The Intelligentsia Find Refuge on a Not So Far Away Island

The Moscow Times

LONDON — For some, the paraphernalia of Slavic food shops, cultural organizations promoting anything from Leo Tolstoy to Nikita Mikhalkov, and Russian-language newspapers in London are a comforting indication of a thriving ethnic community. For others it is a mere illusion.

"It is all rubbish," said Zinovy Zinik, a Russian-born author who has lived in London since 1976. "There is no such thing as a Russian community in London. … Anyone with a vestige of brains would try to dissociate himself from such an entity."

The idea of such a community, he told The Moscow Times, "presumes that people of the same ethnic origin abroad always stick together — it implies collective responsibility and conspiratorial tendencies."

Zinik, who referred to himself as a "red emigre" — someone who left the Soviet Union — has been in Britain for longer than he ever lived in Russia. He no longer owns a Russian passport. 

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The Intelligentsia Find Refuge on a Not So Far Away Island