As per my quest to jot thoughts down about each of the books I'm reading in 2008...
The New Cold War is a useful primer on the Putin years of Russian history. Edward Lucas, the author and a Moscow correspondent for The Economist, draws on his impressively comprehensive knowledge of recent Eurasian politics to call the Kremlin on its re-Sovietization, and to identify the challenges an increasingly powerful Russia will pose to the West. The book is packed with statistics and exposition, with very little narrative or dramatic tension to pull the reader through those percentage signs. The tone is unrelentingly negative. At one point, Mr. Lucas notes, "It is important to show [Russians] that our dislike of the Kremlin is not motivated by russophobia." Unfortunately, Mr. Lucas has not managed that particular trick here. At times his writing reads like an old anti-Soviet propaganda tract from the McCarthy era. And given the unrelentingly negative tone, I would have appreciated more acknowledgement that people who aren't democracy activists or imprisoned former oligarchs, you know, regular plumbers and auto mechanics in St. Petersburg or Nizhny Novgorod, don't share Mr. Lucas's anti-Kremlin bias. This national trait of autocratic acceptance seems perhaps to exasperate Mr. Lucas, as it does many Western journalists. It seems not to inspire in Mr. Lucas much curiosity.
And that's a shame, because it seems to me that awakening the sleeping bear, that is, awakening the Russian people's will toward democracy, could be the quickest way to inspire the Kremlin to loosen control over voting behaviour and the press. In fact, a normative dimension is perhaps this book's biggest weakness. On topic after topic Mr. Lucas expertly describes the way the Kremlin has tightened its grip over the country. But what to do about all this? As it stands, the book's only suggestions are found in a nine-page conclusion where Mr. Lucas suggests that Washington and Brussels should stay united in the face of Moscow's attempt to split them apart. And: financial markets shouldn't tolerate the sort of murky dealings that are a trademark of such Russian companies as Gazprom. These are good ideas. The book would have benefited from more.
Oh, one last thing. Perhaps it was the circumstance I was in as I raced through the last 20 or so pages of Philip Roth's great 1981 novel, Zuckerman Unbound, but since I finished it on Sunday afternoon I've been wondering something. The book is about Roth's alter-ego Zuckerman torturing himself after his publishing an extremely personal and extremely successful novel, which includes among its depictions lifted from Zuckerman's own life unflattering portrayals of Zuckerman's parents. The last bit is obsessed with whether and to what extent Zuckerman has failed to carry out a son's duty toward the father. I finished the book during my son's nap, with my son snuggled into my side, and since I've finished it, I haven't been able to get the question out of my head: What are the father's duty to the son?
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