Arkady Ostrovsky - The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News

Praise for The Invention of Russia

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE

WINNER OF THE CORNELIUE RYA N AWARD

FINALIST FOR THE LIONEL GELBER P RIZE

FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

Anyone who has spent time in Russia over the past thirty years should be deeply grateful for Arkady Ostrovskys fast-paced and excellently written book. Too often, the story of post-Soviet Russia is presented through a Western prism as a clash of good Westernizers and evil reactionaries, or as a lamentation about what the West could, and should, have done once it won the Cold War. Mr. Ostrovsky doesnt waste time on that. A first class journalist who has spent many years covering Russia for The Financial Times and The Economist, he is also a native of the Soviet Union, with an instinctive understanding of how politics, ideas, and daily life really work there.... For better or for worse, Mr. Putin has forced the world to reckon with a surly and combative Russia again. Mr. Ostrovky provides a much needed, dispassionate, and eminently readable explanation of how it happened.

Serge Schmemann, The New York Times

A real insiders story of Russias post-Soviet counter-revolutionan important and timely book.

Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag

Ostrovsky is particularly good at hearing the nuances and seeing how identity, ideology, and personal experience undermined hopes for democracy and reform.

The Washington Post

A clear-eyed and honest account... Informed, insightful, and highly readable.

The Dallas Morning News

Russia has always been a place where intellectuals, propagandists, viziers, and prophets have played a grand role. All the gangster-, KGB-, and oligarch-focused analyses of the countrys recent history have overlooked the men of ideas behind the tumultuous changes. Now comes Arkady Ostrovsky with a gripping intellectual history of the newspaper editors, ideologues, television gurus, and spin doctors who invented postSoviet Russia.

Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

The Invention of Russia is about the central themes that Orwell is most famous of all for... the importance of language, and how he or she who controls the language, controls the narrative. And although there are many strong and brave liberal voices in Russia, if you get control of social and traditional media, youve gone a long way to controlling the message.

William Waldegrave, chair of the judges awarding the Orwell Prize

Grippingly told and brimming with brilliant insights... A fascinating and compelling insider account of how power has been won and lost among Russias ruling elite.

Judges for the Overseas Press Clubs Cornelius Ryan Award for the best non-fiction book of the year on international affairs

A focused, bracing look at how the control of the media has helped plot the Russian political trajectory from dictatorship and back again.... Astute, accessible, and illuminating.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

This dazzling book flags up the conflicts over ideas, morality, and national destiny in Moscow politics from Gorbachev to Putina triumph of narrative skill and historical empathy based on personal experience and rigorous research.

Robert Service, author of Comrades! A History of World Communism

Essential, timely, and always gripping... Written with the narrative flair of a true chronicler of the mysteries of the Kremlin.

Simon Sebag-Montefiore, author of Stalin

A beguiling account... Ostrovsky demonstrates how the dominance of Putin was not an aberration.

The Guardian (London)

Arkady Ostrovsky traces the descent from the heady days of 1991 with deep local knowledge, a journalists fluent style and sharp eye for detail, and wit. He places much of the blame on those who owned and dominated the media in the fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Dominic Lieven, author of The End of Tsarist Russia

Sizzling reporting and razor-sharp analysis from a seasoned Russia-watcher. This timely, insightful, and revealing book is a must-read for anyone needing to understand where the Putin regime came fromand where it is heading.

Edward Lucas, author of The New Cold War

How post-Soviet Russia got from there to here makes a gripping story, told here brilliantly by a writer who watched it unfolding.

Tom Stoppard

I was gripped by Arkady Ostrovskys book. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to be more precisely informed about Russia today.

Ralph Fiennes

Russias surprisingly free media were once a powerful instrument of reform. In his illuminating and saddening account, Arkady Ostrovsky tells how all but a very few have turned insteaddeliberately, cynically, and on behalf of the stateto creating the distorted image of reality which shapes the country today.

Rodric Braithwaite, British Ambassador to the USSR 19881991, and author of Moscow 1941

For a decade Arkady Ostrovsky has been the most insightful foreign correspondent in Moscow, and in The Invention of Russia he uses his deep understanding of the country he loves to tell the gripping, tragic story of its recent history. A brilliantly original, illuminating, and essential book.

A. D. Miller, Booker short-listed author of Snowdrops

The Invention of Russia chronicles the power of the media, both in Soviet times and in Vladimir Putins Russia today.

NPRs Morning Edition

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE INVENTION OF RUSSIA

Arkady Ostrovsky is a Russian-born journalist who has spent the last sixteen years reporting from Moscow, first for the Financial Times and then as bureau chief and Russia and East European editor for The Economist. His articles for the Financial Times were the first to warn of Putins reactionary agenda and to chronicle the behind the scenes resurgence of the state security services. He was also the first to identify Putins manipulation of the media and deliberate dissemination of false news as a key pillar of his foreign policy and domestic agenda. He has a PhD in English literature from the University of Cambridge and his translation of Tom Stoppards The Coast of Utopia has been published and staged to great acclaim in Russia. The Invention of Russia won the Orwell Prize and the Overseas Press Clubs Cornelius Ryan Award and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber prize.

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First published in Great Britain by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd., 2015

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017

Published with a new preface in Penguin Books 2017

Copyright 2015, 2017 by Arkady Ostrovsky

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Extracts from articles by the author published in the Financial Times and The Economist are reprinted with permission.

Ebook ISBN 9780399564185

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