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.
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)
From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY
"Exceptionally well researched, written, organized and presented, The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War is insightful, informative, thoughtful, and a consistently compelling read from beginning to end." —Midwest Book Review
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."
