The Russian officer stared at me with cold contempt.
“What are you doing here? You are not allowed here.”
“But I’m an accredited journalist, and I have a permit,” I said.
Next to his Kalashnikov my case was weak: pulled from my car at a hastily created checkpoint in Chechnya, I feared more for my Chechen driver than for myself, in a war where death and disappearance were daily fare.
“This is our territory,” said the officer. “And we can do as we please.”
We can do as we please.
That phrase echoed back at me as I read The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, sociologist and long-time peace activist Metta Spencer’s multi-layered personal, political and cultural analysis of Russia’s tumultuous march toward democracy from the 1980s to the fall of communism and its acrid aftermath.
Democracy goes hand in hand with the rule of law. But over a decade of covering Russia, from the 1990s to the early...
Olivia Ward is The Toronto Star’s foreign affairs writer. She covered the former Soviet Union as bureau chief and correspondent from 1992 to 2002.
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