The invention of Russia : from Gorbachev's freedom to Putin's war

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Ostrovsky, Arkady, 1971-

Physical Description:

374 pages ; 24 cm.

Summary:

The end of communism and breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of euphoria around the world, but Russia today is violently anti-American and dangerously nationalistic. So how did we go from the promise of those heady days to the autocratic police state of Putin's new Russia? The Invention of Russia is a breathtakingly ambitious book that reaches back to the darkest days of the cold war to tell the story of the fight for the soul of a nation. With the deep insight only possible of a native son, Ostrovsky introduces us to the propagandists, oligarchs, and fixers who have set Russia's course since the collapse of the Soviet Union, inventing a new and more ominous identity for a country where ideas are all too often wielded like a cudgel.

Contents:

I: In The Beginning Was The Word -- 1. Fathers and Sons -- 2. New Beginning or Dead End -- 3. "We Suffered a Victory" -- 4. Kommersant or the Birth of Russian Capitalism -- 5. Loss -- II: "Image Is Everything" -- 6. Normal Television in Abnormal Circumstances -- 7. The Oligarchs' War -- 8. Lights, Camera, Putin -- 9. Remote Control -- 10. Aerial Combat.

Subject Term:

Post-communism -- Russia (Federation) -- History.

Nationalism -- Russia (Federation) -- History.

Capitalism -- Social aspects -- Russia (Federation) -- History.

Publication Info:

New York, New York : Viking, [2016]

Subject:

Post-communism -- Russia (Federation) -- History.

Nationalism -- Russia (Federation) -- History.

Capitalism -- Social aspects -- Russia (Federation) -- History.

Russia (Federation) -- Politics and government -- 1991-

Russia (Federation) -- History -- 1991-

Russia (Federation) -- Foreign relations -- Western countries.

Russia (Federation) -- Social conditions -- 1991-

Western countries -- Foreign relations -- Russia (Federation).

Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1952-

Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeevich, 1931-2022

Putin, Wladimir Wladimirowitsch, 1952-

Putin, Volodymyr, 1952-

Pujing, 1952-

Poutine, Vladimir Vladimirovitch, 1952-

Путин, Владимир Владимирович, 1952-

Putinas, Vladimiras, 1952-

Putin, V. V. (Vladimir Vladimirovich), 1952-

Poetin, Vladimir Vladimirovitsj, 1952-

Gorbačov, Michail, 1931-2022

Gorbatschow, Michail, 1931-2022

Gorbachev, M. S. (Mikhail Sergeevich), 1931-2022

Gorbachov, Mikhail, 1931-2022

Gorbachov, M. S., 1931-2022

Gorbatchev, Mikhaïl, 1931-2022

Gorbaciov, Michail Sergeevic, 1931-2022

Gorbachev, Mijaíl, 1931-2022

Ko-erh-pa-chʻiao-fu, 1931-2022

Ghūrbātshūf, 1931-2022

Gorbatsjov, Michail, 1931-2022

Gorbaczow, Michaił, 1931-2022

Jūrbātshūf, Mīkhāʼīl, 1931-2022

Gorbaciov, Mikhail Sergejevic, 1931-2022

Gorubachofu, Mihairu, 1931-2022

Gorbachov, Mijail S., 1931-2022

Kō̜kbāsep, Mikhāʻīn, 1931-2022

Gkormpatsoph, M., 1931-2022

Gorbačëv, Michail, 1931-2022

Gorbacsov, Mihail, 1931-2022

Ko-pa-chʻi-fu, M., 1931-2022

Gorbats'ov, Mikhaʼel, 1931-2022

Gorbaciov, Mihail, 1931-2022

Gorbachov, Michael, 1931-2022

Gorbatxov, Mikhaïl Serguèievitx, 1931-2022

Gorbatšov, Mihail, 1931-2022

Горбачев, Михаил Сергеевич, 1931-2022

גורבצ׳ב, מיכאל סרגייביץ׳, 1931־2022

גורבצ׳וב

戈爾巴喬夫, 1931-2022

Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeevich, 1931-

Postcommunism

Consciousness, National

Identity, National

National consciousness

National identity

Market economy

Russia (Federation) -- Foreign relations -- 1991-

Occident

West (Western countries)

Western nations

Western world

SAILS ISBN:

9780399564161

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Fairhaven-Millicent	947 OST 2016	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Mansfield Public Library	947.086 O	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE
WINNER OF THE CORNELIUS RYAN AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE
FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

"Fast-paced and excellently written...much needed, dispassionate and eminently readable." -- New York Times

"Filled with sparkling prose and deep analysis." - The Wall Street Journal

The breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of optimism around the world, but Russia today is actively involved in subversive information warfare, manipulating the media to destabilize its enemies. How did a country that embraced freedom and market reform 25 years ago end up as an autocratic police state bent once again on confrontation with America? A winner of the Orwell Prize, The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the cold war to tell the story of Russia's stealthy and largely unchronicled counter revolution.

