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WINNER OF THE 2016 ORWELL PRIZE FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR "Fast-paced and excellently written ... much needed, dispassionate and eminently readable." - New York Times "Filled with sparkling prose and deep analysis." -The Wall Street Journal How did a country that embraced freedom and market reform 25 years ago end up as an autocratic police state bent on confrontation with America? The Invention of Russia reaches back to the dark days of the cold war to tell the story of Russia's stealthy and largely unchronicled counter revolution. A correspondent for the Economist who grew up in Moscow, Ostrovsky astutely explains the phenomenon of Valdimir Putin - his rise and impervious longevity, his use of hybrid warfare, sophisticated disinformation campaigns, and the alarming crescendo of his military interventions. One of Putin's first acts was to reverse Gorbachev's decision to end media censorship and Ostrovsky argues that the Russian media has done more to shape the fate of the country since the collapse of the Soviet Union than its politicians. The new Russia is a cynical operation, where perpetual fear and perpetual war are fueled by a web of lies as the media peddles myths to justify the invasion of Ukraine, cheers the bombing of Syria, and goads its new tsar to go nuclear. Putin pioneered a new and dangerously appealing form of demagogic populism --oblivious to facts and deceptively manipulative - that has now been embraced by an admiring Donald Trump. Twenty five years after the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin, Russia and America are again heading toward a confrontation, but this course was far froom inevitable. With this riveting and essential account of how we got there - of the many mistakes and false steps along the way - Ostrovsky emerges as Russia's most gifted chronicler.



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