The Long Hangover: Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past

by Shaun Walker Narrated by Michael Page

Overview

In The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been. The book explores why Russia, unlike Germany, has failed to come to terms with the darkest pages of its past: Stalin's purges, the Gulag, and the war deportations. The narrative roams from the corridors of the Kremlin to the wilds of the Gulags and the trenches of east Ukraine. It puts the annexation of Crimea and the newly assertive Russia in the context of the delayed fallout of the Soviet collapse.



Packed with analysis but told mainly through vibrant reportage, The Long Hangover is a thoughtful exploration of the legacy of the Soviet collapse and how it has affected life in Russia and Putin's policies.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

09/25/2017
In his first book, Walker, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, explores the way Vladimir Putin exploits a sanitized version of Russia’s history, especially its role in WWII, to unite its populace behind the goal of returning to major-power status. The book mixes historical analysis with original reporting, using the modern- day Russia-Ukraine conflict as its central example. Walker proves an able historian and clearly guides the reader through the context necessary to support his thesis. For instance, as a counterexample to the Kremlin’s straightforwardly heroic account of the Soviet WWII record, he recounts Stalin’s relocation of an entire ethnic group, the Kalmyks, accused of backing Hitler. Walker’s original reporting is exemplary and differentiates the book from equally well-informed but more scholarly analyses with its eye for the idiosyncratic and telling detail. While interviewing a prominent Crimean supporter of Putin, he observes that the man “seemed defensive, almost angry, as he answered my questions while doodling stick trees in his notebook.” Walker proves an empathetic interviewer throughout, willing to hear both pro- and anti-Putin viewpoints but also willing to hold his subjects accountable. Intelligent and ambitious, Walker’s book succeeds in providing insight into the recent history of a nation at the center of world attention. (Jan. 2018)

From the Publisher

"Intelligent and ambitious, Walker's book succeeds in providing insight into the recent history of a nation at the center of world attention." — Publishers Weekly

"The heroes of our age of postmodern myth are the investigative reporters. Shaun Walker has not only done the hard and necessary work of reporting from Russia and Ukraine, he has also reflected, with remarkable historical and literary sensibility, on what it means when a great power gives up on its own future and decides instead to market its past." — Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University, and author of On Tyranny and Bloodlands

"The Long Hangover is thoughtful, brave, and full of insight. Anyone who wants to understand Russia now needs to read it." — John Simpson, BBC News

"In this skillful and vivid book, Shaun Walker allows us to understand the region's current affairs through ordinary and extraordinary people's experience of an un-dealt with past." — Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

"This book has a very Russian feel to it. As with the best works of Russian literature, stories of ordinary people fold into the bigger picture. The characters cry, laugh, drink, fight, mourn, and celebrate all at once. Fear is mixed with hope, sorrow with pride, and things rarely end well. This is a deep, emotionally charged, and enthralling book that leaves a sad and bitter aftertaste." — Elena Racheva, Novaya Gazeta

"[Walker] traveled to the faraway corners of the former Soviet Union and interviewed people whose voices are heard very rarely, especially in the West. The author must be a great listener and a careful interviewer to win the trust and confidence of all these individuals. He takes their stories seriously without dismissing their experiences." — Washington Post

"The Long Hangover is considered and careful and humane, and should be compulsory reading for any politician considering engagement with either Moscow or Ukraine. It's not only the best book I've read on Putin's Russia, but also has great resonance for the age of Donald Trump and Brexit: no one likes being told they're a loser, everyone needs something to believe in." — The Guardian

Library Journal

★ 11/15/2017
Walker (Moscow correspondent, the Guardian) explores the complex way in which many Russians perceive the relation of the Russian Federation to the former Soviet Union, and provides a compelling account of Vladimir Putin's use of the that legacy in forging his popularity. This book contains relatively little about Putin or the Kremlin and much more about the political role of Soviet legacies that have defined his regime. Chechnya, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine, among other themes, are interpreted through powerful and revealing interviews, and as Walker approaches each as a problem rooted in the Soviet past, its meaning emerges in the present. For example, we learn about how the "cult" of Soviet victory in World War II became relevant to mobilizing support for Moscow in Eastern Ukraine's rebellion against Kiev. An astonishing dialog between a Russian commander and Ukrainian officer typifies the author's perceptive use of subjects confronting a contradictory legacy. The pro-Moscow "warlord" Ramzan Kadyrov reveals an authoritarian brutality in a broken Chechnya, while the wartime deportation of its people remains unmentioned. A trip to the Siberian camp Kolyma underscores the enduring need to explain Stalinism. VERDICT Some of the finest journalism of the post-Soviet era. Highly recommended.—Zachary Irwin, Behrend Coll., Pennsylvania State Erie

Kirkus Reviews

2017-10-17
A British journalist offers a searching account of contemporary Russia, a nation bent on recapturing a more glorious past.People crave meaning and security in their lives. Both vanished for citizens of the Soviet Union when that storied country dissolved, replaced by a much weaker Russia and a ring of former satellites and conquered states. As Guardian Moscow correspondent Walker chronicles, much of the last quarter-century has been an exercise, among Russians from Vladimir Putin to ordinary citizens on the street, of recapturing past glories; says one anti-Ukrainian Russian nationalist, "we need to rebuild the country. The Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, it doesn't matter what you call it." the author documents the rise of Putin from middle-management KGB type to supreme ruler, abetted by a Boris Yeltsin who had abandoned the democratic experiment, ruing his former belief that "we would leap from the gray, stagnating totalitarian past into a bright, prosperous and civilized future." Much of Walker's solid reporting is from trouble spots that have been much in the news lately, including Crimea, where he looks at the fate of Crimean Tatars, who have essentially been stripped of citizenship on Russia's reclamation of contested territory, and eastern Ukraine, where Russian rebels shot down a Malaysian Airlines flight, thinking it an aircraft of the Ukrainian air force—an event that Putin's government hotly denied. "The downing of MH17 and the subsequent brazen lying was probably the Kremlin's lowest point in all my years covering Russia," writes Walker. Using techniques from the old Soviet propaganda machine, the Putin regime has successfully branded the enemies along its borders as Nazis, evoking memories that only the oldest Russians have while also recapturing some of the old sense of exceptionalist nationhood, "using fear of political unrest to quash opposition, equating ‘patriotism' with support for Putin, and using a simplified narrative of the Second World War to imply Russia must unite once again against a foreign threat."Essential reading for Russia watchers.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171389376
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	01/02/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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