The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia by Angus Roxburgh

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It is probably most appropriate to post this review on the day of the re-inauguration of Vladimir Putin, re-elected as a President of Russian Federation for the third time.

As much as the book is not exactly about Putin, he is still an axis all the events described in the book are pivoting around. The book is a fascinating book in modern history covering last 12 years of developing relations between Russia and the West. It’s a history of failed attempts, misunderstandings, tricks and backstabbing.

I will afford only one quote that may sum up the essence of the narrative (p. 251-252, hard cover edition):

“… the failure of Russia and the West to understand one another and to take one another’s concerns and fears into account. Bush preached and lectured. Putin raged and menaced. America said that Russia must give up its ‘sphere of influence’ in its ‘near abroad’. Russia said that America should stop acting as if it ruled the world. Bush accused Putin of communist-style authoritarianism. Putin accused Bush of Cold War thinking. Both were right.”

If you were thinking whether the Cold War was over, of if it had ever happened, this book is brilliant material to explore the topic from authors first hand account, as well as from the interviews granted by the very participants of the historical events of 1999 to the date.

Extremely highly recommended: The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

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It was April of the 1979 when we, the Urals Polytechnical Institute students, learnt that people started dying from unconfirmed cause in our city of Sverdlovsk. The deaths have not been officially confirmed in the first place, and the following explanation of the pulmonary type anthrax related deaths with tainted meat did not make any sense. Nevertheless the cat was out of the bag, and the youth in their twenties ran to the nearest pharmacy for antibiotics. Penicillin was available over the counter, I administered myself a week course and methodically finished up a bottle of cherry coloured pills.

This is how the opening pages of the book brought me about 30 years back. The accident blamed by most on the leak from the semi-military R&D compound specialized in bio-weapons located amidst residential area, and by some on the biological attack by unknown enemy sets the tone to the little discussed layer of the arm race. While the world seems to be alarmed by the nuclear threat, the author brings together facts making the reader think that at least one big country is busy working out the unbeatable creepy and literally viral weaponry. The author bases investigative part of the book on interviews with former leading Soviet bio-chemists and genetic-engineers who moved to the West, as well as on the results of International commissions having placed visits to supposedly decommissioned bio-facilities in former Soviet republics.

Great deal of the book is concerned with Reagan-Gorbachev relations. The author was a journalist on an assignment to cover the topic at the time, and it’s been covered well. David Hoffman later worked in Russia. This itself makes the book fairly balanced, taking interests of the parties on both sides of the iron curtain into prospective.

If you are interested in US and/or Russia politics, Cold War, arm race, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy is definitely for you. Highly recommended.

Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene

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The book collides two ideas, or concepts, or religions – the Communism and Christianity in a form of an ongoing anecdote. The Catholic priest and the Communist mayor, both fallen out of favour, one of his Superior’s, another one of the electorate – taking it on the road in the same car.

The beauty of the book is that it is framed into a rich background of Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote. The Monsignor takes himself as a descendant of Don Quixote, and the Mayor agrees to be called Sancho. Even their car is named Rocinante after the Quixote’s horse. Of course they bump into all kinds of windmills as they go along.

But most interesting to me are the dialogs where the characters check their ideals against their adversaries. They both reveal some doubts and some intolerance, but some tolerance as well. The case of red wine they carried in the back of their Rocinante could sometimes be a helper, sometimes a topic of discussion and at one occasion a blasphemy.

Whether you prefer hammer and sickle or the cross, you get to enjoy the Monsignor Quixote.

Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age by Matthew Brzezinski

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It is rewarding to be a witness of an exciting era. I missed the very beginning of the space exploration, since I was not born back then yet. But caught up on it in its glory – when every Russian boy wanted to be a cosmonaut. We knew the names of all the spacecraft models, names and faces of all the crew members leaving the Earth and coming back safe. And sometimes not.

And while nowadays Soyuz is the only craft capable of taking man reliably to the space, it was sad to see the news of Russian rocket engineer Boris Chertok death. It felt like the era was closing a chapter. Chertok was buried few days ago in Moscow, but he appears as young Soviet officer on first pages of the Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski.

