Kicking the Kremlin by Marc Bennetts covers Putin's rise to and consolidation of power, and dissidence against him. It was interesting and well constructed, but in many ways, I wish either that I'd picked a book with a slightly different focus, or that this book had been written later and, essentially, was a different book itself.
Bennetts raised several key points that I hadn't necessarily explicitly understood about Russia. The first is the importance of the 'good tsar, bad boyars' mentality that has persisted throughout the ages, which allows Russians to be dissatisfied with aspects of their lives, and yet still support the man in charge, because localise this dissatisfaction on their regional officials.
Related to this is the idea that Western-style democracy simply doesn't and won't work in Russia, justified by the great demographic and geographic spread of its people, and by historical example.
All politicians aim to create an 'us' and a 'them', but Putin has been very successful at this. I wasn't familiar with the situation surrounding Putin's rise to power, but it was interesting to see how the war in Chechnya created an Other and a sense of fear, and how he leveraged this to increase his popularity and demonstrate that he was the man for the job. There are obvious parallels here to the war in Ukraine and the current NATO/Russia tension but the book can't draw them out because it concludes its narrative in 2013 and was published a month before the annexation of the Crimea in March 2014.
In the West, our picture of protest in Russia is one of Pussy Riot and mass demonstrations, but Bennetts draws out the lack of unity amongst dissenters. There's the far right, the far left, and many small groups in between, but there isn't - or maybe I should say wasn't, as of the end of the book - any mass movement that was universally appealing to people dissatisfied with Putin. Even people who were successful rallying points, like anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, had trouble connecting with wider audiences and movements.
Bennetts also highlights the 'why now?' aspect of to the dissidence faced by Putin, who has been in power (including the time he spent as Prime Minister with his ally Medvedev as President) since the turn of the century. After the societal trauma of the collapse of the USSR and the tumult of the Yeltsin years, people liked Putin because he brought stability and economic security. They weren't so concerned with abstract political freedoms so long as there was bread on the table. Now, however, there is an younger generation who only remember these times as a child, if they remember them at all, and some do not feel that it should be an either/or scenario.
Overall, I'm not sure how relevant the book's conclusions, made in 2013, actually are. So much has happened in the interim - Crimea, Ukraine, M17, Sochi, Syria, just general tension between Russia and NATO/the US - that, in many ways, Kicking the Kremlin has more of a historical feel than a current affairs one. As a result, I've come away feeling like I don't have solid understanding of dissidence in Russia, despite reading a whole book on it. Essentially, for whatever is happening today, all that I've read is just the backstory, and I guess that's why it was in the bargain bin at the bookshop.
EDIT: It was been brought to my attention in the comments that Bennetts released an updated version of Kicking the Kremlin this year entitled I'm Going to Ruin Their Lives. I haven't read it (yet), but if he grapples with everything as well as he does in Kicking the Kremlin while discussing the current situation in Russia, I imagine it would be well worth the time.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My opinion is my own.
Man, I am on a roll choosing to read and review books that I am not in the mood for. Indiscretion scraped me raw emotionally and I eventually gave up just after the 60% mark. I couldn't deal with all the drama and heartache. On the other hand, I did appreciate the unique setting - 1950s Andalusia, and it had in-depth scene-setting and character-building, to say the least. However, there were also some other aspects that kept me from enjoying Indiscretion.
The writing was, at times, very florid, and everything was always described in such detail, which was sometimes atmospheric and sometimes excruciating. The female characters - with the exception of our kind, virginal heroine - were all horribly cruel, not to mention the male characters. The hero was a sullen man-whore, and I couldn't stand the way the heroine's father treated her. Actually, I couldn't really stand the way anybody treated anyone. That's my brief take.
I haven't given Indiscretion a star rating, because I didn't finish it and that seems unfair. Instead, I've brainstormed people for whom this book might work for, and people who might have a similar response to me.
This book might be a hit with:
- People who like/feel like reading something stylistically similar to old school epic saga romances of old, complete with dynastic complications and loads of angst.
