Умом Россию не понять - the mind cannot understand Russia

I stumbled upon an extract from this book in a random magazine carelessly left by one of my flat-mates on a kitchen table. I started reading to entertain myself during a solitary breakfast. The breakfast was long finished, I reached the last line, and I was impatient to read more. The little I have seen of the last book by the brilliant Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya "A Russian Diary", so ironically murdered by the system she was exposing, is now stuck in my mind. The few paragraphs I got to read intrigued and disturbed me, they left me feeling sad and unsatisfied.

I've found a few reviews of this book on the internet, and each of them has added to my impatience to get the book.

BBC Radio 4: Book of the week - April 9-13, 2007
"Anna Politkovskaya’s last book A Russian Diary is a devastating account of life as it is lived in contemporary Russia. Her mounting horror at the chaos and corruption she sees around her is captured in the diary entries which are shocking, wry and full of despair that nobody seems to acknowledge what’s happening."

The Guardian's book of the week: Chronicle of a death foretold - April 7, 2007
"But the Chechen fighter who is driving her instead starts to bare his soul, and she realises she will not die because he wants the world to hear his story. "I understood that, but sat there crying from fear and loathing. 'Don't cry,' the fighter from Zakan-Yurt finally said to me. 'You are strong.'"

InTheNews book review: A Russian Diary by Anna Politkovskaya - March 29, 2007
"A Russian Diary, even without the grace of hindsight, is a singularly heartbreaking experience."
"And the further you read into the book, despite the thought's revulsion, Politkovskaya's death becomes painfully more inevitable..."

Although I see most of the world politics in somewhat academic light, meticulously separating facts from sentiments, I've come to a conclusion that the politics of Russia can be only viewed with a healthy dose of conspiracy. But setting aside the efforts to be objective, I have to admit that I do care about what is going on in Russia. It is not because Russia is our biggest and the least predictable neighbour - it is because I was born in that country, I grew up in that environment and I was educated in that system. I would have expected to understand Russia, but I don't...