Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia

Remnick gives a detailed portrait of Russian society in the 1990's. He points out how the promised hope of a new era of freedom has been delayed. How instead there is a government of corruption, a new class of superwealthy oligarchs, a market economy which has gone haywire, a persistence of very great poverty for large masses of the people. In the course of the work he speaks with Russians of all walks of life and presents a picture of a society confused and lost in its own contradictions. The new freedom has exhilarated but has not led to a productive and competent economy, or a fair political system. Remnick sees the strong absolutist and obscurantist elements in Russian society. In talking to the literary giant Solzhenitzsyn, Remnick does not meet a liberal but rather a true believer who supports an absolutist Russian Orthodox vision of the world. My friend Moshe Fushman a former citizen of the former Soviet Union says that this is one of the best books on Russia he has read, and compares it favorably to Hedrick Smith's 'The Russians'. I found it however to be for long stretches quite predictable and prosaic. Remnick ends up on a positive optimistic note about Russia's democratic future. But from the evidence he presents I would not bet on it.

This book bills itself as a history of the past 10 years after the fall of the Soviet Empire, and it does just that. There is no denying that the author, David Remnick is the king of current Russian society structure. The book not only focuses on who has power and what hey are doing with it, but it digs deeper down to the Joe everybody and what it is like to live in a country that continues to fall into lower and lower standards of living. As far as who has the power now, that is a mix of old political cronies and new upstart organized crime figures with a few brave capitalists thrown into the mix. This is a well thought out and constructed book and keeps you interested. Just when you have had a good dose of heavy economic issues we go to the war in Chechnya, which keeps the pace up. He has peppered the book with interesting interviews and massive dose of good old fashion reporting. You can tell he worked very hard on this book, there is nothing left in the air. Each conclusion or statement is backed up in the writing. You also get the true love he has for the country and the people, the emotion comes through the writing and makes the book more then just a historical report. The writing is very good and challenging, this is not a book you can read and watch TV at the same time, you really need to and want to sink your teeth into it. If you are looking to learn something and enjoy it at the same time then this would be a very good buy.

Remnick's writing as a vehicle for depicting current life in Russia may engross you more than fiction.But you're not being served entertainment. The book skillfully integrates fact, opinion and analysis from a multitude of personalities in contemporary Russia and the former Soviet republics.Solzhenitsyn, Zhirinovsky, Gusinsky, Stalin's portraitist: the list of interviews goes on and on.A Russian emigre friend and I spent a couple hours one evening discussing the seeds of thought planted by this book.

Author David Remnick continues where he left off from his masterpiece "Lenin's Tomb" by following events in Russia first hand as the country struggled with the advent of democracy and capitalism. Particularly fascinating is Boris Yeltsin, who is as central to this story as he was to life in Russia in the century's last decade. Yeltsin's tragic encounter in Chechnya is particularly poignant. This is a book that will fill you with concern, but also hope for Russia's future. Perhaps no Westerner knows Russia better than Remnick. His works are absolute must reading on the subject.

With the release of Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia, David Remnick further strengthens his reputation as one of America's premier journalists. The book is the sequel to Lenin's Tomb, Remnick's superbly written Pulitzer Prize winning account of the fall of the Soviet Union. Resurrection continues where Lenin's Tomb left off, brilliantly chronicling Russia's painful effort to emerge from under the rubble of a collapsed system and recreate itself. Remnick lived and worked in Moscow between 1988 and 1991 as a Washington Post correspondent, witnessing and writing about the last days of the Soviet Empire. During his tenure at the Post and in more recent years, Remnick has traveled extensively throughout Russia and the former Soviet Republics, conducting countless interviews with key Russian political figures, businessmen, cultural icons, and ordinary citizens. Fluent in Russian, he possesses an impressive depth and breadth of knowledge of Russian and Soviet history, politics, and culture--tools he effectively employs to enhance the reader's understanding of events and personalities in modern-day Russia. In Resurrection, history, politics, and biography are skillfully woven together to create a beautiful, tightly knit journalistic tapestry. Not merely content with recounting events, Remnick probes the deeper currents that underlie these events and give them their meaning. His writing is vivid and passionate, and his sharp journalistic instincts and keen understanding of human nature enable him to perceive and analyze crucial details. Penetrating, insightful, and tragic, his account of the war in Chechnya is Remnick at his best. He traces the Chechen struggle with Russia from the nineteenth century to the present, a legacy of Czarist and Soviet brutality and domination culminating in Stalin's 1944 mass expulsion of the Chechen population to the wastelands of Kazakstan. He further describes the influence the Chechens have had on the Russian psyche, as depicted in the literature of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and others. "In verse and prose, the Chechen becomes more of a trope than a man; he is nature itself--untamable, wild, raw" (267). Or, as Remnick also writes, "In the Russian imagination... Chechnya is an obsession, an image of Islamic defiance, an embodiment of the primitive, the devious, the elusive" (266).It is this defiant, mafia-ridden tiny republic that Russian President Boris Yeltsin sought to tame in November 1994, an enterprise that was to take no more than two hours, according to then Defense Minister Pavel Grachev. In the weeks before the conflict, conservatives in the Kremlin elite--including Grachev, Yeltsin's bodyguard Alexander Korzakhov, and Deputy Prime-Minister Oleg Soskovets--convinced Yeltsin to go ahead with plans to bomb the republic into submission. Yeltsin decided that he needed a short, victorious war to boost popular morale, and regain the support of a constitu