- People with time on their hands.
- People who make forays into women's fiction and literary fiction.
This book might not be a hit with:
- People who have had enough of the real world at the moment and want to read for escapism.
- People who don't want to deal with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a barely reformed hero and duplicitous and cruel family members.
- People who will become impatient with pages of descriptions and backstory.
Skybound by Aleksandr Voinov had its merits. It's a very short novella (only 44 pages), so the plot was a bit rushed, but the characterisation was solid and the relationship arc was reasonable. It's very lyrically written. However, I also have some reservations about Skybound, if my thoughts are concrete enough to be called that. Maybe a better way of phrasing it is that there are some things that sit uneasily together for me, and which people definitely need to consider when thinking if this book is right for them.
This is largely because it's set in the last days of World War Two, and is the romance of a German Luftwaffe pilot, Baldur Vogt, and Felix, a mechanic who works on the planes. Felix has admired and loved the flying ace from afar, but after he pulls Vogt from the flaming wreck of his plane, the two develop a friendship with undercurrents of something more. Vogt and Felix escape the airfield for a weekend, only to return to to the realities of the Russian advance on Berlin.
As much as the central romance itself was well constructed, I think I would have felt a lot easier about the characters and their setting if they had shown more emotional angst. There was some, but it was brief and low-key and I didn't feel it was in proportion with the fact that Felix and Baldur are two gay men (and, later, a gay couple) in Nazi Germany. While they had some concerns about being outed, these were less in, say, The Imitation Game, set in Britain during the same period. Even if the mechanisms of the state had broken down at this point and people were no longer being prosecuted for homosexuality, I feel like 10+ years of living in a toxic, openly homophobic environment would have had an effect on the characters, both in terms of paranoia about being outed and their own acceptance of their sexuality. There is brief mention of the latter with regards to Felix, but by and large, I didn't see this, and I feel a bit uncomfortable about that, like it's an erasure of the Nazi regime's genocidal homophobia.
The lack of more than low-level fear or angst extends to more aspects of the book as well, particularly the Russians closing in. While this drives the plot in the final scenes of the book, it is very underdeveloped until then, appearing like a bolt out the blue.
I respect that it's a novella, so it can't include masses of content or suspense-building, but I felt both these areas were pretty essential if you are going to have an M/M romance set in Nazi Germany that uses fear of the Red Army's brutality to move your plot along.
Voinov puts a lot of effort into painting a picture of the airfield, with details of the Luftwaffe and planes, but there is none of the same effort put into recreating other parts of the society. On some level, I think this was a conscious decision, part of efforts to portray Felix, Baldur and their ilk as citizens and soldiers of Germany and distinguish them from the Nazi establishment. But part of what did make me uncomfortable with the story is that the airfield is presented as a bubble, with little external input or output, even from other military establishments. But focusing on the technical aspects of the planes and not mentioning where Baldur's orders were coming from doesn't change the realities of the situation.
And this is where my mind gets stuck, because an idealistic part of me wants to believe multiple experiences of the war can exist side-by-side without impinging on each other, but another part also recognises that in order to focus on a story like Felix and Baldur's, a thousand others are pushed out of the frame. Reading Elie Wiesel's Night after I read Skybound, but before I wrote this review, I was reminded that, at the same time that Baldur and Felix took that weekend away with ample food and warmth and petrol, the survivors of concentration camps were being forced to make death marches through snow-covered Poland and Germany ahead of the liberating forces.
These are all just jumbled thoughts, and I'm not the person to give them any weight or validity, if they're to have any at all. But I do think that maybe 44 pages are insufficient to tackle all the context that needs to be addressed in a romance with a Third Reich setting. I think that would be the case with a heterosexual romance, but it's doubly so with a gay romance.
In the end, I haven't rated Skybound, because I don't feel like my thoughts are enough of a cohesive critique to rate it negatively, but I would also feel uncomfortable giving it a rating that was divorced from them.
