The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War by Arkady Ostrovsky, Hardcover

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.

The New York Times - Serge Schmemann

…fast-paced and excellently written…Too often, the story of post-Soviet Russia is presented through a Western prism as a clash of good Westernizers and evil reactionaries, or as a lamentation about what the West could, and should, have done once it "won" the Cold War. Mr. Ostrovsky doesn't waste time on that…His is an insider's story about how the uniquely Russian contest of ideas, myths and invented histories shaped the chaotic search for a new Russia, once Communist rule crumbled…I spent many years as a reporter in Moscow, and yet Mr. Ostrovsky's original and trenchant observations repeatedly had me exclaiming, "Of course, that's how it was!"…Mr. Ostrovsky's account of the progression of invented Russias, political battles and changing realities is never dull or academic. A serious student of theater until he took up journalism, he fills his book with anecdotes, conversations and a delightful cast of Russian characters, all of whom he seems to have known and interviewed at some point…For better or for worse, Mr. Putin has forced the world to reckon with a surly and combative Russia again. Mr. Ostrovsky provides a much needed, dispassionate and eminently readable explanation of how it happened.

Publishers Weekly

04/11/2016
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)

From the Publisher

Anyone who has spent time in Russia over the past 30 years should be deeply grateful for Arkady Ostrovsky’s fast-paced and excellently written book. Too often, the story of post-Soviet Russia is presented through a Western prism as a clash of good Westernizers and evil reactionaries, or as a lamentation about what the West could, and should, have done once it “won” the cold war. Mr. Ostrovsky doesn’t waste time on that. A first class journalist who has spent many years covering Russia for The Financial Times and The Economist, he is also a native of the Soviet Union, with an instinctive understanding of how politics, ideas and daily life really work there…. For better or for worse, Mr. Putin has forced the world to reckon with a surly and combative Russia again. Mr. Ostrovky provides a much needed, dispassionate and eminently readable explanation of how it happened.”
– Serge Schmemann, The New York Times

“A real insiders’ story of Russia’s post–Soviet ’counterrevolution’—an important and timely book.”
—Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag

“This dazzling book flags up the conflicts over ideas, morality, and national destiny in Moscow politics from Gorbachev to Putin—a triumph of narrative skill and historical empathy based on personal experience and rigorous research.”
—Robert Service, author of Comrades! A History of World Communism

“Essential, timely, and always gripping… with the narrative flair of a true chronicler of the mysteries of the Kremlin.”
—Simon Sebag-Montefiore, author of Stalin

“How did Putinism come to pervade the psyche of the nation?… Ostrovsky’s sparkling prose and deep analysis provide a sweeping tour d’horizon of Russia’s malaise.”
– The Wall Street Journal
“Russia has always been a place where intellectuals, propagandists, viziers, and prophets have played a grand role. All the gangster-, KGB-, and oligarch-focused analyses of the country’s recent history have overlooked the men of ideas behind the tumultuous changes. Now comes Arkady Ostrovsky with a gripping intellectual history of the newspaper editors, ideologues, television gurus, and spin doctors who invented post–Soviet Russia.”
—Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

“Ostrovsky is particularly good at hearing the nuances and seeing how identity, ideology and personal experience undermined hopes for democracy and reform.”
–The Washington Post
“A clear-eyed and honest account… informed, insightful and highly readable.”
–The Dallas Morning News

“Arkady Ostrovsky traces the descent from the heady days of 1991 with deep local knowledge, a journalist’s fluent style and sharp eye for detail, and wit. He places much of the blame on those who owned and dominated the media in the fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union.”
—Dominic Lieven, author of The End of Tsarist Russia

“For a decade Arkady Ostrovsky has been the most insightful foreign correspondent in Moscow, and in The Invention of Russia he uses his deep understanding of the country he loves to tell the gripping, tragic story of its recent history. A brilliantly original, illuminating, and essential book.”
—A. D. Miller, Booker short-listed author of Snowdrops

"A focused, bracing look at how the control of the media has helped plot the Russian political trajectory from dictatorship and back again. . . astute, accessible, and illuminating"
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred)

Library Journal

01/01/2017
By analyzing the changing tone and content of newspapers and TV programming, Ostrovsky defines the media's role in shaping post-Soviet Russia rather than reflecting its reality. He describes media control by the government and other power brokers and its effect on public support of the ruling regime. (LJ 4/15/16)

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-03-17
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 and…the 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."

The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War

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