Mikhail Zygar (Public Affairs $27.99)
Back during the First Cold War, academics invented kremlinology. The Kremlin was a black box, and so, to smoke out Soviet intentions, analysts would parse leaders’ seating arrangements, speaking order, speech content, press articles and more, to find out what sorts of things the red elite were sparring about behind closed doors. There were often some interesting conclusions, but it was sometimes more tea leaf reading than science, and rarely of predictive value.
Today, the Kremlin is no less opaque, and the speculations of modern kremlinologists are still rarely helpful in predicting Russian actions.
Along comes Mikhail Zygar, one of the few Russian journalists with a measure of independence, and clearly a vast network of leadership connections. His book illuminates what has been going on behind Kremlin walls in the Putin years and is a must read for anyone interested in understanding Kremlin intentions, if not predicting its actions. Because he bases his conclusions not on reading tea leaves or the content analysis of speeches, but on real interviews and inside contacts with real people. People, being people, will always want to tell their side of the story to someone, even to a journalist...
Zygar writes in a conversational style, lightly tinted with wry humor and cynicism. He starts each chapter with a concise portrait of a Kremlin player that is revealing and human. If one takes nothing else from this book, it is that the Kremlin is a viscous solyanka soup of strange, conniving, egotistical and power-hungry personalities. Clans wrestle beneath the rug like rabid bulldogs, cementing grudges, undermining rivals, all seeking to shape and mold the tsar into their vision of what he should be (and usually with personal gain in mind).
It is also clear that there is no Grand Plan guiding the Kremlin’s actions. Zygar shows that the Kremlin leadership is largely reactive and tactical, mainly interested in keeping Russia’s adversaries off balance through conflicting messages, inconsistent and unpredictable behavior, and info/cyber disruption. Apropos of the present tsar’s martial arts predilections, Russian foreign policy is guided by principles of judo: if your opponent shows strength, step aside, parry, and use their strength against them; if they show weakness, advance in ways that do not put yourself at risk.
Yet Zygar also shows that, if someone were paying close enough attention, they would not have been surprised by recent events, say in Crimea or Ukraine. Putin and others telegraphed these moves in early 2008. And they were a natural consequence of the main turning point in US-Russian relations, which was in 2004 and 2005. Until then, Zygar asserts, the Kremlin truly thought that Russia and the West could reforge a new relationship. But when George W. Bush became a lame duck, and when the “anti-Russian” course of events (dropping the ABM treaty; expanding NATO eastward; supporting Georgian and Ukrainian independence) proved unstoppable, the hardline anti-Western elements in the Kremlin strengthened, and there was no turning back.
Zygar’s fine book (which can hardly be fully summarized here; get a copy and read this book not once, but twice) ends on a troubling analysis of the cynical self-deception that is now lodged in Kremlin player’s minds. They thrive on anti-Americanism and conspiracy theories targeting Russia, Zygar writes, and wantonly feed these theories to a willing Russian public, knowing “that if they do not offer television viewers a simple and plausible answer to pressing geopolitical issues, the people will draw their own (far worse) conclusions. But such analysis is in itself a conspiracy theory. There is no evidence that Russian officials are so crafty. Most likely they really do believe in their fictions.”
And that is the most disturbing part: never knowing whether the Kremlin minions are just cynically manufacturing lies for personal gain, or if they truly believe their own lies.
Perhaps it’s time to consult some tea leaves.
Blue Crow Media (£ 8)
bluecrowmedia.com
This beautiful map of Moscow, does not show street names, but it does show metro stops and is sufficiently detailed and clear for walkers to find over 50 Constructivist buildings from the 1920s and 1930s that are still standing (though many are at risk) in the Russian capital.
From the cylindrical Melnikov House to the Tetris-ready NKPS building, this is your guide to the Soviet movement that most influenced Western design and architecture.
Two movies, written and directed by Yury Bykov
olivefilms.com
Winter. A phone rings. A light turns on in a tall apartment block on the city’s outskirts. Sergei’s wife is in labor in Ryazan. He rushes off to the maternity hospital.
But he is not careful. He is reckless in fact. He speeds. There is a boy and his mother at a bus stop. Ice. A horrific accident.
Panic ensues. The accident is Sergei’s fault. He has taken a life. He wants justice to be done. He wants to go to jail.
But there is a problem. Sergei is a police major, and admitting a mistake will give others an opportunity for score settling. As his superior officer (the esteemed actor Boris Nevzorov) says, “Don’t complicate things for yourself or others.”
Nonetheless, Sergei insists on acting against his personal interest, while the other cops try to cover things up for him in the worst way possible. The calamity grows in size, which only seems to strengthen Sergey’s backbone.
The Major is a tense, well-acted, well-written drama about a decent man trying to opt out of a corrupt system. The brooding Denis Shvedov is convincing and powerful in the lead role, and writer/director Bykov is despicable as his cowardly, corrupt colleague Pavel Korshunov – a role that earned him a Nika (Russia’s top film award) for Best Supporting Actor.
The film’s grim, starkly horizontal, rural backdrop adds an element of bleak hopelessness that serves to magnify Sergey’s dilemma, well summarized by Tolya, a police colleague: “We’re all people, until we cross the line.”
Whereas in The Major, the story begins with a tragedy, in The Fool, the tragedy looms over the film, tensely and ominously, ready to strike at any moment.
Dima (Artyom Bystrov) is a young plumber in a provincial city. He has discovered that a run-down dormitory on the outskirts is about to collapse. He cannot be silent; he must do the right thing. And, after all, there are 800 people living in the dormitory.
So, over his family’s objections, like the “fool” he is, Dima crashes the mayor’s birthday party to deliver the bad news. Yet, no surprise, it turns out the reason the building is collapsing, the reason it has not been fixed, is that all the city bosses have been stealing from the budget for years, greasing the next guy’s palms, sending kickbacks up the line. So nothing is left for the city’s dormitories, much less for its roads, the orphanages, the hospitals or pensions. Or to resettle 800 people out of a collapsing building.
There is an exquisite tension at the heart of The Fool, because we know that building is going to fall – it’s a nine-story Chekhovian gun revealed in the first act that must eventually be fired. But, instead of taking action, the pit of vipers that surrounds the mayor only wants to cover their backsides. They toy with doing the right thing, but are caught in a trap of their own making: as in The Major, doing the right thing will expose their decades of thieving.
“Yes, I take a little of every deal,” the mayor says, “But whose hands here are clean?” An aide amplifies her sentiment: “The whole country lives on bribes... If you don’t take some for yourself, you live like a worm in s**t.” And another: “I am a Russian, I cannot not take.”
The film is filled with uncomfortable indictments of Russia political culture, and the fact that it won a Nika for best screenplay speaks to the fact that the accusations hit the mark.
To say more would reveal spoilers. But suffice it to say this is not a movie to watch if you want to come away with a warm and fuzzy feeling about Mother Russia or one’s fellow man. Bykov’s corrupt, dilapidated town is a depressing, dead-end place – a house of cards bound together by corruption and selfishness. If a “fool” tries to fix even a portion of it, he risks tearing asunder everything he knows and loves. But the caring has to start with someone. As Dima says near the film’s end, “We live like animals and die like animals, because we are nothing to one another.”
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