War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance
£15.30£20.90 (-27%)
‘History is made up of myths,’ writes the renowned Russian dissident journalist Mikhail Zygar. ‘Alas, our myths led us to the fascism of 2022. It is time to expose them.’ Drawing from his perilous career investigating the frontiers of the Russian empire, Zygar reveals how 350 years of propaganda, bad historical scholarship, folk tales and fantasy spurred his nation into war with Ukraine.
How did a German monk’s fear of the Ottoman Empire drive him to invent the fiction of a united Russian world? How did corny spy novels about a ‘Soviet James Bond’ inspire Vladimir Putin to join the KGB? How did Alexander Pushkin’s admiration for a poem by Lord Byron end with him slandering the legendary chief of the Cossacks? And how did Putin underestimate a rising TV comic named Volodymyr Zelensky, failing to see that his satire had become deadly serious, and that his country would be a joke no longer?
A noted expert on the Kremlin with unparalleled access to hundreds of players in the current conflict – from politicians to oligarchs, gangsters to comedians (not least Zelensky himself) – Zygar chronicles the power struggles from which today’s politics grew, and digs out the essential truths from behind layers of seductive legend. By surveying the strange, complex record of Russo-Ukrainian relations, War and Punishment reveals exactly how the largest nation on Earth lost its senses. A work of history can’t undo the past or transform the present, but sometimes it can shape the future.
In fact, that’s how the story begins.
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Additional information
| Publisher | W&N (13 July 2023) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 432 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1399609017 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1399609012 |
| Dimensions | 16.2 x 4 x 24 cm |
by Kate
A must read for everyone who thinks that Russians and Ukrainians are the same. An excellent and concise review of history and how putin’s imperialistic views were formed. Wish this could be on the bookshelves in Russia…
by airman
Best book I have read on the case for Ukraine statehood.
by Carol Ann
It’s nonsense to suggest, as other reviews do, that a Russian cannot write about their own imperial history and the victims of that history, such as the Ukrainians. By the same logic the authors of such reviews would argue that a Brit cannot write about India, that a Frenchman could not write about half of Africa or Southeast Asia, or indeed that a German should not write about Europe, considering the past. Mikhail Zygar is a remarkable historian, a vital critic, and we need him now more than ever. It is a shame that few seem to understand what a treasure Zygar is, how his works should be supported, for much the same reason that writers comparable to him should have been supported during the fascist decades of Italy or Germany. I hope people today won’t make the same mistakes as their grandparents. Those who have read Zygar’s previous works will find a similar commitment to the facts and a famililarly ingenious argument in his new work. Fundamentally, they should find the time to read the work and judge it in its merits and not on the spot of earth the author happens to have been conceived.
by Allie
Mikhail has not ceased to speak out about his country’s oppression of Ukraine and Russia’s imperial designs, and he has paid the price for it. We cannot just ignore the voices of Russians who are brave enough to speak about the imperialist darkness at the heart of Russian culture and history, and, contrary to another review here, this is not ‘about’ Ukraine, it is about Russia and how it has treated Ukraine and Ukrainians for centuries. As Mikhail says himself, in response to a Ukrainian friend who no longer speaks to him as he is Russian: “Nadia, I am not an imperialist, and I am writing this book so that others will not be either.” If we condemn people based solely on their place of birth and nationality, we are no better than Putin and the fascist imperial Russian state he has brought (back) into being.
by jod
Inappropriate for a Russian to be writing about Ukraine its culture and its war when Russia instigated the war against Ukraine. Don’t buy it
by G. Tittley
It is not inappropriate for a Russian to write about Ukraine.
Zygar is not a Putinist and may offer much insight into the Russian regime’s attitudes and thought processes.
I will read his book with an open mind and then post a review.
We can’t start banning books because the author is from a particular country.
by Anna
First, this book is not about Ukraine, but about Russia (I had very mixed feelings when I saw it in a bookstore. The title sounds strangely aggressive and appealing, but why the red army on the cover? You don’t put Hitler or his symbols a book about Jews, right?). Second, being anti-Putin does not mean being anti-imperialist. And people often forget this second statement.
Be very careful with books with “Ukraine” in the title written by Russians.
Dozhd TV channel is not pro-Ukrainian and never was. It’s anti-Putin and anti-Kremlin – yes, but it’s not anti-imperialist.
In his BBC interview, the author lied that the war was initially not supported by the Russians, and therefore Prigozhin recruited prisoners. But in reality, the war was very much supported by the civilians from 2014, from the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donbas region.
This book exists only for an English-speaking audience and only because Russia is losing.
I wonder if the author mentioned in the book other nations whom they killed and enslaved?
I am Ukrainian