Our Game - John LeCarre

An excellent book.  This one based on the unsettled situation post fall of USSR in the Caucasus mountains.  A great portrait of Russia and Moscow at the time.

The Cockroach - Ian McEwan

Great impromptu spoof of the whole Brexit deal and the individuals and forces behind it.  Bit of a take-off on Franz Kafka.  Basically, cockroaches take over the bodies and minds of leading political figures behind Brexit.  Their goal is to create a world in chaos and disorder to promote living conditions more suitable to their continued reproduction and success - another way of looking at Brexit, Trump and Putin (amongst others) who strive to create legal, political and social conditions favourable to their own greed and desire for power

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality - Peter Pomerantsev

  A complex exploration of how our communication has moved away from facts and reality to the fantasy worlds of Facebook and Twitter.  Looks at social and economic causes.
Some interesting examinations of how totalitarian forces have coopted the language and gestures of the Left to counter their influence.
  Some scary case studies of how Facebook and Twitter have been used by would-be dictators and extremists to control people's perception of reality, to win elections and to create riots and commit murder.

  Worth rereading, as ideas are quite complex and wide-ranging.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible - Peter Pomerantsev

  A very interesting book about how the modern Russian mafia state works, and how Russia has changed since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin.  What makes this book interesting is who's stories the author tells.  This is not an analytical book, a theoretical book, nor a look at well-known key figures.  The author tells the stories of regular, everyday people that he meets in the course of his ten years of working for Russian media. (His difference as a reporter is that he actually grew up in London but kept up his Russian with his dissident parents who had moved there.)
   Some salient points:
   The historical progression goes something like this:  The fall of the Soviet Union leads to the rise of two groups; mega-entrepreneurs who quickly become very rich, and a well-organized criminal mafia with roots in the Gulag system.  This leads to chaos.  The rise of Putin follows, and he uses the KGB structure to rein in/destroy/subsume the independent criminal mafia.  Putin uses his new KGB mafia alliance to destroy or rein in the mega-entrepreneur class.  Slowly the mega-entrepreneurs transfer their wealth to London and leave the country.  Huge amounts of money are extorted, profitable business are taken over, whole areas of the economy are taken over, and the resulting spoils are distributed amongst Putin's underlings.  Slowly the mega-entrepreneurs transfer their wealth to London and leave the country.  The government/mafia inserts itself into most of the economy.
    It becomes clear in the book that Putin controls all levers of power in the country - government, military, criminal organizations, media, the courts, the economy.  It would seem the only crack in the structure is when Putin is no longer, but the result will probably resemble a civil war amongst various underlings to capture the top position - which won't help the country at all; in fact, make everything worse.

   Like China, it would be very interesting to study this phenomenon of countries where revolutionaries have tried to destroy the organically rooted culture and replace it with an entirely new imposed ideologically based culture.  These types of radical breaks do something strange to the society.  It would be interesting to look at this from a sociological point of view.  I wonder if there are parallels to be made with various personal psychological issues and pathologies...

