Vladimir Rybakov was born to émigré parents in Paris in 1947, lived in the Soviet Union 1956-1972, including a hitch in the Soviet army, and returned to the West in 1972, since which time he has been a journalist and a novelist with a historical bent. He spent much of the 1980s in Afghanistan, where, among other things, he interviewed Soviet soldiers captured by the Afghans. He spent 1989-1995 in Moscow and presently lives in Bulgaria, where he recently completed a huge historical novel about Genghis Khan. Currently he is preparing a book on how Eastern and Western civilizations developed.