attached to a tiny apartment that the Sashas shared with yet another guy, Sergei; all of them had jobs, in IT or media, but the jobs didn’t pay very well, and because the city was the center of government and media and finance in Ukraine (such as these were), prices even in the outer bedroom communities were high. Still, the Sashas were having a good time; they spent hours on their bulky laptops, surfing the internet, and recently, led by Sergei, they’d been making funny sketch comedy videos and posting them on YouTube.

(…)

I felt it every time I wrote about Russia: there just wasn’t any downside, ever, to saying something derogatory or snide about Russia, whereas it was complicated, fraught, and difficult to say something positive. I never felt this more clearly than when we published the writings of Kirill Medvedev at n+1. Medvedev was, and is, a unique phenomenon—a poet, born in 1975, who’d experienced the traumas of the Russian ’90s, and had gradually turned into a socialist, not out of any nostalgia for the Soviet past, but simply through his analysis of the situation in Russia and the world. His poems and essays and statements had been a revelation to me; one of the things that he’d said, about Putin, back when I first met him in 2007, kept coming up in my mind. He said, “Our liberals think that everything was going fine under Yeltsin, and then this bad man came to power and undid everything. But he didn’t undo anything. Putin has continued the reforms. And the fact that he’s become authoritarian while doing so is because the reforms are unpopular. This is what capitalism looks like on the periphery of the world-system.”

There it all was, and it was true. And it didn’t mean that Medvedev did not oppose Putin. He was protesting against Putin, and being beaten up by supporters of Putin, long before anti-Putinism became the default position of the Russian “creative class.” But he was also entirely committed to Russia, to remaining in Russia no matter what happened, and he had what was, to my mind, a very different analysis of the situation from most of what appeared in the English-language opinion-sphere (or the Russian one, for that matter).

And yet when it came time to promote our book, this was just too long a story to tell. I mean, I tried to tell it, but I always also made sure that people knew that Medvedev was constantly being arrested; that he had become somewhat famous for singing one of his translations in the back of a police van after a protest in support of Pussy Riot (someone recorded him with an iPhone, then posted the clip on YouTube). And when the book got written up, this was what people focused on: Medvedev became another in a long line of anti-authoritarian dissidents from Russia, alongside Nabokov, Brodsky, et al. Not bad company, but it served to erase his distinctiveness—and reinforce the main story, which was that Russia was bad.

(…)

If what seems to be happening right now, as the United States and European Union impose sanctions in the wake of the Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and Russia, as it always does, responds (absurdly, self-destructively, but pridefully) in kind, and the door that suddenly opened 25 years ago is about to close—which I really, really hope it doesn’t, but if it does—I will say, for myself, that I wish I had taken the opportunity to see more of Russia while I still had it; that I wish I had tried harder to tell a counter-story, of some kind, to the story about Russia that was being told; and, really, simply, that I’d just met more people, talked about more things, hung around a bit more. I wish I’d gone to the beautiful Crimea one more time! I spent an entire month in Ukraine back in 2010, traveling to various places where political events were happening, but not to the one place I really wanted to go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N40IMddYsc