RUSSIANS: THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE POWER
Gregory Feifer
Grand Central Publishing; 384 pages; $28
The extravagant, sometimes kitschy opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics on February 7 gave us a cleaned-up, World's Fair version of Russian history, celebrating the glories of its scientific and artistic achievements while airbrushing the horrors of its Stalinist past. At the same time, the ceremony was devised to try to make the world forget the dark side of President Vladimir V Putin's Russia - its smothering of dissent, its oppressive anti-gay laws - and to promote an image of the country as a modernising great power ascendant on the world stage.
From the journalist Gregory Feifer's lively new book, Russians: The People Behind the Power, it is clear that the oversize ceremony was very much in keeping with a long-standing Russian penchant for the big and bold and italicised, and that the much-talked-about problems with the games (monumental cost overruns, unfinished hotel rooms, spring temperatures inhospitable to snowboarding and skiing) simply underscore pervasive troubles with corruption and Kremlin power politics in the Russia of today.
With Russians, Mr Feifer gives us a revealing, opinionated primer on the country where his mother grew up under Communism and where he served as Moscow correspondent for National Public Radio. It is a collagelike book, consisting of historical asides, family reminiscences, interviews with public figures and ordinary people, political assessments and sharp snapshots of the country across its nine time zones, from the gaudy Moscow restaurants and clubs that cater to the showboating new rich to the distant wastelands of Siberia, where cold and poverty still define daily life.
Russians does not have the depth of reporting and analysis that distinguished David Remnick's books on the collapse of the Soviet empire and the birth of a new Russia (Lenin's Tomb, Resurrection) and it retraces a lot of the same ground covered by Ben Judah's recent book, Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin. It also draws heavily on the thinking of scholars like Edward Keenan and Richard Pipes. What Mr Feifer does very well is give the lay reader a spirited introduction to this complex country and its torturous past.
There are sobering sections about Stalin's terror and the gulags, and the social and psychological burdens and legacies of living in the Soviet Union - and more speculative passages about the ways the hardships of Russian history have shaped a cynical, even fatalistic attitude towards life. Mr Feifer addresses current topics like Mr Putin's cult of personality, as well as age-old debates about the relationship between Russia and the West; the meaning of Russians' passion for alcohol (the subject of the new book Vodka Politics, by Mark Lawrence Schrad); and the country's historical susceptibility to authoritarian rule, attributed by some to its geographic vastness, by others to its backwardness.
In Mr Feifer's view, Mr Putin has gone out of his way to depict the 1990s as "a period of chaos and criminality," in order to play upon "people's traditional anxieties" about disintegration and anarchy and to appeal to their nostalgia for the Soviet Union's superpower status. Mr Putin's war against Chechen rebels helped spur his rise to power, Mr Feifer observes, and he would use the threat of terrorism as "a main justification for his attack on his country's democratic institutions".
Aided by the boon of soaring oil prices, Mr Putin also took decisive steps to restore the Kremlin's administrative control of the country once he took office. "He immediately set about replacing elected governors with presidential appointments," Mr Feifer writes, "instituting controls over the national media and removing his rivals from government - and he continues tinkering with electoral and other laws to maintain his control over the country and its officialdom." As Mr Feifer sees it, Mr Putin's "innovation wasn't cleaning up Russia's various Mafias but instilling a kind of order by making the Kremlin the main Mafia".
The Sochi Olympics - a Soviet-size megaproject, costing north of $50 billion, some four times the initial estimate - have become a symbol of Mr Putin's "crony capitalism", enriching his business associates with huge sums of money, much of it from taxpayer funds. "Companies belonging to one man alone, Putin's childhood friend and former judo sparring partner Arkady Rotenberg," Mr Feifer contends, "earned more than seven billion dollars, more than the entire budget for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics."
What does Mr Feifer see for Russia in the near future? He writes that "like most regimes not based on genuine popular support in an era of open access to information, Putin's is inherently unstable," but says he is pessimistic about any rapid return to the path of real democracy that once seemed possible in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse - even were Mr Putin to decide not to run for another term in 2018.
Mr Feifer argues that it will be difficult to overhaul the institutions like the legal system, which Mr Putin's "crony establishment" has done so much to undermine, and that many in the so-called middle class (half of which, the book says, consists of government officials) may have too much invested in the status quo to embrace genuine reform.
"Polls indicate," Mr Feifer writes, "that rather than a Western form of government, many of the disgruntled probably still want a strongman in the Kremlin - just a better one."
