At first, the Kremlin denied the disaster on April 26, 1986, then concealed its true scale—and in the end lost the war against reality in less than three weeks

Last week, few people remembered Vladimir Ulyanov’s (Lenin’s) birthday. Among those who did mark the date was the Turgenev Library in Paris: on April 22, the complete 55-volume collected works of the leader of the Russian Revolution were ceremoniously carried out from its shelves. Parisian supporters of Lenin tried to intervene in the process.

The general public often treats postmodernist practices with a certain lack of seriousness—since historical religious dogmas can be ironically and bizarrely combined with thoroughly cynical modern «business pragmatism.» However, the growing number of victims of these postmodernist wars is all too real.    

According to the most optimistic estimates, the total audience of popular science publications in Russia is only about 6 million people. That’s roughly 4% of the population. And this market in Russia today, it seems, is experiencing a crisis.