RaveBookforumYaffa isn’t interested primarily in Putin’s misdeeds, but rather in the responses of ordinary people to the society he’s shaped. He seeks the compromisers in contemporary Russia ... Between Two Fires stands a rank above most publications of its genre because of its effective shoe-leather reporting. Not content with analyzing media coverage or online debates, Yaffa has sought out and interviewed both his central characters and their friends, enemies, and former supporters. The result is a richly layered work that captures both the moralism and the cynicism of contemporary Russian discourse.
Tony Wood
RaveBookforumWood shows how Western observers have persistently misunderstood the country’s post-Soviet economic and political situation ... Russia Without Putin explores the scholarly consensus of the past twenty years of Russian studies from an accessible left-wing perspective that never strays into what-aboutism or an apologia for Putin’s policies ... This structural approach pays off. The book brings attention to details other commentators leave out, such as the massive post-1991 withdrawal of women from the middle-class workforce and the return of explicit patriarchal rhetoric in the 1990s. Wood is equally deft in not ceding ground to right-wing or imperialist arguments, offering nuanced analyses badly lacking in the world of Russia journalism today. And he is admirably clear-eyed about the prospects of the Russian opposition movement, avoiding wishful thinking and partisan overidentification at all costs ... Yet because Russia Without Putin is organized around the crude, nakedly ideological caricature of Putin as totalitarian strongman, if only to deflate it, Wood struggles to describe what shape \'an alternative to the system as a whole\' might take ... Yet...the book is not only praiseworthy but vital.
