A glimpse of terror
WHEN Rachel Polonsky moved from Britain to Moscow, little did she expect that she would soon be leafing through the personal library of one of Soviet Russia’s most ruthless characters. Even less did she expect this to set her on a peculiar journey across the country to visit the Russia evident from those books.
Moving in the 1990s with her family, she planned to write a monograph on orientalism. That never came to fruition, but Molotov’s Magic Lantern emerged in its stead, born of the fortune to move into the building once home to the Soviet elite and the apartment beneath Vyacheslav Molotov’s, which still contains many of his possessions.
