Pravda Ha Ha

True Travels to the End of Europe

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on Waterstones.com
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 14 Jan 2020 | Archive Date 31 Oct 2019

Talking about this book? Use #PravdaHaHa #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

An unsettling, timely, and darkly comic exposé of Putin's Russia and European disintegration from highly acclaimed travel writer Rory MacLean.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were – for most Brits and Americans – part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev.

As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists – both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists – have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.

An unsettling, timely, and darkly comic exposé of Putin's Russia and European disintegration from highly acclaimed travel writer Rory MacLean.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory...


Advance Praise

'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' - John le Carré

'No one writes quite like Rory MacLean' - Robert Macfarlane

'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' - John le Carré

'No...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781408896525
PRICE US$27.00 (USD)
PAGES 368

Average rating from 10 members


Featured Reviews

I was in West Berlin the day the wall fell and earlier that year I had visited Moscow, I have never visited a reunified Germany or a dissolute USSR and after reading this book I am not in a hurry to visit Moscow anytime soon, this book should be sold in the horror section because although the tale is engaging and interesting the story is horrific

Was this review helpful?

Join historian and travel writer Rory MacLean as he retraces backwards a journey made in the euphoric year of 1989 from Berlin to Moscow. Now 30 years later he makes both a physical and metaphysical journey through the lands that were once part of the unlamented (but not by all) Soviet Union. We are taken on a journey through Russia itself, to former soviet states and struggling Russian enclaves meeting along the way an eclectic collection of colorful characters.

Layer by layer a picture is painted of lands that owing to their geography were subject throughout history to wars, conquest, ever changing borders and a continue struggle to survive and define their purpose and identity. Russia is portrayed as a kleptocracy, Poland and Hungary as descending into illiberal authoritarianism and Estonia and the Ukraine as being trumatised by Russian aggression and interference.

Depopulation, corruption and xenophobia seem to proliferate throughout. The story of Eastern Europe following the collapse of the USSR is indeed a dispiriting one with the evaporation of so much hope and expectation. However with the absence of something like the Marshall Plan the consequences were perhaps inevitable. Not great reading if you take like the author an outward looking liberal approach but it will provide you if nothing else with a glimpse into lands not far away that provide a warning what happens when truth is replaced by lies and distortion.

Was this review helpful?

There's lots to enjoy, and even more to be worried about, in Rory Maclean's journey to Russia and back through Europe to the UK "to try to understand how it went wrong". The Russia section, which is the bulk of the book, is the most gripping and astounding section, although its effect is slightly reduced by the fact it follows a string of books examining Russia's current position (the best of which is probably Pomerantsev's Nothing is True...). After that it loses way a little but the parallels Maclean draws between the rise of the right in Poland and Hungary and Brexit are fascinating and well-made. Can't decide if the title is genius or a mistake though.

Was this review helpful?

Readers who liked this book also liked: