The Russian Empire Must Die

During the quarter century of its formal existence, the Moscow School of Civic Education did not have a campus, a syllabus, or professors. The school instead ran seminars for politicians and journalists, led by other politicians and journalists, from Russia and around the world. It operated out of the Moscow apartment of its founders, Lena Nemirovskaya and Yuri Senokosov. They had met in the 1970s while working on a Soviet philosophy journal, and shared a hatred of the violent, arbitrary politics that had shaped most of their lives. Nemirovskaya’s father was a Gulag prisoner. Senokosov once told me he could not eat Russian black bread, because the taste reminded him of the poverty and tragedy of his Soviet childhood.

Both also believed that Russia could change. Maybe not change very much, maybe not very dramatically, but change nevertheless. Nemirovskaya once told me that her great ambition was just to make Russia “a little bit more civilized” through the exposure of people to new ideas. Their school, an extension of conversations held in their kitchen, was designed to achieve that single, nonrevolutionary goal.

For a long time it flourished. From 1992 to 2021, Nemirovskaya reckons, more than 30,000 people—parliamentarians, city-council members, businesspeople, journalists—attended their seminars around the country on law, elections, and media. British editors, Polish ministers, and American governors came to speak; they got financial support from an equally wide range of European, American, and Russian foundations and philanthropists. I attended perhaps a dozen seminars, mostly to speak about journalism.

But the school remained a Russian organization, built by Russians, for Russians. The topics were chosen