Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia

Twenty-five years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet Russia is still without a stable national identity or a functioning democracy. Garrels (Naked in Baghdad), a former NPR foreign correspondent, illuminates these observations in her journey into the everyday lives of 21st-century Russians. As she demonstrates, decades of economic turmoil, political corruption, and the mass emigration of young and wealthy Russians to America and Western Europe have taken a heavy toll. Using the region of Chelyabinsk, formerly the site of the USSR’s nuclear program, as a microcosm, the author profiles citizens from all walks of life with compassion and sincerity. Among the different people interviewed, two of the main constants are support for Vladimir Putin and the belief that the West is more at fault for the poverty and corruption surrounding them than their own government. While Garrels takes pain to include voices willing to condemn Putin’s administration in her exposé, most of the interviewees are either unaware of, or willfully blind to, the worst of their government. This book persuasively asserts that too little has changed in Russia since the days of the Soviet Union. (Mar.)