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The definitive and award-winning history of Vladimir Putin's rise to power following the collapse of the Soviet Union, by The Economist's Russia editor. 'Fast-paced and excellently written' New York Times 'A real insiders' story of Russia's post-Soviet "counter-revolution" - an important and timely book.' Anne Applebaum WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE How did a country that embraced freedom over twenty-five years ago end up as an autocratic police state bent once again on confrontation with the West? In this Orwell Prize-winning book, Arkady Ostrovsky reaches back to the darkest days of the Cold War to tell the story of Russia's stealthy and largely unchronicled post-Soviet transformation. Ostrovsky's knowledge of many of the key players allows him to explain the rise of Vladimir Putin and to reveal how he pioneered a new form of demagogic populism. In a new preface he examines Putin's influence on the US election and explores how his methods - weaponizing the media and serving up fake news - came to enter Western politics.
Russia is not unknowable--and its past might offer hints into its future and place in the world, one that reaches beyond crisis and confrontation
A fascinating, bottom-up exploration of contemporary Russian politics that sheds new light on why Putin’s grip on power is more fragile than we think “Putin v. the People wrestles with perhaps the central conundrum of contemporary Russia: the endurance of support for Putin amid deepening disillusionment with the present and pessimism about the future.”—Daniel Beer, The Guardian What do ordinary Russians think of Putin? Who are his supporters? And why might their support now be faltering? Alive with the voices and experiences of ordinary Russians and elites alike, Sam Greene and Graeme Robertson craft a compellingly original account of contemporary Russian politics. Telling the story ...
A Library Journal Best Book of 2015 A NPR Great Read of 2015 The Internet in Russia is either the most efficient totalitarian tool or the device by which totalitarianism will be overthrown. Perhaps both. On the eighth floor of an ordinary-looking building in an otherwise residential district of southwest Moscow, in a room occupied by the Federal Security Service (FSB), is a box the size of a VHS player marked SORM. The Russian government's front line in the battle for the future of the Internet, SORM is the world's most intrusive listening device, monitoring e-mails, Internet usage, Skype, and all social networks. But for every hacker subcontracted by the FSB to interfere with Russia's antag...
Offers an array of documents, short fiction, poems, songs, plays, movie scripts, and folklore to offer a look at the mass culture that was consumed by millions in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1953. This work focuses on the entertainment genres that both shaped and reflected the social, political, and personal values of the regime and the masses.
Vladimir Putin seemed to have come from nowhere when he succeeded the ailing and incompetent Boris Yeltsin as President of Russia in March 2000. It was as if he had taken the Kremlin by stealth - perhaps, it was whispered, using the skills he acquired as a senior agent in the KGB. In fact, Putin's rise to prominence owes more to a combination of canny manoeuvring and blat, the traditional Russian system of cronyism and patronage. PUTIN'S PROGRESS is the first comprehensive exploration in English of Putin's character and offers many insights into his likely legacy, shedding new light on one of the most enigmatic of modern leaders and what it means to live in Putin's Russia.
When Vladimir Putin, an unimportant, low-level KGB operative, was rushed to power by a group of Oligarchs in 1999, he was a man without a history. Within a few brief years, Putin had dismantled Russia's media, wrested control and wealth from the country's burgeoning business class, and decimated the fragile mechanisms of democracy. Virtually every obstacle to his unbridled control was removed and every opposing voice silenced, with political rivals and critics driven into exile or to the grave. Drawing on information and sources no other writer has tapped, Masha Gessen's fearless account charts Putin's rise from the boy who had scrapped his way through post-war Leningrad schoolyards, to the 'faceless' man who manoeuvred his way into absolute - and absolutely corrupt - power.
"Red Star Over Russia is a visual history of the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the death of Stalin. Its urgent, cinema-verite style plunges the reader into the centre of the shattering events that brought hope, chaos, heroism and horror to the citizens of the world's first workers' state. Revolutionary upheaval turns into Civil War and famine; Stalin's Great Terror of the 1930s is followed by the brutal onslaught of Nazi invasion. The story ends with the intrigue surrounding the dictator's gruesome death in 1953." "More than 550 posters, photographs and graphics are reproduced to the highest quality, accompanied by insightful and informative texts. Many of these images are being reproduced here for the first time. Zooming in from the epic to the particular, the author rescues many lost heroes and villains from obscurity, through the work of the most brilliant Soviet designers, artists and photographers of the twentieth century." --Book Jacket.
Based on massive new research, a compelling and surprising account of the twentieth century's closest election The 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon is one of the most frequently described political events of the twentieth century, yet the accounts to date have been remarkably unbalanced. Far more attention is given to Kennedy's side than to Nixon's. The imbalance began with the first book on that election, Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1960—in which (as he later admitted) White deliberately cast Kennedy as the hero and Nixon as the villain—and it has been perpetuated in almost every book since then. Few historians have attempted an unb...
The definitive history of the Cold War and its impact around the world We tend to think of the Cold War as a bounded conflict: a clash of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, born out of the ashes of World War II and coming to a dramatic end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Bancroft Prize-winning scholar Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War must be understood as a global ideological confrontation, with early roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions around the world. In The Cold War, Westad offers a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry and ideological battle transformed every corner of our globe. Fr...