Guess what my first major purchase in the West was, shortly after fleeing from the USSR in the 1980s and settling in Australia? Not a second-hand jalopy, a three-piece suit, or a clunky word processor. I bought – from a glib Polish salesman - the latest edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The bulky leather-bound volumes – all 28 of them – arrived shortly afterwards in the back of a van. They could hardly fit in our small Melbourne flat, but I was in seventh heaven. The very mass of my purchase appeared sufficient to ram through the wall of the information hunger I had been experiencing all my life in the Soviet Union, where even general knowledge publications like encyclopaedias, directories and dictionaries were heavily politicised and strictly censored.
I recall my mother telling me how, in the early 1950s, when Stalin’s henchman Lavrentiy Beria was exposed as a ‘British spy’ and subsequently executed, all subscribers of the multi-volume ‘Great Soviet...