Putin Country

January 25, 2016
Twenty-five years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet Russia is still without a stable national identity or a functioning democracy. Garrels (Naked in Baghdad), a former NPR foreign correspondent, illuminates these observations in her journey into the everyday lives of 21st-century Russians. As she demonstrates, decades of economic turmoil, political corruption, and the mass emigration of young and wealthy Russians to America and Western Europe have taken a heavy toll. Using the region of Chelyabinsk, formerly the site of the USSR’s nuclear program, as a microcosm, the author profiles citizens from all walks of life with compassion and sincerity. Among the different people interviewed, two of the main constants are support for Vladimir Putin and the belief that the West is more at fault for the poverty and corruption surrounding them than their own government. While Garrels takes pain to include voices willing to condemn Putin’s administration in her exposé, most of the interviewees are either unaware of, or willfully blind to, the worst of their government. This book persuasively asserts that too little has changed in Russia since the days of the Soviet Union.

November 1, 2015
Narrative snapshots over several decades of a Russia riven by contradictions, aspirations, and entrenched defenses. Former NPR foreign correspondent Garrels (Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War as Seen by NPR's Correspondent Anne Garrels, 2003) offers finely delineated, meticulously researched dispatches from a region in Russia that seemed to her both typical of a certain Russian provincialism and arbitrarily chosen: Chelyabinsk, on the southern edge of the Ural Mountains. Since 1993, then Moscow-based correspondent Garrels used Chelyabinsk, once the hub of the Soviet military-industrial complex, as a kind of barometer to gauge how the entire country was faring, from the initial economic chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union to the yearning for strong-armed stability under President Vladimir Putin. In turn, the author examines aspects of this vastly changed society, once utterly insulated from the world but now awash in foreign goods, languages, and TV shows, a country of proud people both leaning toward a Western model and yet fiercely defensive about "where they fit into the world." Garrels finds the Russians sick and tired of being blamed by the world community--e.g., for the takeover of Crimea, for suppressing free speech, etc.--and, "in the absence of a national idea," she asserts, they have "fallen into blaming outsiders instead of dealing with the issues at hand." Those issues involve big-time corruption in most aspects of Russian life, from government to education to the military; the continued blight of alcoholism and the early mortality rate for men; the low birth rate and strain on women in jobs and family; the denial of the existence of special needs children and resistance to adoption by foreigners; the scandalously shabby services and salaries in hospitals; the refusal to address the high HIV rate; and the Orthodox Church's "cozy relationship" with the Kremlin. In essence, Garrels shows how the gloomy sense of "Russian fatalism" poisons all aspects of society. A collection of scrupulous, timely journalistic portraits.

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Starred review from February 15, 2016
Despite all its prominence on the world stage, Russia remains a mystery to most Westerners. For more than 20 years, veteran NPR correspondent Garrels has enjoyed rare, if not entirely unfettered, access to the quotidian as well as the unorthodox aspects of post-USSR society. Using the city of Chelyabinsk as her base, Garrels interviews everyone from undertakers to addicts, entrepreneurs to orphans, homosexuals to religious fanatics to paint a complex and nuanced portrait of a culture coming to grips with the realities of the twenty-first century in a nation ruled by the mercurial and often malevolent Vladimir Putin. Her deep history with the people of this once vital nuclear-industrial region serves her well, giving her a trustworthy if tenuous vantage point from which to compare the relativity of freedoms, the pervasiveness of corruption, and the wishful, if not always warranted, loyalty Putin evokes. A critical and crucial study of a country with which America has always had a volatile connection, Garrels' essays cover vital ground and are essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the myriad issues that inform U.S.-Russian relations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2015

In her latest book, former National Public Radio foreign correspondent Garrels (Naked in Bagdad) transports readers to the "real" Russia, meaning the Russia outside the financial, commercial, cultural, and entertainment center of Moscow. Garrels focuses this journey on the metropolitan area of Chelyabinsk, an administrative base that is home to more than a million people, and that the author has been visiting since 1993. In a narrative that reads almost like a series of short stories, Garrels intertwines her relationship with Russia and Chelyabinsk with accounts from various segments of the population including taxi drivers, LGBTQ activists, Russian Orthodoxy and Muslim communities, and old-time communists. The author looks at issues such as human rights, free speech, and nuclear pollution to create a fascinating study of the Russia that is the foundation of much of Vladimir Putin's power. VERDICT This book will be of interest to general readers seeking to learn more about the country that exists beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as those wanting to gain better insight into its interior political and social conditions. [See Prepub Alert, 10/5/15.]--John Sandstrom, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2015

Twenty years ago, George Polk Award-winning journalist Garrels began visiting a crumbling military-industrial center called Chelyabinsk that lies 1,000 miles east of Moscow. Here she profiles economic chaos, political corruption, and surging xenophobia, bursting cosmopolitanism and sudden wealth for rising professionals and mafiosi, and the determination of activists, evangelicals, and a surprisingly lively gay culture--all to clarify what the fall of communism has meant for the population at large. And she explains why so many Russians love Vladimir Putin.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.