A review by jasonfurman
The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War by Arkady Ostrovsky

5.0

An excellent journalistic history of Russia from Glasnost/Perestroika through the present, focusing particularly on how journalism--and especially TV--shaped not only historical events but how Russia has come to define itself. While some of the characters were familiar to me, most of the focus of the book were on people that were not--executives at television stations, for example. But Arkady Ostrovsky uses their stories to tell a bigger story and does it in a way that is deeply sympathetic to pluralism, democracy and a free press--and dismayed at what happened to the press and what they did to Russia's sense of itself, the culmination being Crimea/Ukraine.