Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.

If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered - viscerally, emotionally remembered - what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way - which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.

The dominance of former communists and the insufficient discussion of the past in the post-communist world is not coincidental. To put it bluntly, former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past: it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their claims to be carrying out 'reforms,' even when they personally had nothing to do with the past crimes.

We have the same mentality. We just have to get the job done. It's one thing to say and another to do it. [But] that's our job. If we're running the ball, we've got to open up holes. If we're passing the ball, we've got to make sure Bones doesn't get touched.

Our play wasn't acceptable. We were a big part of the reason Bones was getting hit.

He's really good at moving people off the ball.