Shaun Walker, for several years the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, describes his book as neither an apology for Vladimir Putin’s policies nor an anti-Putin polemic. Walker reports several illuminating interviews with people who hold “an often intangible longing for a past, if not the actual Soviet past, then at least for the sense of meaning that went with it”. More than half the book deals with the war in Ukraine, where Walker spent many weeks over the past four years. Khodakovsky misses the warm social relations of the Soviet past, yet hates the Kremlin’s way of exploiting history in its struggle with Kiev. Unipolarity and “end of history” smugness led Washington to the relentless expansion of Nato and the invasion of Iraq.

Source: The Guardian March 09, 2018 07:30 UTC