How easy it is to view Russian-Soviet culture and politics as a zero-sum game and how the Magical Chorus lost, as Keith Gessen suggests in his review, Reading Volkov’s chatty, well-informed and in many ways enlightened book, you wonder whether he even suspects just how badly, how devastatingly, how possibly lastingly, he and his friends have lost. Gessen couches his review of the 2008 book by Solomon Volkov in the election engineering that was going on in Moscow the same year, and what he describes as Volkov's loathing for Orlando Figes. The only problem is that it is pretty hard to read any of this in the book itself, as Volkov takes the reader on a magic carpet ride over the cultural history of Russia and the Soviet Union the past 100 years. Volkov takes the title from a term Anna Akhmatova used to describe the young poets of the late 50s and early 60s, which included Joseph Brodsky. Unlike Figes, Volkov is a native son, albeit a self-exiled one, who shared...