The book starts in the last days of WWII in Germany with both Soviets and Americans snooping for German technological secrets and equipment. Boris Chertok was searching for the technology of the V-2, rocket that was supposed to be a death menace to Britain after reaching mass production volumes. It ends up with both the USSR and the USA launching their first satellites, effectively giving start to new era of the mutual nuclear threat. But this may be the topic of another Brzezinski’s book.

Everything in between is detailed mix into the world of politics and rocket science on both ends of the space race. It gives you prospective on peoples’ scientific passion, political narcissism and military-industrial concerns. You may learn how Schturmbannfuhrer SS has become a host of the Walt Disney TV show, and how Odessa boy who wanted to fly carried his dream through the labour camp, how country leaders misreading each other signals have come to inadequate solutions.

If you are into rocket science or into politics, or into all of the above, the Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age is your type of book.

Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America by Ann Coulter

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Whether you like Ann Coulter or not, you can’t be bored by what she may say or write. In Demonic Ann Coulter applies the “Crowd Theory” of Le Bon to the Democratic Party of the USA and to liberals in general.

I am sorry to say that many assertions in the book don’t hold water. For example, Ms. Coulter describes German Nazi movement as one of “mob”, but separately states that Christians don’t act like “mob”. In fact, prior to the Second World War most of German citizens identified themselves as Christians. That included Adolf Hitler. Christians behaved like mob at some other occasions too – Children’s Crusade, or Medieval Inquisition to be examples.

In the last chapter preceding the closing slogan “Overreact!” (although slogans, as we learned, is a mob thing), Ms. Coulter brings in events from Russian history of the last Century, and she gets it all wrong: the dates, the facts, and of course, the conclusion. The “Bloody Sunday” of January 1905 was not mob smashing by the Czar, but rather knee-jerk reaction of the Imperial Guard, who used fire again peaceful demonstrators, which was followed by the peasant revolts across the country, mutiny in Russian Navy while the country was at war with Japan, and finally ended with First-ever Russian Constitution and opening of the State Duma, first Russian Parliament. Revolution of 1910 is Ms. Coulter’s fantasy, it has never happened.

The book is laced with childish personal attacks that defeat the purpose of the book and are nothing but part of the mob arsenal. Aren’t they? Ms. Coulter calls film producer Michael Moore “fat disgusting pig” and suggests that Jane Fonda’s main accomplishment would be her silicon implants. I personally prefer the movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Still I think the lesson on French Revolution is absolutely hilarious, and a must read. Actually, I may suggest Ms. Coulter to drop what she is doing and to get into business of writing history text books. Students need this kind of reading – entertaining, witty, forcing full attention and educational. All in one bottle. Somebody would have to check facts though.

Again, whether you like Ann Coulter or not, I would highly recommend Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America. Great read!

We The Living by Ayn Rand

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Every civil war is different in terms of its place, its timing, the number of people involved. What is the same, it’s always about people hurting people, about one forcing their will on others, about lost hopes, lost lives, lost generations.

When I was reading We The Living I unintentionally compared it to Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. Both books tell personal stories, one of a woman and another one of a man, happening during Russian Civil War of the Twentieth Century. Without comparing literature merits, one can say the books appeal to the human being inside the reader.

We The Living claims its own place among Western readers. As for Russians, while many books mostly unknown inside iron curtain had become public and popular in 1990′s, it stayed in the shadow until lately. It was translated and published in Russian, and I suggest it reads better in Russian, Ayn Rand’s native language.

Highly recommended, We the Living (75th Anniversary Deluxe Edition).

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary

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The book, written as a diary during last few weeks of the Second World War, is attributed by many to Marta Hiller (1911 – 2001). As many who had read the book rightfully point out, the book is about the Soviet Army raping female civilians in fallen Berlin of 1945. It is, but it is not.

The book is about “swindlers acting like kings, sending the fools off to fight with the flags and lies.” It is about the men who go to war and leave their women behind. And about women becoming a trophy of the winning army.

It’s about patriotism, about the person who decided to share her fate with that of her people and leaving with the consequences of the decision. It’s about live, the means of survival one person can adjust to.

Highly recommended – A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary

The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II by Andrew Nagorski

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Bad news first: the book does not have the operational details of the Battle of Moscow in pure military terms.

Great news: the book has a lot more.

