Reading Up On Russia
Photograph by Spencer Platt
To get a proper perspective on the present political state of the world, it is important to get informed about the political situation in Russia. Hugely important. Without it it is impossible to understand what is going on in Europe and the United States today.
Below are some of the books that have shaped my perspective. We have a lot of time for reading now, so maybe the list inspires you.
You will notice that in the book listings below I have avoided linking to Amazon. I would like to discourage all of you to shop with Amazon. Please order your books from a local bookseller instead. The way Amazon owner Jeff Bezos conducts his business and maltreats his employees is a disgrace. Companies like Amazon should be turned into public services like the mail service and their employees should be made public servants with living wages, decent working conditions, and workers’ rights to unionize. And Bezos’ indecent wealth should be taxed out of existence. (End of rant.)
Brave People
Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in Moscow on October 7, 2006.
Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with polonium-210 in London on November 1, 2006, died on November 23.
Sergei Magnitsky, died on 16 November 2009 in Matrosskaya Tishina Prison, Moscow, after he was severely beaten up.
Boris Nemtsov, murdered on a bridge near the Kremlin in Moscow, 27 February 2015.
Here is a Wikipedia list of journalists killed in Russia.
Important Books
Alexandr Solshenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago. This has nothing to do with the present crisis. This book appeared in the West in 1974, and I recall that, at the time, many of my leftwing fellow students, who still believed in communism, did not want to read it. It would have shattered their political worldview, but for them, Solshenitzyn, who was an orthodox Christian, was a reactionary and not worth paying attention to. The book was banned in Russia until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We could read it, but many of us didn’t. This is a reminder that the freedom of information that we have also imposes a duty on us: the duty to inform ourselves. The book describes the chilling system of political oppression that started with Lenin’s decrees shortly after the October Revolution. Soltshenitzyn stresses the role of ideology as a justification for evil.
Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, Blowing Up Russia - Terror from Within (first came out in a special edition of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Moscow in August 2001). If you read this book you will maybe understand better why Litvinenko had to die. Litvinenko, who was a high-ranking officer of the FSB (the successor of the more well-known KGB), specialized in countering organized crime. He was the first to call Russia a mafia state. In November 1998, Litvinenko and several other FSB officers gave a press conference in Moscow where they publicly accused their superiors of ordering the assassination of business tycoon and oligarch Boris Berezovski. This was an incredibly brave thing to do. Blowing Up Russia describes how the successor of the KGB fabricated terrorist attacks and launched the second Chechen war.
Fun fact: a Goodreads reviewer who calls himself Vladimir Putain rated the book with just one star. His comment: “Humbug. There is no vote fraud in Russia, no crime, and certainly not any corruption.”
Boris Berezovski escaped assassination in Russia, fled the country, and moved to the United Kingdom in 2000. He helped Litvinenko escape to the United Kingdom too. Berezovski was found dead at his home in March 2013 under mysterious circumstances.Luke Harding, A Very Expensive Poison - The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War With the West, 2016. The title says all.
Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia describes Russia under Vladimir Putin and was published after the author’s death. A more personal book is Is Journalism Worth Dying For? - Final Dispatches.
Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face - The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Gessen is a brilliant writer, born in Russia and now living in the United States. Her (or their? - Masha Gessen identifies as non-binary) pieces regularly appear in The New Yorker, where I discovered her (them?).
Greg Olear, Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia, 2018. A short introduction to the connections between Trump and Russia, with a clear explanation of why it is very plausible that Trump is a puppet of Putin. Greg Olear is a novelist turned investigative reporter and activist. I admire his writing style and the fact that he is devoting his time to the important task of informing the American public about current affairs in the US. It is a disgrace that influential newspapers such as the New York Times have covered Donald Trump as an ordinary politician and not as the puppet of the mafia (first Italian, then Russian) that he has been throughout his career. As Olear makes clear, all the information was there for grabs and had been around all the time, in the period leading up to the fateful 2016 election. They fucking did not report on it.
Bill Browder, Red Notice - A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice. This is the story of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian tax accountant who refused to back off when investigating a 230 million dollar tax fraud involving Russian tax officials. He was falsely accused of fraud himself, was refused medical treatment while in prison and died after almost a year in detention, allegedly beaten to death. His friend Bill Browder brought the case to the American Senate, which resulted in the Magnitsky Act, the bill signed into law by Barack Obama in 2012 that authorizes the US government to sanction those who it sees as human rights offenders, freeze their assets, and ban them from entering the US. This is the law that Putin desperately wants to get rid of because it hurts him and his Russian oligarchs and mobsters.
Everything in this book is true and will surely offend some very powerful and dangerous people. In order to protect the innocent, some names and locations have been changed. (Author’s Note)
Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Destroy Democracy - How Putin and His Spies are Undermining America and Dismantling the West, 2018. This book describes the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States as the foreign intelligence operation that it was. Malcolm Lance is a career US intelligence officer who knows his stuff and who can write. Who needs spy novels if you can also read books like this? Read it and be scared.
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom - Russia, Europe, America, 2018. Timothy Snyder is a professor of contemporary history who is writing the history of modern Russia and explaining to us how the developments in Russia are relevant for what is going on in Europe and the United States. The book describes the suspension of truth in authoritarian regimes and the threat to democracy that results when the state assumes the right to declare what is true.
Reports
In the USA and in Europe, all the information about what is going on is in plain sight. And it makes no difference.
Everyone can read The Mueller Report. Even though it is heavily redacted, it makes abundantly clear that Trump and his cronies are tied in many ways to Russia, and that it is very likely that Trump is in the pocket of Putin. But Trump fans do not read this, so it does not matter. And if others try to tell them what is in the report, Fox News goes “la-lala-lala” to blot out the message.
PUTIN: What 10 Years of Putin Have Brought is an independent expert report by Vladimir Milov and Boris Nemtsov. Unofficial translation from the Russian by Dave Essel. Boris Nemtsov is dead. Vladimir Milov is still alive. You can find some of his publications, presentations and videos in English on his website.
It is important to spot the people who want us to remain ignorant: the murderers of journalists and writers, the spreaders of desinformation. It is our duty as responsible citizens to let ourselves be informed by the people who are risking their lives (in Russia) or their jobs (in America) to tell us what is really going on.