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asked how I liked Moscow. I said that Moscow was the greatest place I’d ever been, and Russia the greatest country I’d ever seen.
    On one of my later visits to Moscow I was standing at Sheremetyevo Airport in a line at the ticket counter at Aeroflot Airlines waiting to buy a ticket to New York. The guy in front of me was speaking Russian, and after a minute I could tell by his accent that he must be an American. We began a conversation. He said he was a journalist originally from NewYork who had been living in Moscow for many years. Still in the grip of my infatuation, and wanting to hear it confirmed in someone else, I ventured that he must really like Russia to have lived here so long.
    “
Like
it?” he said. “I hate it! I hate this fucking country. Russia is the worst fucking country in the world!”
    I asked why he thought that.
    “My God! What are you talking about? This country is a total disaster! Nothing fucking works. The people treat each other horribly—oh, how they love to abuse each other! They’re schemers, liars, bribe takers. If you don’t know how to bribe people you won’t ever get anywhere here. Everybody’s working some stupid fucking angle. The place is filthy, trash all over . . .” He went on and on.
    When he finally paused, I asked, “Well, if you hate Russia so much, why are you flying Aeroflot?”
    He looked away, toward the floor. “Because they let you smoke,” he said.
    And indeed, he was certainly right about that. The woman who sold me my ticket was smoking, as was the flight attendant who took the ticket at the gate. So were most of the passengers. Through the airport window I saw two Aeroflot pilots squatting on their haunches in that way Russian men do, each enjoying a smoke on the tarmac not far from the planes. When I stepped into the cabin, the density of the fumes in there would have been sufficient to smoke meat. (Sometime after that I learned that Aeroflot had changed its policy; now, like other airlines, it does not allow smoking on its flights.)
    Eventually, of course, I came to understand that the guy had a point, and not just about the smoking. Trying to reconcile the passion I felt for Russia with the way Russia actually is took some doing. I employed various strategies. We all know of famous authors who gave the world great works of literature yet were not such good people themselves. I supposed maybe Russia was an entire country like that. Certainly, it had the great books to show. That explanation proving unsatisfactory, I tried a simpler formula: Russia as both great and horrible, or as the greatest horrible country in the world. I had other formulas and explanations after that one. More recently I have given up trying to reconcile or explain.
    As I read books about Russia, I took comfort in the discovery that Russia-love is an independent force out there in the ether of ideas, andthat it had afflicted other vulnerable people before me. For example, John Reed, author of perhaps the best book ever written about Russia by an American,
Ten Days That Shook the World
. I feel a connection to Reed even closer than I do to Lenin, because Reed and I were on the same organization in college, a humor magazine called the
Harvard Lampoon
. Reed graduated in 1910, and I graduated sixty-three years later. Soon after college, Reed had a great success as a war correspondent following Pancho Villa’s armies in Mexico. When the First World War started, Reed went to France, sent back a number of dispatches from there, and then managed to get himself banned from the Western front. While doing some reporting, he wangled his way over to the German lines, where, for unknown reasons, he accepted the offer of a German officer to take a couple of shots at the French. Reed had returned to New York by the time word of this exploit reached the papers, and the French, understandably, afterward refused to allow him reentry into France.
    For his next war-reporting journey, Reed therefore