In the land of the Soviets, the voice of the Kremlin was everywhere, an omnipresent reality-via-radio that long preceded Orwell’s dystopia. Lenin and Trotsky fomented revolution primarily in print—in the commanding editorials of Iskra and Pravda, in the frenzied leaflets passed around in St. Petersburg meeting halls and later reprinted in “Ten Days That Shook the World”—but the leading instrument of enculturation and inundation under Joseph Stalin was a broadcast technology called radio-tochka, literally “radio point,” a primitive receiver with no dial and no choice. These cheap wood-framed devices were installed in apartments and hallways, on factory floors, in train stations and bus depots; they played in hospitals, nursing homes, and military barracks; they were nailed to poles in the fields of collective farms and blared along the beaches from the Baltic to the Sea of Okhotsk.
The radio day commenced at 6 A.M.
First, the Soviet anthem, then “Govorit Moskva . . .” (“Moscow speaking”).
If someone in a communal apartment shut off the radio, he was considered suspect, defiant, a potential “enemy of the people.” The broadcasts issued the edicts of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, announced the details of the Five-Year Plan, declared the latest triumph of the Soviet Army and the perfidies of the capitalist West. In addition to the news, there was classical music and readings of classical Russian literature, along with “radio meetings” of village workers and soldiers’ mothers. The Soviet people rarely heard Stalin’s actual voice—halting, dry, with a thick Georgian accent—but through the radio they absorbed his pronouncements, his view of culture and the world, his implicit message of paternalism and threat. It is hard to imagine now the totality of the instrument and the perverse imagination required to conceive it, but radio-tochka existed for decades, as present as water and electricity and twice as reliable. It was such a successful tool of propaganda that when, in 1942, Hitler visited occupied Ukraine he expressed his admiration for Stalin’s methodology and bemoaned the fact that the German people were still listening to shortwave broadcasts from the BBC.
With Stalin’s death, in 1953, and the liberalizing thaw under Khrushchev, the Soviet radio dial eventually expanded to include Radio Mayak (Lighthouse) and Radio Yunost (Youth). Mayak’s and Yunost’s programming was slightly less rigid in tone and more open to popular music, though the ideology was no less reflective of the Kremlin line. For the next three decades, the Soviet regime took great care to jam the Russian-language broadcasts of the BBC, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Deutsche Welle. Jamming was an ongoing battle between state and subject. Especially in the sixties and seventies, urban intellectuals typically committed their first anti-Soviet act by purchasing a decent radio—either a Soviet Latvian-made Spidola or, if possible, a German-made Grundig—and attempting to listen to the “foreign voices.” They would try anything to catch an aural glimpse of the world beyond, turning the radio sideways or upside down to get a signal or sticking the antennas out the window; better yet, they escaped from the big cities to the surrounding dacha communities, where the jamming was less effective. The fortunate listener caught some foreign news on Deutsche Welle, the Beatles on the BBC, Willis Conover’s famous jazz broadcasts on VOA.
“We would even listen to Vatican radio, which would give you a good report on what was happening in the Soviet Union, and you didn’t care that the announcer would then add ‘God bless you,’ ” the historian Sergei Ivanov said.
When the Soviet Army invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968, Soviet vacationers listened to news of the events on the beaches of the Baltic sea. The political analyst Masha Lipman, who is married to Ivanov, was in Lithuania at the time, and she recalled, “That summer on the beach, antennas were shooting up all over the place. And, in our circles, when you said that you heard about it ‘on the radio’ it meant only one thing—that you’d heard it on the Russian-language broadcasts of the VOA, the BBC, or Deutsche Welle.” In those circles, there was also a popular rhyme: “Est’ obychai na Rusi—noch’iu slishat’ Bi-bi-si.” (“There’s a custom in Russia—at night we listen to the BBC.”) At a meeting of the Central Committee’s presidium in 1963, Khrushchev pleaded, “Let’s . . . figure out a solution so that we produce radio sets that work only for the reception of our stations.” But, according to Kristin Roth-Ey, a specialist on Soviet-era media at University College, London, nothing ever came of Khrushchev’s ambition.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power, in 1985, and the institution of his policy of glasnost ended the jamming of foreign radio. Newspapers, literary magazines, theatre, television, and film flourished under the new freedoms, and, in broadcasting, Radio Liberty was permitted to open a bureau in Moscow—a vivid sign that the old taboos were falling away and Russia was fitfully joining the world.