©2014 The New York Times News Service
Gregory Feifer
Grand Central Publishing; 384 pages; $28
The extravagant, sometimes kitschy opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics on February 7 gave us a cleaned-up, World's Fair version of Russian history, celebrating the glories of its scientific and artistic achievements while airbrushing the horrors of its Stalinist past. At the same time, the ceremony was devised to try to make the world forget the dark side of President Vladimir V Putin's Russia - its smothering of dissent, its oppressive anti-gay laws - and to promote an image of the country as a modernising great power ascendant on the world stage.
From the journalist Gregory Feifer's lively new book, Russians: The People Behind the Power, it is clear that the oversize ceremony was very much in keeping with a long-standing Russian penchant for the big and bold and italicised, and that the much-talked-about problems with the games (monumental cost overruns, unfinished hotel rooms, spring temperatures inhospitable to snowboarding and skiing) simply underscore pervasive troubles with corruption and Kremlin power politics in the Russia of today.
With Russians, Mr Feifer gives us a revealing, opinionated primer on the country where his mother grew up under Communism and where he served as Moscow correspondent for National Public Radio. It is a collagelike book, consisting of historical asides, family reminiscences, interviews with public figures and ordinary people, political assessments and sharp snapshots of the country across its nine time zones, from the gaudy Moscow restaurants and clubs that cater to the showboating new rich to the distant wastelands of Siberia, where cold and poverty still define daily life.
Russians does not have the depth of reporting and analysis that distinguished David Remnick's books on the collapse of the Soviet empire and the birth of a new Russia (Lenin's Tomb, Resurrection) and it retraces a lot of the same ground covered by Ben Judah's recent book, Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin. It also draws heavily on the thinking of scholars like Edward Keenan and Richard Pipes. What Mr Feifer does very well is give the lay reader a spirited introduction to this complex country and its torturous past.
There are sobering sections about Stalin's terror and the gulags, and the social and psychological burdens and legacies of living in the Soviet Union - and more speculative passages about the ways the hardships of Russian history have shaped a cynical, even fatalistic attitude towards life. Mr Feifer addresses current topics like Mr Putin's cult of personality, as well as age-old debates about the relationship between Russia and the West; the meaning of Russians' passion for alcohol (the subject of the new book Vodka Politics, by Mark Lawrence Schrad); and the country's historical susceptibility to authoritarian rule, attributed by some to its geographic vastness, by others to its backwardness.
In Mr Feifer's view, Mr Putin has gone out of his way to depict the 1990s as "a period of chaos and criminality," in order to play upon "people's traditional anxieties" about disintegration and anarchy and to appeal to their nostalgia for the Soviet Union's superpower status. Mr Putin's war against Chechen rebels helped spur his rise to power, Mr Feifer observes, and he would use the threat of terrorism as "a main justification for his attack on his country's democratic institutions".
Aided by the boon of soaring oil prices, Mr Putin also took decisive steps to restore the Kremlin's administrative control of the country once he took office. "He immediately set about replacing elected governors with presidential appointments," Mr Feifer writes, "instituting controls over the national media and removing his rivals from government - and he continues tinkering with electoral and other laws to maintain his control over the country and its officialdom." As Mr Feifer sees it, Mr Putin's "innovation wasn't cleaning up Russia's various Mafias but instilling a kind of order by making the Kremlin the main Mafia".
The Sochi Olympics - a Soviet-size megaproject, costing north of $50 billion, some four times the initial estimate - have become a symbol of Mr Putin's "crony capitalism", enriching his business associates with huge sums of money, much of it from taxpayer funds. "Companies belonging to one man alone, Putin's childhood friend and former judo sparring partner Arkady Rotenberg," Mr Feifer contends, "earned more than seven billion dollars, more than the entire budget for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics."
What does Mr Feifer see for Russia in the near future? He writes that "like most regimes not based on genuine popular support in an era of open access to information, Putin's is inherently unstable," but says he is pessimistic about any rapid return to the path of real democracy that once seemed possible in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse - even were Mr Putin to decide not to run for another term in 2018.
Mr Feifer argues that it will be difficult to overhaul the institutions like the legal system, which Mr Putin's "crony establishment" has done so much to undermine, and that many in the so-called middle class (half of which, the book says, consists of government officials) may have too much invested in the status quo to embrace genuine reform.
"Polls indicate," Mr Feifer writes, "that rather than a Western form of government, many of the disgruntled probably still want a strongman in the Kremlin - just a better one."
©2014 The New York Times News Service