Review by 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
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book 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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
