PositiveThe London Review of BooksTo most ordinary Russians, the fact that the liberal opposition is dominated by people who have one foot in the West is an accepted reality. Yet where the New York Times and the Economist see only courageous truth-tellers defending their compatriots against ever-encroaching despotism, A Terrible Country stands out for being as critical of Russia’s liberal opposition and its Western cheerleaders as it is of the Putin regime. The fact that this remains a refreshing—even shocking—perspective testifies to the depressing state of most American scholarship and reporting on Russia ... The biggest threat to freedom, he [the protagonist] soon realizes, is not Putin but capitalism; Russia’s unabashed social Darwinism is revealed as the apotheosis rather than the perversion of Western values ... Gessen’s unadorned prose comes into its own, revealing an emotional depth absent from his previous novel ... ‘The new epoch we are finally entering,’ Kirill Medvedev writes, ‘is defined by the fact that the USSR can no longer help anyone. You can no longer use it positively or negatively … The only thing to do now is live without it.’ That is easier said than done. But as Gessen’s lighthearted yet morally serious novel shows, some young(ish) people—on both sides of the old iron curtain—are giving it their best shot.