In 1990, a few refugees from Soviet radio decided to start a station in the capital that would combine straightforward news, discussion, and even call-in shows that allowed people to say precisely what they wanted—a plan that might seem a banality elsewhere. The founders called the station Ekho Moskvy, Echo of Moscow, and they set up shop in a tiny, overheated single-room studio situated just a couple of blocks from Red Square. Echo went on the air on August 22, 1990, with an extended news program, including an interview with one of the young leaders of the Moscow reformers, Sergei Stankevich, and then played the Beatles song “All My Loving.”
At the time, Echo of Moscow seemed merely part of the greater phenomenon of expanding press freedoms, the logical outgrowth of a movement spurred by the Kremlin leadership. Now, eighteen years later, in the authoritarian ecosystem of Vladimir Putin, Echo of Moscow is one of the last of an endangered species, a dodo that still roams the earth.
Since Echo of Moscow was founded, I’ve been a frequent visitor to its studios. It’s a matter of reporting convenience; if you hang out there long enough, you are bound to run into all kinds of interesting people. If there is an important event in the capital—an election, an uprising, a passing scandal, a war in the Caucasus—the principals, the wised-up commentators, and the partisans invariably gravitate to the fourteenth floor of 11 Novy Arbat Street. In New York, whenever I want to get caught up on events in Russia, I go to Echo’s Web site, echo.msk.ru, and listen either to a live broadcast or to podcasts of interviews and discussion shows.
Not long ago, I found myself listening late into the night to Sergei Parkhomenko, who is the former editor of a few Yeltsin-era publications, as he conducted an interview with one Vladimir Kvachkov. An ex-military-intelligence officer, Kvachkov was accused three years ago of conspiring to assassinate Anatoly Chubais, who is despised by most Russians for his role in the rapid privatization of industries and land during the Yeltsin era. At the trial, prosecutors charged that Kvachkov had conspired to plant a roadside bomb that blew up as Chubais’s BMW rolled past it. The car was armored—Russian billionaires spend their money wisely as well as freely—and Chubais survived. In court, Kvachkov denied any part in the plot but made little secret of his hatred. In his view, Chubais is part of a “foreign occupying force” trying to destroy Russia from within. Kvachkov, who was acquitted, brazenly told Parkhomenko that “you can’t kill a person, but you must eliminate the enemy.”
During the war in Georgia and South Ossetia, an event that seemed to portend a potential renewal of the Cold War, Echo of Moscow broadcast sober, balanced accounts from battlefield reporters on a show called “With Their Own Eyes.” There were many discussion shows, too, with guests ranging from the journalist Maksim Shevchenko, who waved the extreme-nationalist banner, to a severe critic of the Kremlin, Andrei Illarionov, who was an economic adviser to Putin in his first term as President. Putin was not amused by Echo’s rounded coverage of the war. On August 29th, he summoned thirty-five of the country’s leading media executives to his vacation compound, in Sochi. In the past eight years, Putin has regularly held such meetings—sometimes to give his political point of view, and sometimes to admonish, but always to make clear who is in charge. And that, evidently, has not changed with the election of a new head of state, Dmitry Medvedev.
At the meeting in Sochi, Putin turned his attention—and his icy glare—to Aleksei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, criticizing the station for its broadcasts about Georgia. Many of the loyalist editors in the room were delighted as they watched Putin rough up Venediktov on a range of editorial and factual points. Not for the first time, there was the sense that Putin might shut down the station. Later, in a hallway, Venediktov protested to Putin that he was being “unjust.” Putin pulled out a stack of transcripts to underline his points, saying, “You have to answer for this, Aleksei Alekseevich!” Venediktov was shaken, but he calculated that Putin would never have invited him to Sochi with the rest of the delegation had he intended to get rid of him or Echo of Moscow. That could have been accomplished with a telephone call.
“Afterward, we met one on one, and there Putin’s tone was more positive,” Venediktov told me. “But he made his point. He was demonstrating his ability to do whatever he wants with us at any time.” When Venediktov returned to Moscow, he made clear to his staff that they had best “pay careful attention” to their coverage, be sure of their facts, and get sufficient government views. But no one was fired, and it was clear that he had managed to escape the worst. “Poka,” Venediktov said. “For now.”
