About this item
A memoir of revolution, reaction, and Russian men's fashionIn this crackling memoir, the journalist and novelist Michael Idov recounts the tempestuous years he spent living alongside -- and closely observing -- the media and cultural elite of Putin's Russia. After accepting a surprise offer to become the editor in chief of GQ Russia, Idov and his family arrive in a Moscow still seething from a dubious election and the mass anti-Putin rallies that erupted in response. Idov is fascinated by the political turmoil but nonetheless finds himself pulled in unlikely directions. He becomes a tabloid celebrity, acts in a Russian movie with Snoop Dogg, befriends the members of Pussy Riot, punches an anti-Semitic magazine editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre, sells an autobiographical sitcom pilot that is later changed into an anti-American farce, and writes Russia's top-grossing domestic movie of 2015. Meanwhile, he becomes disillusioned with the splintering opposition to Putin and is briefly attracted to a kind of jaded Putinism lite -- until Russia's invasion of Ukraine thoroughly changes his mind.In Dressed Up for a Riot, Idov writes openly, sensitively, and stingingly about life in Moscow and his place in a media apparatus that sometimes undermined but more often bolstered a state system defined by cynicism, corruption, and the fanning of fake news. With humor and intelligence, he offers a close-up glimpse of what a declining world power can become.
About the Author
Within weeks of graduation, I moved to New York City and began an extended spell of job-hopping. From 1998 to 2004, I wrote music listings for the Village Voice, bluffed my way through a very brief career as a restaurant critic at Time Out New York, and anchored a news show at NTV, a Russian television network. In 2005, after a disastrous detour into small business that gave birth to "Ground Up," I happily returned to writing, both fiction and articles for New York Magazine. I also write a good deal of journalism in Russian; a Russian version of Ground Up will be published in the fall of 2009. Finally, I am working on a picture book about unsung icons of Soviet design for Rizzoli. It should be out in early 2011.
