Russians: The People behind the Power Author: Gregory Feifer | Language: English | ISBN:
B0092XN8L4 | Format: PDF
Russians: The People behind the Power Description
From former NPR Moscow correspondent Gregory Feifer comes an incisive portrait that draws on vivid personal stories to portray the forces that have shaped the Russian character for centuries-and continue to do so today.
RUSSIANS explores the seeming paradoxes of life in Russia by unraveling the nature of its people: what is it in their history, their desires, and their conception of themselves that makes them baffling to the West? Using the insights of his decade as a journalist in Russia, Feifer corrects pervasive misconceptions by showing that much of what appears inexplicable about the country is logical when seen from the inside. He gets to the heart of why the world's leading energy producer continues to exasperate many in the international community. And he makes clear why President Vladimir Putin remains popular even as the gap widens between the super-rich and the great majority of poor.
Traversing the world's largest country from the violent North Caucasus to Arctic Siberia, Feifer conducted hundreds of intimate conversations about everything from sex and vodka to Russia's complex relationship with the world. From fabulously wealthy oligarchs to the destitute elderly babushki who beg in Moscow's streets, he tells the story of a society bursting with vitality under a leadership rooted in tradition and often on the edge of collapse despite its authoritarian power.
Feifer also draws on formative experiences in Russia's past and illustrative workings of its culture to shed much-needed light on the purposely hidden functioning of its society before, during, and after communism. Woven throughout is an intimate, first-person account of his family history, from his Russian mother's coming of age among Moscow's bohemian artistic elite to his American father's harrowing vodka-fueled run-ins with the KGB.
What emerges is a rare portrait of a unique land of extremes whose forbidding geography, merciless climate, and crushing corruption has nevertheless produced some of the world's greatest art and some of its most remarkable scientific advances. RUSSIANS is an expertly observed, gripping profile of a people who will continue challenging the West for the foreseeable future.
- File Size: 1359 KB
- Print Length: 360 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1455509647
- Publisher: Twelve (February 18, 2014)
- Sold by: Hachette Book Group
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0092XN8L4
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,882 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Ideologies & Doctrines > Communism & Socialism
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Ideologies & Doctrines > Communism & Socialism - #3
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > International & World Politics - #4
in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Ideologies & Doctrines > Communism & Socialism
More and more, Russia -- and her controversial but popular president Vladimir Putin -- have been in the news. We have just witnessed naked aggression against a neighboring country, the Ukraine; in 2008 Putin and his Russian army also interfered in Georgia. Georgia, a tiny country was bullied, invaded, and lost considerable territory to the Russian Federation. The Russian people cheered their armed forces and their president through all these acts of naked force and aggression.
For Westerners, it is difficult to understand why Putin remains so popular, despite the disparity of wealth in Russia today, his despotic rule that squelches citizens' civil rights, and his repeated bellicosity toward Russia's neighbors -- but the fact remains that he is no only popular, but his policies are widely applauded by an adulatory and admiring populace. Putin actually may have been encouraged and goaded into both autocratic rule and foreign bellicosity by the Russian people themselves! In the minds of many Russians and a sizable number of the Americans, Putin may be doing a better job for Russia than Obama is doing for the U.S., and according to recent opinion polls, in both the U.S. and Russia, the reverse may not be the case!
This engaging book will help Americans and English-speaking readers to understand the Russian mentality. If Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his epic, The Gulag Archipelago, helped us understand the Russian mind while being crushed by communist tyranny, Gregory Feifer goes a long way to help us understand the Russian people in relative but inchoate freedom, obviously still bearing in their psyche the deep marks left by 70 years of crushing of totalitarianism, lies, and deception.
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