and that reason would be?

nope. I meant specifically the Main Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps, which ran the entire system of camps in the Soviet Union.

are we writing in Hungarian now?

Ukrainians live in Hungary, too. and in Romania.

well, that kind of wicked went down before I was born, so we were all just under surveillance and encouraged to spy on others since early age.

you say both pedantic and intellectual like it’s a bad thing. and I don’t need any excuses for being harsh where I see fit.

if you are into such kind of soul-wrenching reading, but with more depth — you might want to check out Efrosinia Kersnovskaia’s memoir — I don’t know whether it was translated into English. she wrote about her experience and drew pictures. or books by Svetlana Alexievich — she won a Nobel in literature last year for…

I grew up during the Soviet times, and war movies were on TV (on the total of two channels) and in cinema theatres. and our school would take us to watch them.

isn’t Dragoman a Ukrainian surname? it meant ‘interpreter’ in Old Ukrainian.

well, Americans have a lot of horrors to borrow from in their own history, if they decide to go there for a dystopian material.

Romania had its own share of nightmares, but Hungary had it comparatively easy (I mean, within the Warsaw bloc), especially in the 1980-ties.

I just wonder whether any of these writers read books, say, on GULAG. because compared to that shit, all these dystopias sound meek. toothless. nice.

what is it with you io9ers and geography / history? during WW2, it was the Soviet Union, consisting of Russia and 14 other republics.

or Uzbek or Tatar or Chukcha or any of the more than 130 ethnicities and peoples of the USSR. so, the more correct word for them would be, indeed, Soviet.

during the Cold War it was not Russia, it was the Soviet Union. correspondingly, the teenagers were not Russian, they were Soviet.

amiga :)

that would make sense — on both of your statements.

that’s a lot of legs.