BETWEEN TWO FIRES

TRUTH, AMBITION AND COMPROMISE IN PUTIN’S RUSSIA

JOSHUA YAFFA

Granta, 368pp, £20

The American journalist Joshua Yaffa has worked in Moscow for the past seven years and is now a correspondent for the New Yorker. Guardian reviewer Oliver Bullough described Yaffa’s book as a ‘rich and detailed examination of how Putinism works, about the compromises required by individuals who want to get ahead, and the capricious nature of the system Putin inherited then moulded in his own image... Perhaps Yaffa’s most striking achievement is that every compromise he describes is completely understandable, yet cumulatively their effect is disastrous. The plural of compromise turns out to be corruption. This is a measured, clever, well-researched and superbly written work.’

Life in Russia has to be lived ‘mezhdu dvukh ogney’ or ‘between two fires’. In other words, explained Roger Boyes in the Times, ‘to give yourself room for personal initiative you have to accept that you’re stuck in the middle of two opposing forces bigger than yourself’. Boyes welcomed

President Putin: no call to dislodge him

Yaffa’s approach of ‘long, unforced interviews with his subjects, which reveal how power is exercised, bent and manipulated in daily life’.

Such subjects include a Chechen human rights activist, a Crimean zookeeper, a Bolshoi ballet director, and the head of Channel One, Konstantin Ernst, who, in Boyes’s judgement, ‘wants to be treated as a sophisticate yet comes over as a crude nihilist’. Yaffa sees in the complicity of such individuals ‘an explanation for why there is no call to dislodge’ Putin. Noting his ‘good eye for colourful detail’, Tony Wood in the Financial Times, found that ‘Yaffa skilfully weaves together perceptive descriptions of flesh-and-blood people with a balanced evocation of the wider political and historical context.’