How to Lose a Country - Ece Temelkuran

Subtitled "The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship"
    Brilliant book chronicling Turkey's slide into its current dictatorship/autocracy, with asides looking at the same process in other countries - U.S., Hungary, Russia, Poland, Britain.
She brings up the point that this structure of government can actually be called a form of mafia government.
     A good companion read to "How Fascism Works".
    Temelkuran points out some interesting techniques used by would-be leaders, particularly their use of the news cycle and the outrageous statement as a means to controlling the media's and people's attention, directing it towards controversial topics as the government gets on with some other agenda that it doesn't want attention on.
    A very disturbing book.  You have to worry about your own homeland heading in that direction. So far, Temelkuran has focused on the actions of the would-be dictator as he moves towards absolute power, but I am interested in the ground, the socio-political situation that makes his rise possible, that he exploits on his way up.  My sense is the fertile ground lies in groups that see themselves excluded from the benefits of society as it stands.  And it has to be a significant group in terms of numbers.  When I consider Turkey, Russia and Hungary, it seems that desperate poverty is certainly one of those conditions of exclusion.  Hence, the aspiring fascist/dictator groups get the support of these poor people by simply giving them some of the basic necessities of life for free. (Same thing was done in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood - these poor people may not buy into the religious or nationalist message, but they sure appreciate the food and other necessities.)  Or by creating low-paying fake jobs for them - as Orban is doing in Hungary.  This, however, is not one of the basic techniques in the U.S. - their mythology is too strongly against any kind of social welfare...
So you can conclude here that increased income inequality, either within society as a whole or regionally, is one key element that helps prepare the ground for the rise of autocrats.
     Another group to exploit would seem to be the people who see themselves excluded for religious or cultural reasons.  In Turkey, the religious factor is obviously at play in several ways.  First in the former dominance of a secular elite.  Second, in some discriminatory laws around religious clothing that excluded people from higher education and government positions.  Cultural exclusion can also be seen. At play, I suspect, was also a disdain towards the people and society of smaller, more traditional Anatolian towns and villages, which also suffered, coincidentally from higher levels of poverty.  A would-be dictator gets their support by appearing to take them seriously, by speaking their cultural language, by granting them respect.  Which "respect" also seems to be a big selling point for Trump in the eyes of many mid-western and small town Americans (who also experience higher levels of poverty and joblessness.)
    A third issue also seems to be exploitable by would-be autocrats, the issue of "the other", of immigrants, (or of the "foreign" E.U regulations in some European countries).  It is essentially a reverse side of cultural exclusion  - the fear of becoming a cultural stranger in your own country due to immigrant culture or culture imposed from outside. This is the issue that can be used with the middle-class, secular citizen. This trope is being exploited in many countries, but alone it doesn't seem to get the would-be autocrat too far.  Economic exclusion and cultural exclusion seem to be more powerful issues to exploit.

    The other interesting idea she brings up, which is peculiar to our current technology and era, is the idea of the mob - how harsh it can be, how dangerous, how beyond reason.  In situations like that of Turkey (and the U.S.) Twitter etc. essentially function as tools for the formation of mobs at lightening speed.  The mob follows you everywhere because it infiltrates your online life.  It can also easily track your address, your family and connections.  This is a new and very scary tool for enforcing conformism and for silencing dissent through fear.

Tales of Belkin - Alexander Pushkin

A collection of short novellas - early writing.  Wonderfully crafted.  Even though the world he portrays (rural Russian estates, military officers) is very foreign, the stories hold your attention.  An interesting look into the values and social conventions of another time and another place.

The New Russia - MIkhail Gorbachev

I originally was interested in this book as a possible account of what happened in Russia over the past 20/30 years to lead us to Putin.  You can get this out of the book but you have to do a lot of gleaning through Gorbachev's self-defence and accounts of his opinions and statements at various points in the narrative.  You do get a sense of the mechanisms of political and economic corruption that developed under Yeltsin, and how so much of the State wealth was grabbed by the first generation of Oligarchs.  It is more difficult to get a sense of how Putin's game unfolded.  It seems Putin said all the right things with regard to ending the chaos and respecting democracy, while at the same time pursuing an ever more authoritarian governing style and building a new set of cronies.  Fairly prosaic.  Gorbachev does create, however, a good picture of the chaos and dire circumstances that created what could be called a necessity for Putin and his approach.

Still looking for a really good book on this topic.

Drinking and Driving in Chechnya - Peter Gonda

A novel set during the 1990s collapse of the USSR and the war in Chechnya.  Some good description of life during that rough time. The portrait of corruption and how it works seems fairly accurate.  There are also some accurate details regarding Russian mafia gang culture.  The section where the main character ends up living in a black slum outside Washington D.C. is humorous at times.  Some of the story elements, though, seem a bit stereotypical in their portrayals.