The founders of Echo, including Sergei Buntman, Sergei Korzun, and Yuri Fedutinov, were radio professionals who had spent their twenties working on various Soviet stations and, when they had the chance to go abroad, studying the way things were done in the West. Glasnost gave them their opening. In his youth, Buntman had also run a theatre program at Moscow’s School No. 875, where he worked with Venediktov, a history teacher of unusual intelligence and self-possession. At the time, journalists were still struggling with the old ideological inhibitions, and so Buntman, recognizing a peer with a deep interest in politics and a restless curiosity, hired Venediktov as a reporter, though he had not had five minutes of journalistic experience. Eventually, Venediktov became the station’s editor-in-chief and leading public figure.
Venediktov is a standard-issue type of the Russian intelligentsia, with thick glasses, a wry, knowing manner, and frizzy Bozo the Clown hair. As an interviewer, he is as aggressive as the young Mike Wallace, but a great deal more cerebral. As an analyst, he is incisive and cocky, well satisfied that all his predictions will, or have, come true. More important, he has been an extremely adept politician when it comes to fending off the complaints and demands of the Kremlin and protecting his reporters. The walls of the Echo studios are covered with photographs of the dignitaries who have come to be interviewed, and Venediktov seems undaunted by all of them. Many of his questions begin with chesty prodding: “Kak eto mozhet byt’ ”—“How can it possibly be . . . ?” When Bill Clinton went on too long with an answer, Venediktov kicked him under the table.
As a novice reporter, Venediktov proved to be brave yet untheatrical. In August, 1991, during the K.G.B.-led coup, he stayed inside the parliament building, the Russian White House, with Boris Yeltsin and his defenders, while the building was surrounded by tanks. He returned to the Russian White House in October, 1993, when Yeltsin ordered the shelling of the building, which had been occupied by the so-called “Red-Brown coalition” of Communists and nationalists. During that uprising, Yeltsin’s rebellious Vice-President, Aleksandr Rutskoi, borrowed Venediktov’s telephone and used it to call on Russian Air Force pilots to bomb the Kremlin, and Echo of Moscow aired Rutskoi’s tirade. The Red-Brown rebellion was eventually suppressed and Rutskoi imprisoned. Two months later, a group of reporters, including Venediktov, was invited to a meeting with Yeltsin. Usually, the reporters were seated around the table in alphabetical order, but now Venediktov realized that he was seated directly across from Yeltsin, who was bound to be furious at Echo. Yeltsin, an enormous man with a stevedore’s chest and a party-boss temperament, strode into the room and angrily addressed Venediktov: “Echo of Moscow, you should be ashamed of yourselves!” he said. “ ‘Comrades, the planes should be launched, you have to go and bomb the Kremlin.’ Who said that?”
Venediktov thought that he would be lucky to leave the room alive.
He replied to Yeltsin, “Boris Nikolaevich, this is my job. Echo sent me there. I’m not to blame. They said just do it and I did it.”
Yeltsin looked at Venediktov awhile and then said, “Oh, well, you have a job. You’re a good worker. So go work.”
And that was the end of it. For all of Yeltsin’s profound failings and the reflexes he had developed as a lifelong Communist apparatchik, he was rarely hostile to the press. During his Presidency, which defined the nineties, newspapers and even state and independent television flourished as never before in the history of Russia. In the wake of the failed 1991 coup, he shut down the Communist Party newspapers that had supported it. But, after receiving a petition of protest from many members of the press and the liberal intelligentsia, he relented, and Pravda and Sovetskaya Rossiya reopened. In 1996, during Yeltsin’s reëlection campaign against a Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, the press, including Echo of Moscow, returned the favor, running obsequious coverage that helped Yeltsin reverse his pitiful standing in the polls and defeat Zyuganov.
After Yeltsin retired, on the New Year’s Eve before the new millennium, Putin assumed power and soon moved against the media, using financial and legal leverage to take over, or shut down, newspapers and television stations whose coverage he deemed unfriendly or whose ownership he deemed uncoöperative. Reporters Without Borders, in its worldwide press-freedom index, ranks Russia, in terms of liberty, a hundred and forty-fourth out of a hundred and sixty-nine countries—just behind Afghanistan and Yemen and just ahead of Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe.
