On-the-ground reporting meets with strategic analysis to form a nuanced portrait of an ongoing conflict.
British journalist Harding offers a frontline view of the Russian-Ukrainian War.
Although previously bound up with the likes of Edward Snowden, now living in Russia, and Julian Assange, Harding himself is no friend of the Putin regime. Expelled from Russia a decade ago, he now lands on the opposing line, covering the events in Ukraine for the Guardian. Along his meandering course through the embattled country, the author examines rumor and fact. An example of the former was a supposed consultation between Putin and a Siberian shaman in support of his invasion; of the latter, the undeniable tensions that a Westward-turning Ukraine created in a theater of realpolitik that seems increasingly committed to Central Asian autocracy. The current war, Harding writes, is incontestably one of Putin’s choice, though he faults Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for discounting intelligence that suggested that Russia would actually invade: “It caused panic, depressed the economy, spooked foreign investors, and ran down the country’s currency and gold reserves. Why…should Ukraine suffer and its ‘cynical’ neighbor be rewarded?” Even so, Zelenskyy recovered, and one of his “soft-power” tools was to insist on transparency and decentralization even as a secretive, top-heavy Russia tried to make further inroads. Harding, a knowledgeable student of history, is particularly good when he considers Russian errors in the field as near mirror-image re-creations of those errors during World War II, when Stalin’s Russia relied on sacrificing thousands of soldiers to overwhelm a less populous enemy. Indeed, Russia’s wartime state has been “moving even further in the direction of the 1930s, using mechanisms of coercion and intimidation”—even as Ukraine is comparatively free and is able to exercise a secret weapon that’s no secret at all: Russian command is vertical, “always looking feudally upward,” while Ukraine’s is horizontal, with a citizen army bent on remaining democratic.
On-the-ground reporting meets with strategic analysis to form a nuanced portrait of an ongoing conflict.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 9780593685174
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed.
New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are “using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that “alternative facts” are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That’s a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we’ve been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney’s accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson’s attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption’s not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a “new, smaller American society,” one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration’s missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind’s The List as a record of how far we have fallen.
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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