Putin Country - Anne Garrels

An in-depth look at the rise of Putin and his era.  The book focuses on a small town near the border of Kazakstan.  It looks how systemic collapse, corruption and right-wing ideology affects people's lives.  Also, looks at the corrosive effects on communism and Stalin on society and social realations, and how this continues to affect social structures (or lack thereof) in modern Russia. Very gritty.  The city which is the focus of the book also happens to be one the nuclear hotspots of post-Communist Russia, which gives the author a chance to look at how opaque both the Soviet and current governments can be for their citizens.

Journey Into the Whirlwind - Eugenia Ginzburg

A book referenced in Masha Gessen's "The Future is History".

An account by a woman who lived through Stalin's Great Terror.  She begins as a staunch and well-respected member of the Communist party, working in academia.  She recounts her personal experience with the quota arrest system that led to her spending two years in solitary confinement and then sixteen years in the work camps around Kolyma.  She explores the insanity, the double-think, the sadism of Stalin's system.  (Though she never really gets to thinking about the underlying point of it all.)  She describes the mind-wrenching logic of the justice system and trial, the types of torture used to get confessions, the daily details of life in the sub-human conditions of both the prisons and the work camps.  She describes people who sell out dozens of others in a useless attempt to save themselves from the Terror.   The sadistic interrogators who themselves later turn up as goners in the camps. 

Strangely, when you read about her on Wikipedia, she never seems to have given up on Lenin and Communism in general, seeing the whole Stalin period as a "Cult of Personality" problem... 

The book gives a good sense of the difficulty of trying to understand such an experience when reason, logic, social values and politics don't explain it.  What was the point of all that suffering and death?  This is what is so hard to get your mind around.

Also, makes it even more frightening or disturbing when you see how Stalin is again becoming a hero, a model, in Russia....

The Future is History - Masha Gessen

Gessen is basically chronicling the rise of Putin and his mafia don status in Russia.  She narrates the main events and steps leading up to the current situation, starting with the fall of the Soviet Union, and makes the links to economic, political and geopolitical events, and how they affected the development of the current system.
She also includes summaries and discussions of other interesting elements that she sees leading to the rise of Putin.
One interesting sub-theme revolves around the first Russian sociologist to actually conduct surveys to get a sense of the public's view and attitudes, and to chronicle the changes from the 90s on.  (She also discusses the impossibility of sociology as a discipline during Soviet times.)
She also references a number of academics and articles which attempt to define the current Russian system of governance - totalitarian?  fascist?  dictatorship?  Unfortunately none of the source material seems to be available in English.  The one she seems to lean most strongly towards is a mafia system - I tend to agree.  Ideology is irrelevant.  The goal of "governanace" is to increase and control both wealth and power.  The system is run by a Don (Putin) who distributes wealth, power, positions as he sees fit. (And also takes them away when he sees fit.)  Ideology serves as a pacifying or distracting element - new Orthodox religion, family values, anti-immigrant and anti-gay policies.
She also chronicles a return to the Soviet system of almost random intimidation and punishment - the use of gay concept, the ever useful tax evasion charge - as a way of intimidating society to follow the leader and not challenge power.
There is also a psycho-analytical sub-theme, which explores the idea of trauma and how it affects a society, interpersonal relations, etc.  The trauma in this case is, of course, the 18 odd years of terror under Stalin.

I find this particularly interesting, as she is exploring a governance model that is gaining prevalence in many countries currently.  What lies behind the strong man phenomenon.

A complex book with lots of threads and ideas.  Worth rereading, probably several times.

Our Kind of Traitor - John Le Carré

Another brilliant book by Le Carré.  The story unfolds in a creative structure.  Current time, debrief time moving back into the past, current time. 

Central premise is the links between Russian criminal gangs and government.

Great characters.

