Learning to Live Free

Learning to Live Free is the history of late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia told through the lives of the two leading Russian intellectuals, Yuri Senokosov and his wife Lena Ne- mirovskaya, who founded the most ambitious project in the sphere of civic education, the Moscow School of Political Studies, currently known as the School of Civic Education. In 2014, the Putin regime declared the School a «foreign agent.»

The book is about a Moscow girl, who came from a family of a high-ranking govern- ment official purged by the Stalin regime, and a boy from a remote Russian province, who grew up alongside exiled Chechens and German POWs. Both were able to overcome the fear of the Stalin era and the censorship of the late Soviet time and become free in an unfree country. They were destined to meet some of the best people of their time, including the most prominent philosopher of the Soviet period, Merab Mamardashvili, and the ecumeni- cal priest Father Alexander Men, both of whom influenced their worldview.

Having become free, Senokosov and Nemirovskaya started teaching freedom to others at the end of the Soviet era, making civic education their mission. Hundreds of their stu- dents are still assimilating civic values and are prepared to build civil society, even under authoritarian conditions.