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The Russian writer Pyotr Chaadayev wrote of his country: “We have never advanced along with other people; we are not related to any of the great human families; we belong neither to the West nor to the East, and we possess the traditions of neither. Placed, as it were, outside of the times, we have not been affected by the universal education of mankind.”
That was in 1829. The “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” as former British prime minister Winston Churchill described Russia more than a century later, is no closer to being solved today. The philosopher John