Teatime with a Christian cult leader

How I met (and escaped) a woman whose ideas predicted the rise of Russian fascism

I’m going to tell you a story about the evolution of Russian fascism. It starts, surprisingly enough, in a gloomy apartment building on the outskirts of the Ukrainian city of Kyiv, the place of my birth. The basement of that building was flooded in the summer of 2003, and the older couple whom I visited frequently over my break would ask me to close the…