Customer Reviews
A depressed state - By: tallpete33, 19 Jun 2008 
Anna Politkovskaya hates Akaky Putin. Really hates him. She says soin one of the final chapters, speaking as a Muscovite who has no desire to relive the Soviet union of the 70s & 80s.
This is a brave & shocking book. It is basically several chapters listing the ills of Russia under Putin. It is worth noting at this point that a lot of the troubles started under Yeltsin but Putin's inertia or even condoning of the situation has exacerbated the problems greatly.
It starts with the Russian army, committing horrific crimesin Chechnyain the name of counter-terrorism. One chapter deals with the rape & murder of a village girl by a drunken colonel. What makes this story worthy of note is not the crimes, but the fact that the colonel was actually punished for it. It takes a brave & determined prosecutorin Russia to make military crimes stick.
Another chapter deals with individuals & how they fared under the new regime. Those who adapted & learnt how to play the system (i.e. bribe) prospered. A talented scientist who found the state safety net taken away foundered & inevitably turned to drink. A nuclear submarine commander goes unpaid for months on end feeding his family on meager rations. His whole crew walk to work with no money for petrolin the navy town of Kamchatka.
The most outrageous chapter was entitled "How to Misappropriate Property with the Connivance of government". We are not talking paper clips here. We are talking oil & utility companies, taken at will by the mafia with strong-arm tactics & forged documents with genuine shareholders held back at roadblocks by the policein the pay of the oligarchs. Think the Kray twins walking into Canary Wharf & taking control of BP with the help of the Met Police & you're getting half of the picture.
This is not a book about Putin. We do not learn much about him apart from the fact he is ex-KGB & his stance reflects that. Whereas not seen to encourage it,in his country war crimes, corruption & poverty go unchecked. State assets have been divided up amongst the few as the rich get richer. The country outside Moscow seems so be of little interest & the have-notsin the capital & beyond have no voice & no fightin them to voice their anger at their country's betrayal. They know their voices will not be heard.
This is not a cohesive & definitive book on the new Russia or Putin, & so is not a fluent read but what Politkovskaya says has to be taken notice of.
Postscript - On October 7, 2006, Politkovskaya was found shot deadin the elevator of her apartment blockin central Moscow
Useful but flawed. - By: Cole Davis, 15 Jan 2006 
This contains some useful journalism. Some of the reports are searingin their clarity & certainly reflect & enhance my first-hand knowledge of Russia. Unfortunately, the author doesn't know when to omit unnecessary details, at times appears just to have welded together a series of interviews & major events & hasn't organised the book coherently.
In making her points, the author is at times contradictory, presenting unpunished misconduct as evidence of untrammeled corruption & abuse of power & then referring to appropriate sanctionsin the end-notes. Worse still, her analysis of the country's situation is superficial, bar-room stuff, her case against Putin himself unproven.
Criminal State - By: Pieter, 13 Aug 2005 
The brave Anna Politkovskaya revealed the reality of Russia todayin this sad, sometimes horrifying book. After a brief window period of freedom under Yeltsin, Russia has rapidly become a vast swamp of corruption, oppression & deception under Putin. Anna paid with her life for her courageous opposition to the ruling class.
Politkovskaya tells of the trouble & suffering of ordinary people who are humiliated & exploited by the criminal nomenklatura. For example Nina Levurda, whoin trying to establish the truth about her son's deathin the Chechen War, became a victim of this system that when not cruel, is completely indifferent to the individual. This & other cases are discussedin 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 & extremism prevalentin the army & the state apparatus. There are sections dealing with war criminals, brutality against privatesin the military, government complicityin crime, the corruptionin the judiciary, the struggle to survivein places like Kamchatka, & racism against people with a non-Slavic appearance.
Russia's stability is of a monstrous type, where power means everything, few people hold the lawin any regard, bribes keep business & the state running, & 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 & the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky demonstrate what a vindictive little man Putin is & how he is steering the country towards fascism.
This process of crushing dissent & stifling freedom has been escalating throughout Putin's first presidential term & shows no sign of abating during the second. The Western press has mostly not showed great interestin this slide to oppressionin Russia. It is hard not to write Russia off when confronted by the experiencesin this book: the deliberate cruelties, the cold indifference & 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.
If you read one book on present day Russia - this is it! - By: , 19 Oct 2004 Anna Politkovskaya is a hero for all she has done to carry the torch of humanity & civil rightsin present day Russia. She has seen the dark under-belly of Putin's Russia through her terrifying experiencesin war-torn Chechnya, as a mediatorin the Nord Ost siege & 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 & 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 & fundamental civil rights. Russia is being systematically regressed into a quasi-dictatorship & 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 & freedom loving people to look beyond the Russia of popular cariciature & see the true state of a long suffering & manipulated people.
Politkovskaya's is a rare voicein present day Russia & she deserves to be heard.
Superb work - essential reading! - By: Allison Hargreaves, 18 Oct 2004 Anna Politkovskaya is a hero for all she has done to carry the torch of humanity & civil rightsin present day Russia. She has seen the dark under-belly of Putin's Russia through her terrifying experiencesin war-torn Chechnya, as a mediatorin the Nord Ost siege & 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 & 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 & fundamental civil rights. Russia is being systematically regressed into a quasi-dictatorship & 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 & freedom loving people to look beyond the Russia of popular cariciature & see the true state of a long suffering & manipulated people.
Politkovskaya's is a rare voicein present day Russia & she deserves to be heard.