Mr. Nagorski makes a point that the Battle was not finished in January 1942, but continued until 1943 pulling resources from both parties involved. Therefore the book covers events and characters involved in much broader terms and at various levels of scrutiny. The author compares biographies of Hitler and Stalin, looking for the similarities, and analyzing the psychology of the war as a collision of characters.

The author compares strategic decisions, the good ones, the bad ones and obvious blunders made by both sides, and how they led to the final tall in terms of the war results and massive human losses of both nations. He analyzes records left by the historians and memoirs of the participants on both sides to build big picture of what had happened. But he also offers anecdotal stories of Russian and German regular folks like me and you who found themselves in the mutual slaughter. There are stories of young communists trained to be spies, and of a general who committed suicide to avoid capture, excerpts from the letters German soldiers sent home to their Hausfraus, and a story of the group of captured German soldiers lined up by the side of the road in their summer uniform in the midst of Cruel Russian winter, falling on the ground one by one and literally freezing to death.

The author takes on ugly sides of war (as if there was a nice side), omitted in the Soviets history textbooks. He tells the story of Muscovites fleeing the Capital in panic and looting, the stories of the Soviet troops set behind the front line of their compatriots and shooting those trying to retreat.

Great book, highly recommended.

Buy The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II from Amazon.

Back in the USSR by Artemy Troitsky

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XXI Century, the history exam.
Q: “Who was Leonid Brezhnev?”
A: “A politician during the era of Alla Pugacheva.”

In the same sense as the joke meant to juxtapose the grandiose figure of the General Secretary of the 1970’s against the pop-star admired by the regular Russian folks, it may be related to Artemy Troitsky, the author of the Back in the USSR, The True Story of Rock in Russia. Anyone who had grown up in Brezhnev’s Russia, even with a little interest to the Western pop-music, could not have missed the articles squeezed into the back pages of the Soviet official youth magazines and papers. Bits and pieces of the pop-music news, short reviews of the bands and artists from the parallel universe had tremendous effect on us, the readers in our teen years. In fact I asked my parents to pay for a yearlong subscription to one of these magazines only to be able to catch up on what was going on in the music world beyond iron curtain.

Now, after receiving the Back in the USSR as a gift, first of all I looked at the year of publishing. 1989. Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still legitimate and in power. Soviet people were enjoying first free National election. Michail Gorbachov was about to become first Soviet President.

The book therefore covered the very beginning of what was then the Soviet Rock Music. Troitsky travelled extensively between Moscow, Leningrad, Tallin and Riga becoming not only the observer, but the active participant of the rock music movement back in 80′s. And he tells the stories of the first “festivals” and “contests”, anecdots about the modern icons who were making first steps in music back then.

First part of the book covers young mocsovite’s trends in fashion, music and dance, as a preamble to what had happened next. But the rest is a compressed history of the very start of the Russian pop-scene, embracing the names of Pugacheva, Makarevich, Grbenschikov, Tsoy and Naumenko.

I don’t know what happened between Makarevich (Mashina Vremeni) and Artemy Troitsky (the author), but everything in regards to the former seems a bit biased. Although it does not seem to take away too much from the big picture.

And although “Sverdlovsky Rock” had started as a stand alone phonomenon before 1989, Troitsky omits the topic almost entirely, except for the mentioning of the band named Sonans and led by Alexander Pantykin.

Other than that the book is great coverage of the few years of promising time, when musicians played mostly for fun and made the best of it. Troitsky has since become a guru and respected music critic, moving towards front pages and on TV.

Would I recommend the book? Definitely yes.

Amazon: Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia

Murdered by Polonium

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As death makes good stories, amusing the readers and inspiring the writers, the real life events make them bestsellers. Out of the series of books on the mysterious death of the former KGB officer (although as some are saying there is no such thing as “former” KGB officer), I have recently finished the two: The Litvinenko File: The Life and Death of a Russian Spy by Martin Sixsmith and The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder by Alan S. Cowell.

Both books are amazing examples of the thorough investigation journalism. Yet more amazing is that most of the characters of the drama are still well and living in this world, and both authors had managed to reach to the most of them. I would not want to score one book against the other, although the latter in my opinion sets more fundamental geo-political background for the action and reaches to the more versatile group of witnesses, if not the accomplices. Both books compliment each other.

Rest in peace, Alexander Litvinenko.

Available at Amazon: The Litvinenko File: The Life and Death of a Russian Spy and The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder.