The book tells the story of how Russia has evolved into a mirror of the old USSR. The author, a Cambridge PhD. and native Russian states that "old fashioned nationalism in neo-Stalinist garb" has taken over the Russian Federation. It is a disheartening tale and he lays much of the responsibility at the feet of the media: the journalists, editors and television executives in charge of the "message". Russia has long been a society where language and communication are the foundations of power. The western-like media of the 1990's slowly became part of the establishment. The first thing Putin did was to take control of television, and it is through the visual medium that he controls the state today.
The USSR fell, not because of outward pressures, but because the lies that upheld the state were exposed and undermined by glasnost. The newspapers in the big cities, along with television, were partially freed when censorship was loosened after Chernobyl in 1986. As glasnost and perestroika freed up the political system but failed to put food on the shelves, the failure of Gorbachev's reforms were out front for all to see. The 1989 Party Congress was the first ever televised and featured speaker after speaker calling for the abolition of the Communist Party. Television showed the breaching of the Berlin Wall, and two years later, the arrival of tanks at the Russian White House, heralding the coup against Gorbachev. Televising Yeltsin standing on those tanks ended the coup, but since neither Yeltsin nor Gorbachev had a plan for the post-Communist era, the USSR soon ended in ignominy.
As matters fell apart in the early 1990's, America and its insidious influences were an obvious rallying point for Russian nationalists. "The disintegration of Soviet Empire was blamed on the west..." The nationalists and communists attempted a coup in late 1993 and almost succeeded. Yeltsin managed to hold them off. Soon thereafter, NTV took off as Russia's first totally free from interference news station and made a name for itself during the First Chechnya War. The people followed NTV and not the official Channel One. Knowing that a Communist election victory would put them out of business, NTV cast Yeltsin favorably in his remarkable 1996 election comeback victory. They had been backed by the oligarchs who soon started to shower the NTV journalists with cars, flats and cash. Igor Malashenko, the man who ran NTV and the man who had defeated the war party in the Kremlin and the Communists in the election, was offered the Premiership by Yeltsin. A liberal forward thinking journalist turned the succession offer down and has lived to regret his decision ever since. The job eventually went to Vladimir Putin instead.
In 1999, Chechen terror attacks in Russia's big cities propelled Putin to the top. Touring devastated buildings, he assured Russia on tv news that this would be stopped. He acceded to the Presidency on the eve of the new millennium and assured people he would restore, and make great again, the Russian state. This is what 55% of them wished to hear. Within days of his winning reelection in March 2000, NTV's offices were raided. Within a year, a new iteration of the station was his mouthpiece. Throughout his decade and-a-half at the top, he has ruled ruthlessly and always with an eye toward how it plays on television.
At the end of the day, this book is written by a Russian, and although the language is English, I suspect he targeted audience is Russian. There's way too much detail on way too many characters in the media industry. The most telling take-away for me is that the 1990's were not a time of detente that Putin later revoked. It was just a truce in the ongoing animosity toward America that is a core creed of the Russian mind.
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