Also, for the Kazakhs in the novel, China looms as a more menacing and extremist alternative to Soviet power; that is the land of mind control.

—Katerina Clark, Foreword to Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), xi.

Perestroika wasn’t created by the people, it was created by a single person: Gorbachev. Gorbachev and a handful of intellectuals . . .

—Speaker in Svetlanta Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, (New York: Random House, 2017), 21.

Nancy Fraser, New Left Review:

Here, I want to examine a different aspect of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza: its significance as a ‘world event’, an epochal turning point that also serves to reveal, and so to signify, the nature of the times. I aim to do so in a register that will range between the political, the social, the philosophical and the personal. I argue that ‘Gaza’ signifies a crisis for the moral order that has held sway across much of the West for the past half century. Installed in the United States from the 1970s onward, and serving to justify its global hegemony along with Israeli expansionism, that order was centred on the Nazi Judeocide as the ultimate emblem of ‘radical evil’, delimiting the horizon within which wrong and its rectification could be thought. Today, however, Auschwitz itself is invoked as justification for a new genocide. The effect is to leave the Holocaust-centred Western moral order in tatters, no longer able to conceal or contain the glaring crimes committed by the Israeli state and its American backer. In the current period, ‘Gaza’ bids to replace ‘Auschwitz’ as symbol for the worst human atrocities of our time.

In society’s perception, the reality of constant psychological mobilization and the tense expectation of global military conflict became a way of life to be reproduced by two generations, for whom fidelity to convictions was always inextricably linked to fear and the feeling of powerlessness in the face of fate. The unprecedented destructive power of the new superweapons had a disarming effect on both sides of the invisible front. Henceforth, the strength of either party could only be measured by its capacity to make people accept choices that have already been made for them in advance. Paradoxically, the constant feeling of risk has proven to be one of the most stable conditions of recent modern history, which is why its memory has always prompted so much subconscious nostalgia.

Today, the spectre of the Cold War has returned, and it has roused not only old‑school diplomats, but generals, and/or propaganda hacks, who finally feel that they are once again on more solid ground.

—Ilya Budraitskis, Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post‑Soviet Russia, (London: Verso, 2022), 19.

I think this is an interesting insight which addresses something of the appeal of both Ostalgia and Europe’s present insistent drumbeat for war with Russia. There is constancy, familiar comfort in having a known enemy.