One evening, I went to see Aleksandr Prokhanov, a far-right newspaper editor and novelist, whom I’ve known since the late eighties. In the Soviet period, he was known as the Nightingale of the General Staff, a writer commissioned to ride and chronicle the glories of nuclear subs and strategic bombers and to visit the Cold War battlefields of Kampuchea and Angola. He was a panegyrist of Stalin’s military-industrial state and the achievements of Sovietism. “No one,” he told me, “could describe a nuclear reactor like I could.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse