This is an excellent ground-floor view into Middle Russia post-collapse. It highlights the political support for Putin that existed alongside public knowledge of his growing kleptocracy and an inside of life inside a nuclear city as it shifted from its state of soviet secrecy to suburban freedom.

Most people would agree that to look only at New York City or Washington, DC is to see the United States through a peculiar lens. You get a distorted image at best. By a similar token, many would also say that the political and cultural elites in the US have been doing just this and it is what paved the way for a non-establishment candidate, especially one who expressed the right populist and nationalist positions, to become a viable presidential candidate.

This, of course, in no way confined to how foreigners view the US: we all take this mental shortcut: Germany through Berlin and Munich, Egypt through Cairo, or Russia through Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Putin Country seeks to widen the lens through which we peer into the former Soviet Union. It takes us to a rusty, downtrodden land far from Moscow and distant indeed from St. Petersburg. The city of Chelyabinsk’s stands, in many ways, for Detroit or Memphis—and its one million souls are beset by many of the same ills: economic irrelevance, epidemic drug addiction, and the judgments of their more cosmopolitan fellows in the political and cultural capitals.

While I while I do not see any one slice of the United States as being more ‘American’ than any other, I do see where someone is coming from when they make such a claim about Detroit or Memphis or similar places. Certainly, by virtue of not being on the coasts, they have held on to aspects of their cultures that would have mutated under the constant and intimate contact with other communities experienced in the New Yorks of the world.

To be clear, I’m not making any judgments here: not about cultural mixing and melding and appropriation (which is more or less uncontrollable in any event) nor about whether one culture is superior to another. I am saying though, that the high-profile cities one typically views their host nations through are often quite different from the less travelled (at least by foreigners) places of those nations.

Chelyabinsk certainly falls into this latter category.

Just as a foreigner’s first trip into the US interior opens one’s eyes to its cultural variety so does a journey into Middle Russia, even if only by book. As you meet the people of Chelyabinsk and their land and learn their collective history, you cannot help but see a harsher reflection of post-industrial—some would say the real—America.

To make Chelyabinsk, take Detroit and add a history of nuclear waste dumping and general environmental devastation, deep-seated corruption, a couple decades of national humiliation, and a grossly mismanaged ‘transition’ to capitalism. As you travel through these travails, page by page, your sympathy for its people grows. You wonder that anyone still lives there, let along tries to make it a better place. And yet they do: just as Americans in Detroit do.

The situation is simultaneously so similar and so much worse, that if a bumbling real estate tycoon can make it with Middle American, you feel no surprise that a more skilled and cutthroat version enjoys sweeping popularity here.

In the eyes of many Middle Americans, the establishments of both parties have failed them over and over for decades. So, when they were given an alternative, even an obviously flawed one, they took it. In the words of a conservative friend, “What else can we do? Who else are we going to vote for?” Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as different as they were, both failed the Chelyabinskites of Russia so when a skillful, capable strong man who spoke to their complaints came along, they jumped at the chance to put him in office.

The final tragedy here then is that the Detroiters and the Chelyabinskites are still being failed. Trump embarrasses America and horrifies much of the rest of the world while being so mired in scandal he lacks the political capital to push his agenda. At the same time, while Putin has managed to prop up his popularity through pride-inducing military action, the plight of Russians remains little changed.

Like all analogies, Middle Russia as Middle American has obvious limits. Nevertheless even if Putin Country wasn’t as well written as it is, I would still tell you to read it for this experience of learning not just about a wider Russia, but of finding the echoes of a wider America in it.
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I first read Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia back in 2017 and decided to reread it to see how it fared against the current situation with Putin invading Ukraine. Anne Garrels, a former NPR correspondent, visits Chelyabinsk, one city in Russia, and the various facets of that city and her people. She talks to people (who dare to speak with her) about what matters to them, their causes, and concerns.

Among the topics covered are stability at what cost, LGBTQ issues, Healthcare, Families, Religion, Freedom of Speech, environmental damage from nuclear waste, and the fallout of the 20th-century. Of course, Putin is center stage—hard to believe how long he has been in charge and this book was written about ten years ago.

I found the information on the Russian military to be particularly interesting—corruption, uneducated conscripts, hazing, bullying, and lies. She describes Russian parents searching through dead bodies in search of their sons after they’ve been left on battlefields. Corrupt officers don’t report deaths to grift off the system. Hard to not see how Ukraine's tractors are winning against tanks.

There are many parallels in the Russia of 2012 with what is happening in the U.S. now. Reading this now, you see what has led up to this moment of now. And more frighteningly, you see echoes happening in our own country and could very well be our own future unless we work to stamp out fascism here at home.

Here are a few parallels that struck me while reading:
*Accusing the LGBTQ community of grooming
*people believing state-run propaganda machines (in our case slipping into our tribe run machines)
*not caring about special needs children (there they encourage parents to give them up)
*having a healthcare system that doesn’t seem to work well
*putting the chicken farm on radioactive land (i.e. not cleaning up our messes)
*censorship and cancel culture combined in one system (don’t attend a rally and your boss will make sure the heat is turned off near your desk)
*bribery and corruption exhibited as normal by our last administration
Is Russia something we want to emulate? Personally, I’d take America’s can-do attitude, a military that leaves no man behind, and all of muh freedoms. F*** Putin. ( )

This book is a great intro to the changes that happened in Russia in the 90s and under Putin to today. I listened to the audiobook while driving an Audi at high speed across France and left fingerprints on my steering wheel in anger at what a missed opportunity the US had in the 90s to truly help the fUSSR rejoin the world -- probably Bill Clinton's greatest failure, rivaled only by the rise of Islamic terrorism. She does a great job of expanding on well known concepts "Russia is corrupt" to show why rational actors behave the way they do, and why a lot of reasonable Russians support Putin -- even if they don't love him, they believe he is the only possible leader for Russia, and they are probably right. It didn't have to be this way, but that is how it is. ( )

The journalistic scepticism is a bit one sided here, the author takes almost all accounts at face value. Overall a very sympathetic picture of the Russians. Fails to address how decades of communism has shaped the nation and paints the people as somehow externally constrained by the government and not complicit in the culture under which they live.

Concentrates on anecdotes - I'd like to see them put in context of more general facts. ( )