The Fight to Save Russia’s Opposition Movement; the Kremlin’s Long Shadow; an Arctic Oil Rush

A special delivery from the Vanity Fair Archive View in your browser | Update your preferences     A daily digest of things to discuss over drinks March 05, 2022 This week from the Vanity Fair Archive: coverage of Russian regimes⁠—and their dissidents⁠—dating back to 1990.   The Good Wife After the Kremlin poisoned her husband, Yulia Navalnaya waged an epic battle to save his life and the life of Russia's opposition movement. It's a fight she has no intention of losing. R E A D  M O R E »     The Arctic Oil Rush There have been many expeditions to the North Pole, but it was Russia's, in 2007, that touched off a furor over who owns the Arctic—and the oil that is becoming more and more accessible as the ice disappears. From the halls of Moscow's scientific institutes, where global warming was not part of the official story, to Siberia's permafrost tundra, where reindeer were dying and a powerful greenhouse gas was bubbling from the ooze, Alex Shoumatoff probed the secrets of Yakut shamans, woolly mammoth skeletons, and a new Great Game: energy exploration. R E A D  M O R E »     The Man Who Changed the World Who is Mikhail Gorbachev? How did he manage to rise through the ranks of a repressive regime with his revolutionary vision intact? In 1990, Gail Sheehy traveled to the Soviet Union, Vienna, and Italy to compile an extraordinary human document on the man from nowhere. In the tiny village where he grew up, she traced a harrowing childhood of famine, German occupation, and Stalinist terror. In Stavropol, the "Warm Siberia" where he might have languished as an apparatchik, she learned how he became a fixer for party powers like KGB chief Andrpov. Everywhere, she gained new insights about the controversial redhead he had loved ever since she caught his eye on a dance floor—Raisa Maximovna, the woman he called "my general." R E A D  M O R E »     The Kremlin's Long Shadow After the sensational death of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by polonium 210 in London in 2006, many suspected the Kremlin. But interviewing the victim's widow, fellow émigrés, and toxicologists, among others, Bryan Burrough explored Litvinenko's history with two powerful antagonists—one his bête noire, President Vladimir Putin, and the other his benefactor, exiled billionaire Boris Berezovsky—in a world where friends could be as dangerous as enemies. R E A D  M O R E »     In Trump's Amerika In 2017, was the Trump White House in chaos because of incompetence—or was it effectively taking a page from Putin's playbook? Propaganda experts feared that Russia's Orwellian culture would take hold in the U.S. R E A D  M O R E » Get on the list Subscribe to our Hollywood newsletter for your essential industry and awards-season news, every day. Sign Up Now     This e-mail was sent to you by VANITY FAIR. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, vanityfair@newsletter.vf.com, to your address book. View our Privacy Policy Unsubscribe Copyright © Condé Nast 2022. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.