When Putin was asked by a writer how he would respond to critics who accuse him of limiting media freedom, he replied, “Very simply. We have never had freedom of speech in Russia, so I don’t really understand what could be stifled. It seems to me that freedom is the ability to express one’s opinion, but there must exist certain boundaries, as laid out in the law.”
Article 29 of the Russian constitution says otherwise; it “guarantees” freedom of speech. Nevertheless, Putin brought the Russian media to heel with ruthless speed. The independent television station NTV, which had aggressively covered the war in Chechnya, was taken away from its founding owners in 2001 and neutered; Channel One, by far the biggest station in Russia, is once more a compliant extension of government policy.
For Putin, only television really counts. The heads of the networks are summoned to regular weekly meetings at the Kremlin to set the news agenda; executives are provided with lists enumerating the names of political opponents who are not permitted on the air. The loyalty of important anchors, station managers, and star reporters is bought with unheard-of salaries. Live television discussions and interviews no longer exist. There are newspapers and Web sites that are at least as free as Echo, but their audiences are so limited that Putin is content to relegate them to the margins and leave them alone.
“The problem is that official propaganda on television is extremely distracting—it insures that people talk about the nonsense they are showing,” Yulia Latynina, a well-known newspaper columnist and commentator on Echo of Moscow, told me. “For example, if Russia drops a rocket on Georgia from a plane, the report will talk about the size of the hole and whether or not the Georgians dug the hole themselves and all sorts of other nonsense. Suddenly, you are talking about holes and not about whether Russia is trying to scare the hell out of the Republic of Georgia and other such ‘enemies.’ And television makes up things, too, about supposed enemies like Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia. Everyone is our enemy. Who is a good guy? Andorra? Iran? All of it is a diversion from real political information and thought.”
In 2001, Putin invited Aleksei Venediktov to a meeting in the Kremlin library. By way of both embracing him and warning him about how he understood their relationship, the Russian President talked at length about the difference between enemies and traitors. “It’s a crucial distinction for Putin,” Venediktov said. “He said, ‘Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed, crushed.’ This is his philosophy of the world. And then he said, ‘You know, Aleksei, you are not a traitor. You are an enemy.’ ”
Foolishly, perhaps, I asked Venediktov if Putin smiled when he said this.
“Smile?” Venediktov said. “Putin never smiles. He was just making it clear in what sense I existed for him. He knows that I won’t stab him in the back or play games, but that I will simply do what I do. I said, ‘If you want to close Echo, close it. I can’t restrain myself from doing what we are here to do.’ ”
Venediktov had no illusions about his interlocutor or about the meeting. In effect, Putin was telling him what Tsar Nicholas I told Pushkin: “Henceforth, I will be your censor.”
“Putin saw me because he wanted, as the intelligence professionals say, to recruit me, to draw me onto his team, and so he spoke to me with the air of a comrade,” Venediktov said. “It showed a level of trust. He needed the reputation of Echo.” For Putin, the station had a certain utility—as a showpiece of press liberty—but Venediktov knew that Putin could change his mind and shut it down at any time. “Putin came from the ranks of the Soviet K.G.B. and had a very different notion of the press than Yeltsin, and I could immediately see that difference when we spoke,” he recalled. “I told my friends, even though all of them had voted for Vladimir Putin and believed he was a modernizing reformer, that we were going backward. No one believed me. They said that I was a narrow pessimist, that I had lost my intuition. Now, of course, they believe it.”
There is no end to the paradoxical condition of Echo of Moscow. Since 2001, Echo has been owned by Gazprom, the gigantic energy conglomerate that is one of the bases of Kremlin economic and political power. Venediktov calls the Kremlin “our main shareholder.” Nevertheless, Echo’s reporting has been aggressive and honest, which has been especially important in the past four or five years, as, one by one, the institutions of civil society—the courts, parliament, N.G.O.s, television, and the Russian Orthodox Church—have been co-opted into the body of the state and the direct rule of Vladimir Putin.
Echo cannot possibly match the range and audience penetration of radio-tochka. These days, Russian listeners are offered a broad choice of music, entertainment, and news (or pseudo news) on the radio, to say nothing of the competition from newer media. Echo’s listenership, however, is substantial by contemporary standards: nearly a million daily in Moscow, and two and a half million nationally, and the listeners are well educated and middle-aged.
“We are a radio of influence, rather than a mass radio station,” Venediktov said. “If you want to be a mass station, a crowd-pleaser, then we should probably be paying more attention to the life of Paris Hilton. But if we did that then those who are listening to us would not be listening. We’d lose them.”
Despite the size of its audience, the station cannot pretend to have much sway over Russian society, which is, in the main, deeply apolitical and immensely more supportive of Putin than it ever was of Yeltsin or Gorbachev. Masha Lipman calls this Putin-era phenomenon the country’s “non-participation pact”: the public agrees not to meddle in politics in exchange for the chance to take part in the consumer benefits of the Russian energy boom. “Not that the West is so uniformly agitated to act when it hears about an abuse of office, but it does become a matter of politics,” Lipman said. “Here, even when a tabloid like Moskovsky Komsomolets prints something scandalous, it doesn’t instigate public debate, it doesn’t affect public consciousness. People don’t believe they can make a difference, and they don’t give a damn. They don’t want to be engaged. This is a pillar of Putin’s power.”
One afternoon, I met Kirill Rogov, a former editor at Kommersant, Russia’s best mainstream daily newspaper, and a co-founder of the political Web site polit.ru, at a bar above the Mayakovsky Theatre. Rogov has retreated from a life in journalism, and is working now at a think tank in Moscow and writing occasional opinion columns, but he retains a respect for Echo. “It’s been the best news service for a long time,” he said. “But is a free media outlet possible in an unfree country? I would say no. In a free country, the newspaper publishes a story, it influences television, it reaches the public, then it helps to shape the course of policy. In an unfree country, Echo of Moscow lives in isolation, on a kind of Indian reservation. It broadcasts a story or a discussion and it reaches an audience, but then it never goes any further.”
One of the stars at Echo of Moscow is Yevgenia Albats, a political-science professor who listened carefully to National Public Radio while studying in the United States and hoped to emulate the style when she returned home. But as a personality she is a great deal more caffeinated than anyone on NPR. She rightly says that she has the reputation of “a strange, direct woman, a little crazy, who believes in democracy.” Venediktov once informed Albats that some Kremlin officials told him they had a “visceral hatred” for her. A Putin campaign adviser, a onetime dissident who had been persecuted by the K.G.B., stormed out of her studio when she informed him that “Chekists are taking over the Kremlin and now you are a proponent of these people in epaulettes.”
“He went totally bananas!” she recalled.
Albats, who does solo commentaries and hosts a Sunday-evening talk show, is also the deputy editor-in-chief of The New Times, a weekly magazine that carries excellent investigative reports. As a journalism student at Moscow State University during the Brezhnev era, she was called in by the resident K.G.B. representative and warned that she would be expelled if she continued to seek out underground editions of banned literature. In the perestroika years, she made her name by investigating the K.G.B. and, in 1992, published a book, “The State Within a State,” which foresaw the persistence and centrality of the K.G.B. in post-Soviet Russia. When we met for coffee at the National Hotel, Albats stopped our conversation after a few minutes and went over to say hello to someone at the next table.
“Who was that?” I asked when she came back.
“Aleksei Kondaurov,” she said. “Ex-general in the K.G.B. He’s been on my show. We talk all the time.”
Like her colleagues, Albats has discovered that Russian officials, including active agents in the intelligence services, listen to Echo as a kind of reality check.
“Decision-makers in Russia are distant from real life,” she said. “They have money, they live far from the life of the country, and meanwhile the bureaucracy hides concrete information from them when it suits bureaucratic purposes. Information is the bureaucrat’s commodity—he depends on it for funding, for his survival, and so he exaggerates threats, say, when it suits him. Decision-makers choke on such ‘information.’ For example, the bureaucrats in intelligence, in order to get more and more funding, need to feed the fears of the decision-makers, and so they exaggerate the threat of an ‘Orange Revolution’ ”—a political rebellion of the kind that transformed Ukraine, nearly three years ago—“coming to Russia, even though no such threat exists.”