Putin Country - Anne Garrels

An interesting look at a middle-sized city in central Russia, near the border with Kazakstan.  Garrels visited the city over several years for extended periods of time, made friends, got inside the society a bit.   It is an interesting look at the lives, attitudes and perspectives of different kinds of people living in the city.
You get a sense of how life can be harsh there - the role of corruption, the power of money, the indifference of the State, families alone in a sea of opportunistic individualism.  She gives you a sense of the blind spots, the places where ideas and reality don't match, where rhetoric wanders off from basic realities.  It is interesting to see where nations' mythologies diverge from historical and actual reality - there is something tragic in the Greek sense lurking in these dark spots.
The city was one of the Soviet's centres of nuclear technology, and there are endless stories about pollution and contamination ignored, denied, hidden.  It is still a very toxic environment.

The book reminds me of another social idea (wish I could remember the book).  When a society experiences a prolonged period of oppression, exploitation and fundamentally dishonest leadership, social and moral bonds eventually break down, leaving everyone operating as an isolated agent.  The example sighted in the source book is southern Italy and Sicily.  This type of social structure is very persistent and rebuilding social trust and social morals seems to be next to impossible.   Modern Russia as the result of a century of Soviet Communism and Putin's kleptocracy. 

The End of Europe - James Kirchick

Subtitiled "Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age"  Published in 2017

Kirchick looks at a number of European issues through the lens of specific countries and their problems.  Some of the problems he discusses include neutrality as a stance and how it encourages Russian aggression and meddling, the rise of antisemitism and the failure to integrate Muslim immigrants into the European system of values (also seen as a failure to manage immigration as an issue in general), the desire for European wealth without European values and fiscal discipline, the failure to stand firm on state borders and state protection (again in the face of Russian aggression), the pursuit of self-interested economic gains at the expense of other EU states.  Basically the failure to act as a mutually supportive group, and to blame others for the problems of one's own political culture and economy.
For me, the most troubling tendency is the rise of apologists for Russian aggression and interference.  This shows a singular stupidity in relation to even recent history, especially when you see such tendencies in former East Bloc countries.  True, the US has looked after its interests in helping develop the European project, but the net effect has been mutual benefit (unlike some other places where the US has been active...).  People have also forgotten that Europeans have twice in the past century called on the US to help them clean up a mess of their own making, at the price of many American lives.  This gives them the right to participation.  The Russia project, on the other hand, has never been about mutual benefit for the larger population of other countries, something the corrupt elites in many European countries seem to have grasped.  Their Russian apologist stance is based on narrow self-interest or crony interest.   The Russian project has no ideological cover now - oligarchy, corruption, power.
Also the ability to suppress core social values when face with cultural relativism.

Two things that bothered me at first are the usual problems with many US political thinkers.  First, they are blind to the US' use of many practices that they criticize in relation to Russia.  Second, they are blindly pro-Israel and pro-Zionist, and are blind to the many machinations that Israel and Zionist groups in other countries use to stifle criticism and discussion.

While these issues are technically outside the focus of this book, they need to be acknowledged to give the criticisms levies some legitimacy.  Especially true considering the current (as of publication) US president embodies many of the same issues and uses many of the same disinformation techniques discussed in the book.

Worth reading, especially alongside the recently read discussion of major US failings,  Time to Start Thinking, by Edward Luce.

Winter is Coming - Gary Kasparov

A critical examination of Russia post break up.  Kasparov looks briefly at the chaos of the Yeltsin period and then goes on to examine the rise of Putin and the full realization of the current pirate capitalism system - important moments, underlying causes, etc.  He also looks at how Putin and the pirate system work to involve elites and leaders in other states, especially European, which undermines both the current more democratic systems in Germany and France, etc. and also undermines any criticism of the pirate capitalism system that Putin has set in place.  A good bit of time is also spent examining the weak, even ingratiating response of the U.S., and especially the E.U., to the rise and extension of Putin's system of control.

Kasparov's goal is to raise the alarm about the growth and gradual advancement of this type of system - a system where ruling oligarchs take all and where the people of the country have no value, count for nothing.  A system of pure material gain for the few.

