Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics
The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky
BY SIMON SHUSTER. William Morrow, 2024, 384 pp.
Reporting for Time, Shuster began to cover Volodymyr Zelensky shortly before his election as president of Ukraine, in 2019, and therefore had unique access to him when Russia launched its fullscale invasion of the country in 2022. In this illuminating and gripping book, he lauds Zelensky’s amazing bravery and improbable transformation from showman to wartime national leader.
He appreciates Zelensky’s political savvy in delegating military decisions to his generals and focusing on what he can do best: capturing the attention of the public, now on a global scale. Zelensky’s messaging helped Ukraine dominate the news and convince Western leaders to deliver desperately needed military aid to his country. Yet Shuster’s book is not just praise: he also points out Zelensky’s intolerance of political competition. In 2021, the president shut down the TV channels controlled by his formidable Moscow-backed rival Viktor Medvedchuk. A few months into the war, Zelensky grew suspicious that the incredibly popular military commander Valery Zaluzhny was entertaining his own political ambitions. By late 2023, after the book had been written, tensions between Zelensky and Zaluzhny spilled out into the open.
Soviet Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism in Contemporary Russia
BY ELIOT BORENSTEIN. Cornell University Press, 2023, 204 pp.
The trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of past Russian imperial glory, Borenstein writes, have generated in Russia a profound sense of displacement, which has given rise to new forms of identity. Based on his exceptional knowledge of contemporary Russian mass culture, Borenstein offers precise and insightful descriptions of new group identities that have emerged in film, fiction, commercials, and other areas of popular culture; these categories, he believes, are key to understanding contemporary Russian politics and ideology. For example, Russians came up with the term sovok—close to the word “Soviet” but literally meaning “dustpan”—to describe somebody hopelessly stuck in Soviet ways, unable to catch up with modern, global, market-oriented Russians, an “embarrassing yokel” to be ridiculed by more sophisticated compatriots. Unlike the sovok, who is poor, “New Russians” are rich but they, too, are worthy of derision; their obsessive acquisitiveness combined with an utter lack of taste or culture makes them a laughingstock. A more recent term, orc, comes from the loathsome creatures in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Some Russians believe Tolkien conceived the orc as a hateful depiction of Russians. As Russia has grown increasingly unconcerned about pleasing the West, identifying with these ugly orcs has, in some circles, become a matter of perverse pride.
Putinism: Post-Soviet Russian Regime Ideology
BY MIKHAIL SUSLOV. Routledge, 2024, 300 pp.
Contrary to common assertions that President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a Stalinist, fascist, or nonideological state, Suslov argues that the regime boasts a distinct ideology of its own. He traces the development of “Putinism” over the president’s more than 20 years in office by studying the work of Russian scholars, intellectuals, political figures, and think tanks. One of the key elements of Putinism is a peculiar kind of “identitarian” conservatism that emphasizes
the unchanging identity and values of the Russian people through the centuries while dismissing as unimportant the political upheavals and transformations of Russia’s 1,000-year history. Other elements include populism and chronic anti-Westernism, as well as insistence on Russia’s “genuine sovereignty”: its political independence, the uniqueness of its historical experience, and its right to determine its destiny. Although he calls this set of ideas “Putinism,” Suslov emphasizes that it is not “Putin’s ideology” and suggests that these beliefs will likely outlive him and may even appeal to nations outside Russia who feel belittled by and disappointed in the West. Suslov claims that “Putinism” expresses the deep sentiments of many Russians, but his book has too little about ordinary people to illustrate this point.
A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention Into the Russian Civil War
BY ANNA REID. Basic Books, 2024, 400 pp.
Reid writes about the ill-fated intervention of Western countries, primarily France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in Russia following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Western forces joined the White Russians in their civil war against the Bolsheviks. Reid’s lively narrative is based in large part on diaries, memoirs, and letters home written by Western soldiers, many of whom realized the futility of Western interference long before policymakers did. Support for the Whites was hard to portray as a righteous cause because of the Whites’ involvement in horrific Jewish pogroms. Their atrocities, such as the execution of civilians and prisoners, made them hardly different from the Reds.The rural population shared equally bad experiences of the Reds and the Whites, as both sides in the war confiscated the peasants’ livestock and grain.The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky’s talent as a military organizer gradually turned the ragtag collection of volunteer Red militias into a regular conscript army, and by the fall of 1920, the Whites were thoroughly defeated and dislodged from most Russian territory. In their final act, Western interventionists helped evacuate the Whites from Crimea to Constantinople.
The Russia That We Have Lost: PreSoviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse
BY PAVEL KHAZANOV. University of Wisconsin Press, 2023, 208 pp.
Khazanov’s detailed research focuses on the “anti-Soviet discourse on the pre-Soviet past.” Based on the work of the late Soviet thinkers, writers, poets, and filmmakers, he discovers that, as early as the 1950s, following Stalin’s death, Russian cultural elites sought to valorize, “rejoin,” and even identify with imperial Russia.The very regime condemned by Marxist-Leninist ideology appeared to the Russian intelligentsia as a realm of kulturnost (culturedness), decency, and normality. As Khazanov emphasizes, the pre-Soviet past appealed to both liberal and conservative Soviet intellectuals. The author’s attempt to project this pursuit of reconnecting with pre-Soviet
Russia into more recent times is less convincing. Unlike the Soviet state, which continued, until its collapse, to celebrate the overthrow of tsarist Russia, President Vladimir Putin proclaims the 1,000-year history of Russia as a continuum of impeccable greatness with the Soviet victory in World War II as the pinnacle of Russian glory. Besides, in today’s Russia, the empire is embraced as a symbol of formidable force rather than cultural refinement.