The Long Hangover by Shaun Walker review – Putin’s new Russia

Shaun Walker, for several years the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, describes his book as neither an apology for Vladimir Putin’s policies nor an anti-Putin polemic. It’s a fine line, but he is more successful than most of his western journalistic competitors in exploring the often contradictory attitudes that Russians hold towards their president and the hybrid system he is building on the basis of Russian nationalism, Soviet nostalgia and a striving for international respect.

Walker reports several illuminating interviews with people who hold “an often intangible longing for a past, if not the actual Soviet past, then at least for the sense of meaning that went with it”. There’s a strange but revealing encounter with Ivan Panikarov, a retired power station worker in Kolyma in Siberia, who has created a Gulag museum in his own flat. Amid the evidence of horror that he has spent years collecting, he shocks Walker with the claim that the western view of the Gulag is one-sided: “People fell in love in the camps, people got pregnant, it wasn’t all bad.”

At a higher level Russian politicians and historians have largely failed to make a proper analysis of Stalin’s crimes, Walker writes. They acknowledge the terror but not the guilt, refusing to see that almost everyone who lived through the Stalin period was partially both a victim and a perpetrator. But Walker argues that the west is wrong to contrast Russia’s failure to come to terms with the grimmest aspects of its history with Germany’s success in doing so. A better comparison is Spain where, after Franco’s death, all sides agreed not to inquire into past crimes.

Source: theguardian