Albats looked around the café and lowered her voice a few decibels. “Bureaucrats lie, and so these decision-makers listen to Echo,” she went on. “It’s a totally malfunctioning system, and we play an important role in it! People in the Kremlin are devoted listeners to Echo.”
Under Venediktov’s canny direction, the main presenters for Echo have developed an ear for what is permissible and what is not. “You can call Putin or Medvedev a fool, which, of course, was totally impossible in Soviet times, but you might get into trouble if you look into their pockets,” Albats said. “You cannot say you’ve heard that So-and-So has sent x trillion dollars to this or that offshore account. These people are total conformists, total pragmatists, they have no interest at all in ideology. They care about their power and their assets.”
Opinion is unfettered, in other words, but Echo falls short in the area of reporting, particularly of the investigative variety. In our conversations, Venediktov insisted, rather unconvincingly, that investigative reporting requires the ability to publish documents, “and how can you do that over the radio?” But Echo’s Web site would seem to be an available tool for just that. One of the station’s commentators, Yulia Latynina, admitted that investigative work is nearly “impossible,” but the reasons have to do with the nature of post-Soviet Russia. “The basic problem is that you cannot really expect, in a regime like that of Marcos or Duvalier, to get solid information into your hands on bank accounts,” she said. “Everyone looks the other way. This is not a dictatorship—no one should exaggerate and compare it to the Soviet Union—but in an authoritarian regime you can’t conduct an effective investigation the way you can in a democratic regime. You are not discovering aberrations. In Russia today, corruption on a gigantic scale is merely a matter of economic policy. It is what it is. So all you can do is make reasonable suppositions. For example, look at the takeover of Yukos.” Latynina was referring to the energy conglomerate led by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, before he was arrested, in 2003 (presumably at Putin’s command), given a transparently bogus trial, and sent off to prison in Siberia. “When Yukos was taken over, it was suddenly co-owned by Putin’s old friend Gennady Timchenko, of Gunvor”—an energy-trading conglomerate—“which is registered in Switzerland. Gunvor made seventy billion in revenues this year exporting for the state. So you can’t really know what Putin’s cut is, but you can make a supposition. I mean, either Putin is just purely generous to his friend or he has an expectation. And I doubt that Putin is that generous!”
In the late Soviet era, the number of real political dissidents was tiny. The men and women who risked everything—their jobs, their freedom, their citizenship, even their lives—were so few because the danger was so great. Venediktov certainly does not count as a post-Soviet dissident (or even a partisan activist); he is, rather, a professional, which he defines as a journalist devoted to open inquiry and discussion, come what may. Mikhail Leontyev, who until recently ran a nationalist, pro-Kremlin show on Echo of Moscow, told the Moscow Times that, while he disdained the station’s over-all liberal politics, he admired Venediktov’s openness. He added that the existence of the station proved that Putin’s Kremlin was hardly vicious in its attitude to the press. “Echo of Moscow is proof of the authorities’ vegetarianism,” he said.
Echo’s liberals, however, are not in a position of comfort. Putin made that clear to Venediktov last month. On state television, Venediktov, Yulia Latynina, and Matvei Ganapolsky—central voices on Echo—have been branded members of a subversive “fifth column.”
“When you meet people from the Kremlin or the intelligence services, they always say, ‘How brave you are! We always listen to Echo of Moscow!’ ” Latynina said. “Venediktov knows how to talk to people in the Kremlin and turn a bland face to their requests and complaints. I’ve never been disappointed in him even when we have disagreed. I can always say what I want and he will always defend me.”
But, while Venediktov’s integrity has proved as reliable as his political skills, his capacity to protect his people is limited. There have been twenty unsolved murders of journalists in Russia in the past eight years. When Anna Politkovskaya, of Novaya Gazeta, was killed, two years ago, three reporters at Echo walked into Venediktov’s office and said that they were leaving to pursue other careers. Earlier this year, Venediktov came to New York to collect an award from the Overseas Press Club. When he told his wife, she said, “First comes the award, then comes the bullet.” For now, Echo of Moscow remains open, vital to its audience, useful to the regime. “But no matter what we do,” Venediktov said, “no matter how clever we are, we always have to recognize that we can be gone in a flash.” ♦
Editors’ Note, December 1, 2008: A letter responding to this article appeared in the December 8, 2008, issue of The New Yorker.
