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By Root 982 0

University of Geneva, and a very famous Slavist in France. Georges Nivat is not just a famous Slavist, but the same person who came as an exchange student to Moscow in the early 1960s and very soon found himself in the house of none other than Olga Ivinskaya, the last love of Boris Pasternak. Georges did not merely drink cups of tea in her house, but fell in love with her daughter, Irina. He even moved in with them, and their impending marriage was blessed by Pasternak himself. More than that, Pasternak and Georges spent a lot of time together, talking. Pasternak helped him to make sense of Russian life, with all its trials. Later he was booted out of Russia thanks to the efforts of the relevant agencies. And Irina? She ended up in one of the labor camps in Mordovia.

Gradually everything fell apart between Georges and Irina. First he got married in France and began bringing up his children in the ascetic spirit of strict Protestantism. Little Anne Nivat crawled through the mountains with her Papa. That is how she was brought up, learning to grit her teeth. Less than 30 years would pass before these lessons in survival came in very handy as Chechnya burned. She was to crawl through the mountains of Chechnya, well able to grit her teeth. But let us return to the story of that love in the middle of the last century. Learning that Georges had got married in France, Irina too fell in love with a prisoner in the neighbouring camp for men.

The marriage of Georges and Irina, to which Pasternak had given his blessing, never came to pass, but the love he had encouraged did flourish in a house in the very road where Novaya gazeta’s offices are situated. The house is still there, and so is their apartment.

We are all closer to each other than we know. Our world is a strange place and more intricately connected than we imagine in our wildest dreams. Paris and Moscow are almost the same.

COME WITH THE WIND: MOSCOW CHAMPIONS OF A BETTER RUSSIA MEET GEORGE W. BUSH (AT HIS REQUEST)

May 25, 2002

It is not only the Kremlin that gets to enjoy the Bushes’ company. Over 100 of us, officially classified as “Russian social, parliamentary, and religious opinion-formers” and highly diverse in terms of our socio-political make-up, also got invited to meet the US President. On May 24, 2002, from 2:15 p.m. Moscow time, immediately after a presidential lunch in one of the Kremlin dining halls. The venue was Spaso House on Old Arbat, the renowned residence of the American Ambassador.

A fashionable function is good because nobody is responsible to anybody for anything. It is pure entertainment. While the Bushes were being catastrophically late arriving from the Kremlin, the rest of us in Spaso House were also enjoying ourselves. First, everybody was entertained by Boris Nemtsov of the Union of Right Forces, who appeared sporting such an amazing milk-chocolate tan that he eclipsed even Valentina Matvienko. Madame Matvienko is a Deputy Prime Minister in the Russian Government, and has lately been making increasingly strenuous efforts to mutate into a social lioness. Anyway, she was amazing too at the crush in Spaso House, displaying a tan worthy of the Caribbean and Seychelles.

“Well, I got mine in Sochi,” Nemtsov said defensively. “I always go there in the spring.”

An hour and a half passed in disputation and the consumption of aesthetically irreproachable canapés. Still Bush didn’t appear, but no nervous anticipation was observable among the guests.

Jewish administrators, eternally indebted to America, sauntered around and the Chief Muslims of Russia in exotic costumes smiled sweetly at them. The A-team from the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of Foreign Relations, the whole lot of them, drifted in looking pleased with themselves. One of the last to appear was Gleb Pavlovsky, our principal Presidential Privy Counsellor, looking grumpy.

This provoked a minor stir. “What’s he doing here?” echoed around the room with its laden tables. Most of those present evidently felt that Bush’s definition of social, parliamentary and religious opinion-formers