Galina

"She was extraordinarily pretty, also, as well as a wonderful singer. And another reason for reading her book is that the photographs are particularly good. She and her husband put up Solzhenitsyn when he was writing The Gulag Archipelago , so they’re all connected. Well, the first thing is that it gives the feeling of Russian sanity about what the truth was. She had a lot of nasty experiences with the Party apparatchik literary and opera machinery. They gave her a lot of trouble. But her personality was such that she could answer them back, and did. Sometimes she got away with it, and eventually she left the Soviet Union, in 1974. Russia has been through a lot of people who were silenced, but there were some people who managed not to be. It really is a very Russian story, it has a lot of Russia in it."