A highly regarded Moscow correspondent for the Economist, Arkady Ostrovsky comes to this story both as a participant and a foreign correspondent. His knowledge of many of the key players allows him to explain the phenomenon of Valdimir Putin - his rise and astonishing longevity, his use of hybrid warfare and the alarming crescendo of his military interventions. One of Putin's first acts was to reverse Gorbachev's decision to end media censorship and Ostrovsky argues that the Russian media has done more to shape the fate of the country than its politicians. Putin pioneered a new form of demagogic populism --oblivious to facts and aggressively nationalistic - that has now been embraced by Donald Trump.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this insider's account of the Soviet Union's collapse and its reemergence as new Russia, Ostrovsky, a Russian-born journalist, recounts how Russian politics, business, and media have melded into a powerful, dangerous myth-making apparatus unlike anything in the West. The primary figures here are Russia's elite, the ideologues and editors whom Ostrovsky interviewed mostly between 2004 and 2014. He spends the book's first half exploring perestroika and the subsequent stumbles into a market economy during the early 1990s. He also ably portrays the media moguls and unscrupulous TV personalities who brought first Boris Yeltsin and then Vladimir Putin to power. Ostrovsky's reporting is heavy on analysis and reliant on secondhand accounts. He argues that Russia has a centuries-old habit of confusing fact and myth, and he probes the souls of propagandists as they bid farewell to Communism while their irreverent progeny start up capitalist tabloids. Viewed through the Russian lens, the events of recent years look startlingly different. While the media flexed muscle under Yeltsin, Putin won the long game. During coverage of the annexation of Crimea, for instance, the media invented a pro-Russian narrative "using fake footage, doctoring quotes, and using actors." Ostrovsky's dizzying tale takes its own myth-like form, and Western readers will quickly learn to take everything in this book with a grain of salt. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

A focused, bracing look at how the control of the media has helped plot the Russian political trajectory from dictatorship and back again. A Soviet-born insider who hailed the opening up of Russia by Mikhail Gorbachev 30 years ago as creating an "exhilarating new sense of possibility," Ostrovsky, former Moscow bureau chief at the Economist, is chagrined by the nostalgic return to Soviet ways by the current leadership of Vladimir Putin. The "dismantling of lies" first spelled out in Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech denouncing Stalin's crimes opened a rift between the generation of old-school Communists and those of the shestidesiatniki, "the men of the 1960s," contemporaries of Gorbachev who wanted "to restore social justice and clear the names of their fathers." While Gorbachev introduced perestroika as a "new beginning" to fix the broken Soviet Union in 1986, 30 years to the day after Khrushchev's speech, he "dithered" in terms of moving to a free market and liberalizing state-controlled prices, creating "an unbridgeable divide between the minority of the liberal intelligentsia andthe gray and menacing mass of Soviet-bred men and women" known as Homo soveticus. Ostrovsky effectively demonstrates this divide in the father-son dichotomy of reformer journalist Yegor Yakovlev, "the mouthpiece of Gorbachev's perestroika," brought up in the era of "socialism with a human face," and his son Vladimir Yakovlev, the founding editor of the new capitalist newspaper, Kommersant, started in 1990. Each of these organs defined the tone of the times, along with NTV, a new TV channel started in 1993 by media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky, which presented Western-style "normal" ("uncensored") news; the station eventually got into hot water after criticizing Putin's handling of the Chechnya war and was shut down. From oligarchs bred in Boris Yeltin's administration to the lethal growth of the bureaucrat-entrepreneur under Putin, the grasp of the message became key to controlling the state. An astute, accessible, illuminating navigation of the idea that the "only consistent feature in Russia's history is its unpredictability." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

The spooky Putin and his shenanigans make headlines almost daily, but how did he get there, and why? Russian-born Ostrovky's intensely researched and highly readable précis of the new Russia takes readers from Gorbachev, and his perestroika and glasnost, through current-day Putin, and his state-run media and billionaire cronies. The West appears, almost always, as a villain to be avoided; even so, brave former Soviets and present-day Russians attempt to spell out, often literally, what is really happening in their world. Ostrovsky gives a hearty nod to journalists, artists, and others who have done their best to make the truth available, and his book is filled with quotes from speeches, books, and newspapers, information not always published in the former USSR or Russia today. Russians are misled and mistreated, while billions are spent on glitz (e.g., the Winter Olympics) and projects (e.g., agriculture) that produce nothing. A troubling and superbly documented book that will make readers wonder what comes next for Russia and its propagandists. For another disturbing and fascinating look at contemporary Russia, see Marc Bennetts' Kicking the Kremlin (2014).--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2016 Booklist

Prologue: A Silent Procession	p. 1
I In the Beginning Was the Word
1 Fathers and Sons	p. 11
2 New Beginning or Dead End	p. 54
3 "We Suffered a Victory"	p. 91
4 Kommersant or the Birth of Russian Capitalism	p. 120
5 Loss	p. 141
II "Image is Everything"
6 Normal Television in Abnormal Circumstances	p. 167
7 The Oligarchs' War	p. 205
8 Lights, Camera, Putin	p. 228
9 Remote Control	p. 263
10 Aerial Combat	p. 304
Acknowledgments	p. 329
Dramatis Personae	p. 335
Notes	p. 337
Select Bibliography	p. 351
Index	p. 357

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Summary

Summary

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

Table of Contents