David Kapovitch emigrated to the United States with his mother in the late 1990s. Twenty years later, on the occasion of a brutal return to Russia, he will discover the Russian way of doing business: corruption , embezzlement, large scale money laundering, coercion, blackmail. After A sequence of events (Gallimard, 2021), a story in which Mikhaïl Chevelev, born in 1959 and a well-known opposition journalist in Russia, explored the workings of terrorism, The number one is an open window on an elaborate system aimed at enriching an unnamed character, at the very top of the pyramid of power. If the story sometimes lacks credibility in its thriller dimension, its striking force remains very real. A family history and a novel against the occult powers of contemporary Russian society, where the author still and everywhere sees the legacy of the immutable practices of the Soviet Union: “The only thing that allows them to control us is is our fear. »
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