Sam Greene is the Director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is also a Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London. Before joining CEPA, he founded and directed the King’s Russia Institute for 10 years, and previously lived and worked for 13 years in Moscow at the Center for the Study of New Media & Society and as Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
It is an optimistic thing, to read a book in this day and age. It takes remarkable confidence, in these times of galloping “poly-crisis”, to believe that you can devote days or even weeks to an intellectual journey and reemerge back into even a remotely recognizable world. Imagine, then, what it must feel like to write a book.
War and Punishment (Simon & Schuster, 2023) by Mikhail Zygar
Optimism, I feel certain, was on the mind of Mikhail Zygar when he wrote War and Punishment. That’s all the more true because Zygar, who once edited Dozhd, the independent Russian TV station, didn’t write the book for us.
War and Punishment is a sober and sobering take on how centuries of Russian history have led to the barbarity of his country’s invasion of Ukraine, and on how generations of Russian liberals who led the country out of the Soviet wilderness are, if not culpable in those crimes, then at least complicit.
Zygar’s verdict, however, does not carry a death sentence. Rather, he is calling on his compatriots to reflect, to learn, and to act.
Voroshilovgrad (Deep Vellum, 2016) by Serhiy Zhadan (translated by Isaac Wheeler and Reilly Costigan-Humes)
I should have read Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad ages ago – but I’m not sure I would have understood it as fully as I think I did reading it this year.
Originally written in 2012, and deriving its title from the Soviet-era name for Luhansk, the novel does as much as any contemporary work to convey the trauma of Russia’s imperialism, its interference, and its wars on Ukraine.
Zhadan’s prose (which slips into poetry) is populated by people who are profoundly stuck, held hostage to an illegible landscape of cities in which there is no real life, connected by roads on which there is no real traffic.
And yet here, too, there is optimism. Long before I could imagine war’s horrors, Zhadan showed both the horrors wrought by hopelessness, and the relentlessness with which the human spirit will resist.
Late Soviet Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Abby Innes
Optimism is, admittedly, harder to find in Abby Innes’s provocative – and provocatively titled – Late Soviet Britain. A political sociologist at the London School of Economics who has spent most of her career writing about Central and Eastern Europe, Innes writes a parallel history of the calcification of policymaking in the 1970s and 1980s Soviet Bloc and in the post-financial crisis West, and the ways in which that undermines effective political and economic governance.
By showing the similarities in the pathologies faced both by state-socialist and neoliberal systems, including a dogmatic adherence to pseudo-scientific economic theories and a rejection of empirical evidence to the contrary, Innes demonstrates that the problem isn’t where you are on the left-right spectrum – it’s whether you’re so locked into your place and can’t think straight.
The good news, of course, is that liberal systems leave considerably more room for debate and contestation. And that means there’s hope for learning at least some of these lessons before it’s too late.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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