Quiet flows the Don—and almost all else

摘要

If it is possible for a country to succumb to a dis-ease, then Russia is in the grip of chronic-fatigue syndrome. Though doctors may say no such affliction exists, the description seems both to fit the symptoms and to explain why the people are so apathetic. Emerging from 74 grim years of communism, they have in short order lived through the disintegration of the Soviet Union, an attempted coup in 1991, the storming of parliament in 1993, a series of lurches from central planning towards a market economy via privatisation, depression and hyperinflation, plus a war in Chechnya that may have claimed as many as 100,000 lives. After all that, they have little appetite for further upheavals.