The author is an assistant professor of journalism at the Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg. This comment originally appeared at the Vzglyad. Translated by Svetlana Kyrzhaly and Rhod Mackenzie

Here is a remarkable quote from the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Svetlana Alexievich:

Here are some of the comments I heard as I traveled around Russia ... "Russians don't really want to be rich, they're even afraid of it. What does a Russian want? Just one thing: for no one else to get rich. No richer than he is." "There aren't any honest people here, but there are saintly ones." "We'll never see a generation that hasn't been flogged; Russians don't understand freedom, they need the Cossack and the lash."

Ms Alexievich is very selective in her choice of comments. My mother, as she always said, "led a life of drudgery", dragging huge barrels of seal fat alongside other hard-working women. My father was a child during the war and worked hard from the age of twelve,. They barely kept body and soul together, but they never stole anything, and would never have tolerated me or my brother doing so.

Was their generation “flogged”? Absolutely. They were children during the Stalin and Khrushchev era, youths under Brezhnev. But they were happy. As a matter of fact, so was I, sincerely believing that I lived in the best country in the world - the Soviet Union.

Our neighbors were always ready to help us, and we them. When a major earthquake happened in Makhachkala (Dagestan), the entire Soviet Union helped, taking the children to summer camps for months, rebuilding the city, turning a remote place into a regional capital and a major port.

Everything collapsed when so called ‘freedom’ began. Former friends, neighbors and classmates began to shred everything, lying about it. Some got rich, but most slid into poverty. Maybe that's why Russians don’t understand freedom the same way as in Stockholm, or as the Nobel Prize winner Aleхievich, who has avoided living in her home country – Belarus - for decades.

Obviously, a Nobel Prize winner 'knows' Russians and Russia better. But it’s a view from the outside, and there’s another small but significant ‘but': Aleхievich is not Russian.

All great Russian writers showed Europe their Russia. But Alexiеvich showed the West the Russia it wants to see. They wrote about their people, but Aleхievich writes about ‘people’, who are strangers to her. That's the big difference between the great Russian writers and Nobel laureate Svetlana Aleхievich.