The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past Audiobook (Free)

In The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its own search for a brand-new identity, telling the story through the country’s troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only clarifies Vladimir Putin’s goals as well as the government’s formal manipulations of history, but also targets normal Russians and their motivations. He graphs how Putin raised victory in Globe War II towards the status of the national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to about The Longer Hangover: Putin’s New Russia as well as the Spirits of days gone by heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the effects of this have already been. The book explores why Russia, unlike Germany, has failed to come to terms with the darkest web pages of its past: Stalin’s purges, the Gulag, and the battle deportations. The narrative roams through the corridors from the Kremlin towards the wilds from the Gulags and the trenches of east Ukraine. It places the annexation of Crimea as well as the newly assertive Russia in the framework of the postponed fallout of the Soviet collapse.

Filled with analysis but told mainly through radiant reportage, The Lengthy Hangover is certainly a thoughtful exploration of the legacy of the Soviet collapse and how it has affected life in Russia and Putin’s policies.