[Ostrovsky's] sparkling prose and deep analysis provide not only a sweeping tour d’horizon of Russia’s malaise, but also a description of the process by which anti-modern ideas combine with postmodern actions to buttress the country’s authoritarian and kleptocratic system.
While many previous authors have attempted detailed reconstructions of this history, Ostrovsky takes a different approach, focused more on why events turned out as they did. The reader feels as if on a grand tour, with Ostrovsky at the elbow. His interpretations are erudite, taut and mostly right...Ostrovsky sees Russia as a tangle of ideas, and he pays special attention to how the thinking of the day was reflected on television and in other media. He is particularly good at hearing the nuances and seeing how identity, ideology and personal experience undermined hopes for democracy and reform.
Anyone who has spent time in Russia over the past 30 years should be deeply grateful for Arkady Ostrovsky’s fast-paced and excellently written book ... Mr. Ostrovsky’s account of the progression of invented Russias, political battles and changing realities is never dull or academic. A serious student of theater until he took up journalism, he fills his book with anecdotes, conversations and a delightful cast of Russian characters ... Mr. Ostrovsky provides a much needed, dispassionate and eminently readable explanation of how it happened.
The early chapters, in which Ostrovsky discusses the intellectual underpinnings of Gorbachev’s reforms, are excellent. Ostrovsky sets perestroika and glasnost in the wider context of Russian and Soviet book-worship, arguing convincingly that believing communists who took Lenin much too seriously actually did more to undermine the U.S.S.R. than dissidents criticizing the regime from the outside ... Ostrovsky’s analysis of the decline of Russian liberalism and the rise of Putinist authoritarianism is impressive and, for the most part, persuasive, although at times the huge scope of the book results in a little too much pruning of the historical material ... even if The Invention of Russia doesn’t quite live up to its majestic title and occasionally veers into the realm of op-ed style bloviating, it is unquestionably a valuable addition to the growing literature on contemporary Russia — at once informed, insightful and highly readable.