This is a particularly chilling book when you consider current repressive trends in the U.S. and also the recent election cycle which elected an admirer of Putin.

An excellent look at what is sometimes referred to as an "alternate economic system of development".

The Tsar of Love and Techno - Anthony Marra

A beautifully interwoven set of stories depicting life in the far reaches of Siberia and Chechnya in late Soviet times and early Putin days.  Marra manages to evoke the apocalyptic landscapes of a northern mining town and post-war Grozny, as well as the pastoral landscape of the Chechen mountains.  He also creates a seemingly credible set of characters:  homo sovieticus, corrupt officials,  drug dealers, kleptocrats, gratuitously sadistic soldiers and criminal gangs, victims.  The wandering story of two brothers.  An exploration of the small details of what went wrong in post-Soviet Russia. Quite an amazing book.

I am left wondering how he developed this imaginary landscape that he writes in.  There is no indication that he studied this field other than the books he credits in his acknowledgements.  I am wondering how he developed such a feel for the gritty details of these lives.

Find more.

The Ukranian and Russian Notebooks - Igort

- subtitled Love and Death under Soviet Rule

A collection of mostly short comics based on things he has seen and people he has talked with when travelling in both Russia and the Ukraine.   Some devastating stories about the Holmodor in the Ukraine during the 30s and well as some vignettes highlighting the poverty and desperation in current Ukraine.  The Russian section focuses on a variety of moments in recent Russian history - Chechnya and the Chechen war, the brutality and corruption of the Russian armed forces, the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the deportations of kulaks during Stalin's time.  I think it works very well precisely because of the shortness of each aperçu.
The Chechen/Politkovskaya section in particular, gives you a sense of the difference in social and political culture in Russia.  It is portrayed as a system of relations based entirely on power and the ability to oppress, to use that power on those weaker.  And it runs right from the top down to the bottom, where you find the Chechens and other immigrants from former Soviet Central Asian countries.  A form of racism that mirrors the structure in the the U.S. with blacks.  Perhaps not so pervasive socially but certainly with the endless police shootings, a mirror image in some ways of the modus operandi of the Russian Special Forces.  I was thinking Igort should do a similar travel book of a trip around Black U.SA. and portray some of the stories he could gather there...

Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog - Boris Akunin

A new detective character from Akunin - an orthodox nun.  Set in the same time period as his other series, 19th century Russia, but this time in the high society of the remote countryside.  Reminds me of Agatha Christie.  Good evocation of the milieu.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder

A history of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Baltic States and Western Russia from the late 20's (Stalin's takeover) to the end of WWII.  An account of the upheaval, planned murder, mass relocations and the effects of war in this area that was occupied three times over that period - first by Russia and Germany, then by Germany and finally by Russia.
The history of this time period is not well-presented in the West's version of WWII.
Some facts:
In this period, Germany and Russia killed roughly the same number of people.
Most Jews who were killed in the war came from Poland - Western European Jews represented a small percentage.
As many Poles were killed by the Russians and the Germans as Jews.
Belarus lost half of it's population at that time.
Jews represented less than 1% of the German population at the start of the war.
More Jews were killed in one day by a bullet to the head than all the people who died in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped.
The Allies actually did not see any of the German death camps - they were all liberated by the Russians.  The Allies saw the work or concentration camps, and more people survived in those than died.
The Russian's system of concentration camps was far larger than what was established by the Nazis.

There is also some discussion of why Hitler and the Nazis developed the war plans they did, and also why Stalin was involved in so much ethnic and political cleansing (or Terrors).

A good read for a revision of our picture of WWII and where the action really was.

Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman

A gargantuan novel based largely on the seige of Stalingrad.  Mostly from the Russian point of view, but also some sections from the German point of view.
The real subject of the book is a critique of Russia under Stalin.  Never published in Russia, and when you read it, you understand why.  Grossman was ahead of everyone else I think, in his insight into the Russian communist project and how it went so totally off the rails.