Putin's Russia |
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Anna Politkovskaya
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Pages: 296 (Paperback)
ISBN: 1843430509
Pub: Harvill Press
Pub date: 2004-10-14
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 23028
Reader Reviews:
A depressed state (1/1 people found this helpful)
Anna Politkovskaya hates Akaky Putin. Really hates him. She says so in one of the final chapters, speaking as a Muscovite who has no desire to relive the Soviet union of the 70s and 80s.
This is a brave and shocking book. It is basically several chapters listing the ills of Russia under Putin. It is worth noting at this point that a lot of the troubles started under Yeltsin but Putin's inertia or even condoning of the situation has exacerbated the problems greatly.
It starts with the Russian army, committing horrific crimes in Chechnya in the name of counter-terrorism. One chapter deals with the rape and murder of a village girl by a drunken colonel. What makes this story worthy of note is not the crimes, but the fact that the colonel was actually punished for it. It takes a brave and determined prosecutor in Russia to make military crimes stick.
Another chapter deals with individuals and how they fared under the new regime. Those who adapted and learnt how to play the system (i.e. bribe) prospered. A talented scientist who found the state safety net taken away foundered and inevitably turned to drink. A nuclear submarine commander goes unpaid for months on end feeding his family on meager rations. His whole crew walk to work with no money for petrol in the navy town of Kamchatka.
The most outrageous chapter was entitled "How to Misappropriate Property with the Connivance of government". We are not talking paper clips here. We are talking oil and utility companies, taken at will by the mafia with strong-arm tactics and forged documents with genuine shareholders held back at roadblocks by the police in the pay of the oligarchs. Think the Kray twins walking into Canary Wharf and taking control of BP with the help of the Met Police and you're getting half of the picture.
This is not a book about Putin. We do not learn much about him apart from the fact he is ex-KGB and his stance reflects that. Whereas not seen to encourage it, in his country war crimes, corruption and poverty go unchecked. State assets have been divided up amongst the few as the rich get richer. The country outside Moscow seems so be of little interest and the have-nots in the capital and beyond have no voice and no fight in them to voice their anger at their country's betrayal. They know their voices will not be heard.
This is not a cohesive and definitive book on the new Russia or Putin, and so is not a fluent read but what Politkovskaya says has to be taken notice of.
Postscript - On October 7, 2006, Politkovskaya was found shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block in central Moscow
Useful but flawed. (11/31 people found this helpful)
This contains some useful journalism. Some of the reports are searing in their clarity and certainly reflect and enhance my first-hand knowledge of Russia. Unfortunately, the author doesn't know when to omit unnecessary details, at times appears just to have welded together a series of interviews and major events and hasn't organised the book coherently.
In making her points, the author is at times contradictory, presenting unpunished misconduct as evidence of untrammeled corruption and abuse of power and then referring to appropriate sanctions in the end-notes. Worse still, her analysis of the country's situation is superficial, bar-room stuff, her case against Putin himself unproven.
Criminal State (35/39 people found this helpful)
The brave Anna Politkovskaya revealed the reality of Russia today in this sad, sometimes horrifying book. After a brief window period of freedom under Yeltsin, Russia has rapidly become a vast swamp of corruption, oppression and deception under Putin. Anna paid with her life for her courageous opposition to the ruling class.
Politkovskaya tells of the trouble and suffering of ordinary people who are humiliated and exploited by the criminal nomenklatura. For example Nina Levurda, who in trying to establish the truth about her son's death in the Chechen War, became a victim of this system that when not cruel, is completely indifferent to the individual. This and other cases are discussed in the chapter My Country's Army And Its Mothers.
In Russia, people imitate the man at the top, thus Putin is the one who shapes Russian society. It is mainly he who is to blame for the brutality and extremism prevalent in the army and the state apparatus. There are sections dealing with war criminals, brutality against privates in the military, government complicity in crime, the corruption in the judiciary, the struggle to survive in places like Kamchatka, and racism against people with a non-Slavic appearance.
Russia's stability is of a monstrous type, where power means everything, few people hold the law in any regard, bribes keep business and the state running, and a free press has almost disappeared. Putin's bureaucrats have taken corruption to new records, unheard of even under Yeltsin or the Communists. As a lieutenant-colonel who never made it to the rank of colonel, he has the mentality of a Soviet secret policeman. The Yukos affair and the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky demonstrate what a vindictive little man Putin is and how he is steering the country towards fascism.
This process of crushing dissent and stifling freedom has been escalating throughout Putin's first presidential term and shows no sign of abating during the second. The Western press has mostly not showed great interest in this slide to oppression in Russia. It is hard not to write Russia off when confronted by the experiences in this book: the deliberate cruelties, the cold indifference and the manipulation of the media. Mercifully there are still people like Lev Ponomarev who are brave enough to speak out. This disturbing book concludes with explanatory notes containing references.
If you read one book on present day Russia - this is it! (30/36 people found this helpful)
Anna Politkovskaya is a hero for all she has done to carry the torch of humanity and civil rights in present day Russia. She has seen the dark under-belly of Putin's Russia through her terrifying experiences in war-torn Chechnya, as a mediator in the Nord Ost siege and lately by being poisoning at the hands of the Russian Security Services whilst en route to Beslan.
Her writing is superbly erudite as one would expect of someone who has been at the cutting edge of Russian journalism through the cataclysmic collapse of the USSR and the tumultuous ninties. She paints a bleak, but not hopeless, picture of how Putin has exploited the war on terror to roll back Russian democracy, freedom of speech and fundamental civil rights. Russia is being systematically regressed into a quasi-dictatorship and so a new menace is rising on the door step of Europe.
Putin is devestatingly deconstructed to reveal a KGB apparachik whose outlook on the world is shaped through the prism of a repressive, but deeply manipulative, secret police mindset.
This is book is a call to all decent and freedom loving people to look beyond the Russia of popular cariciature and see the true state of a long suffering and manipulated people.
Politkovskaya's is a rare voice in present day Russia and she deserves to be heard.
Superb work - essential reading! (18/24 people found this helpful)
Anna Politkovskaya is a hero for all she has done to carry the torch of humanity and civil rights in present day Russia. She has seen the dark under-belly of Putin's Russia through her terrifying experiences in war-torn Chechnya, as a mediator in the Nord Ost siege and lately by being poisoning at the hands of the Russian Security Services whilst en route to Beslan.
Her writing is superbly erudite as one would expect of someone who has been at the cutting edge of Russian journalism through the cataclysmic collapse of the USSR and the tumultuous ninties. She paints a bleak, but not hopeless, picture of how Putin has exploited the war on terror to roll back Russian democracy, freedom of speech and fundamental civil rights. Russia is being systematically regressed into a quasi-dictatorship and so a new menace is rising on the door step of Europe.
Putin is devestatingly deconstructed to reveal a KGB apparachik whose outlook on the world is shaped through the prism of a repressive, but deeply manipulative, secret police mindset.
This is book is a call to all sane and freedom loving people to look beyond the Russia of popular cariciature and see the true state of a long suffering and manipulated people.
Politkovskaya's is a rare voice in present day Russia and she deserves to be heard.
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