Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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44 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Criminal State, 13 Aug 2005
The brave Anna Politkovskaya revealed the reality of Russia today in this sad, sometimes horrifying book. After a brief window period of freedom under Yeltsin, Russia has rapidly become a vast swamp of corruption, oppression and deception under Putin. Anna paid with her life for her courageous opposition to the ruling class.
Politkovskaya tells of the trouble and suffering of ordinary people who are humiliated and exploited by the criminal nomenklatura. For example Nina Levurda, who in trying to establish the truth about her son's death in the Chechen War, became a victim of this system that when not cruel, is completely indifferent to the individual. This and other cases are discussed in the chapter My Country's Army And Its Mothers.
In Russia, people imitate the man at the top, thus Putin is the one who shapes Russian society. It is mainly he who is to blame for the brutality and extremism prevalent in the army and the state apparatus. There are sections dealing with war criminals, brutality against privates in the military, government complicity in crime, the corruption in the judiciary, the struggle to survive in places like Kamchatka, and racism against people with a non-Slavic appearance.
Russia's stability is of a monstrous type, where power means everything, few people hold the law in any regard, bribes keep business and the state running, and a free press has almost disappeared. Putin's bureaucrats have taken corruption to new records, unheard of even under Yeltsin or the Communists. As a lieutenant-colonel who never made it to the rank of colonel, he has the mentality of a Soviet secret policeman. The Yukos affair and the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky demonstrate what a vindictive little man Putin is and how he is steering the country towards fascism.
This process of crushing dissent and stifling freedom has been escalating throughout Putin's first presidential term and shows no sign of abating during the second. The Western press has mostly not showed great interest in this slide to oppression in Russia. It is hard not to write Russia off when confronted by the experiences in this book: the deliberate cruelties, the cold indifference and the manipulation of the media. Mercifully there are still people like Lev Ponomarev who are brave enough to speak out. This disturbing book concludes with explanatory notes containing references.
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34 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you read one book on present day Russia - this is it!, 19 Oct 2004
By A Customer
Anna Politkovskaya is a hero for all she has done to carry the torch of humanity and civil rights in present day Russia. She has seen the dark under-belly of Putin's Russia through her terrifying experiences in war-torn Chechnya, as a mediator in the Nord Ost siege and lately by being poisoning at the hands of the Russian Security Services whilst en route to Beslan.Her writing is superbly erudite as one would expect of someone who has been at the cutting edge of Russian journalism through the cataclysmic collapse of the USSR and the tumultuous ninties. She paints a bleak, but not hopeless, picture of how Putin has exploited the war on terror to roll back Russian democracy, freedom of speech and fundamental civil rights. Russia is being systematically regressed into a quasi-dictatorship and so a new menace is rising on the door step of Europe. Putin is devestatingly deconstructed to reveal a KGB apparachik whose outlook on the world is shaped through the prism of a repressive, but deeply manipulative, secret police mindset. This is book is a call to all decent and freedom loving people to look beyond the Russia of popular cariciature and see the true state of a long suffering and manipulated people. Politkovskaya's is a rare voice in present day Russia and she deserves to be heard.
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19 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb work - essential reading!, 18 Oct 2004
Anna Politkovskaya is a hero for all she has done to carry the torch of humanity and civil rights in present day Russia. She has seen the dark under-belly of Putin's Russia through her terrifying experiences in war-torn Chechnya, as a mediator in the Nord Ost siege and lately by being poisoning at the hands of the Russian Security Services whilst en route to Beslan.Her writing is superbly erudite as one would expect of someone who has been at the cutting edge of Russian journalism through the cataclysmic collapse of the USSR and the tumultuous ninties. She paints a bleak, but not hopeless, picture of how Putin has exploited the war on terror to roll back Russian democracy, freedom of speech and fundamental civil rights. Russia is being systematically regressed into a quasi-dictatorship and so a new menace is rising on the door step of Europe. Putin is devestatingly deconstructed to reveal a KGB apparachik whose outlook on the world is shaped through the prism of a repressive, but deeply manipulative, secret police mindset. This is book is a call to all sane and freedom loving people to look beyond the Russia of popular cariciature and see the true state of a long suffering and manipulated people. Politkovskaya's is a rare voice in present day Russia and she deserves to be heard.
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