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A review by drillvoice
Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia by Joshua Yaffa
5.0
I'm so impressed by this book.
Basically, Yaffa is interested in the idea of the 'wily' Russian who sort of hustles to get by in the Putin system, who isn't a hardcore ideologue supporter, nor a revolutionary opponent, but just sort of working their way in the system to try to eke out what they can. Each chapter looks at a different such person, from a high-ranked employee of a state news station, to a humanitarian philanthropist who depends upon Putin to resource life-saving work.
I think the best bit of the book is how comfortable it is with nuance. Yaffa sketches an empathetic portrait of each person, trying to show how difficult their situation is and the trade-offs they have wrestled with, what lines they have and haven't been willing to cross. The author is rarely enacting moral judgment, which I think is good and leads to a better book. At the same time, he does record judgments from others he interviews, helping to create a multi-faceted picture of each subject.
One great example of this is an account around someone who was interned in the Soviet prison system, who later was released, and then supported a museum about the system. That person later befriends a former a camp guard and basically reflects: both of us were victims of the system. Both of us did what we had to, didn't really have an alternative. I thought this was the most interesting part of the book and really gets to all the various shades of grey that make up an ordinary human life, and that the author is inviting us to comprehend.
Funnily enough, I read this book because I wanted to read "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible", but I had forgotten the name. Maybe this book wasn't the grand political treatise on modern-day Russia, but it was a beautiful sort of 'people's history' that looks at the society from the ground up. *****.
Basically, Yaffa is interested in the idea of the 'wily' Russian who sort of hustles to get by in the Putin system, who isn't a hardcore ideologue supporter, nor a revolutionary opponent, but just sort of working their way in the system to try to eke out what they can. Each chapter looks at a different such person, from a high-ranked employee of a state news station, to a humanitarian philanthropist who depends upon Putin to resource life-saving work.
I think the best bit of the book is how comfortable it is with nuance. Yaffa sketches an empathetic portrait of each person, trying to show how difficult their situation is and the trade-offs they have wrestled with, what lines they have and haven't been willing to cross. The author is rarely enacting moral judgment, which I think is good and leads to a better book. At the same time, he does record judgments from others he interviews, helping to create a multi-faceted picture of each subject.
One great example of this is an account around someone who was interned in the Soviet prison system, who later was released, and then supported a museum about the system. That person later befriends a former a camp guard and basically reflects: both of us were victims of the system. Both of us did what we had to, didn't really have an alternative. I thought this was the most interesting part of the book and really gets to all the various shades of grey that make up an ordinary human life, and that the author is inviting us to comprehend.
Funnily enough, I read this book because I wanted to read "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible", but I had forgotten the name. Maybe this book wasn't the grand political treatise on modern-day Russia, but it was a beautiful sort of 'people's history' that looks at the society from the ground up. *****.