THE DARK SIDE OF THE EARTH

Exiled Russian journalist Zygar delivers a sobering portrait of Russia’s brief moment in democratic sunlight.

Who really won the Cold War? So Zygar wonders at the opening of his book, answering that certainly it wasn’t Russia. But given America’s slide into Russian-style authoritarianism, marked by the cynical view that nothing is worth believing in, it wasn’t the U.S., either. Still, the Cold War ended with a small window in which it seemed possible for ordinary Soviet citizens, after 70 years of totalitarian rule, “to experience happiness.” This window opened with the glasnost and perestroika programs of Mikhail Gorbachev, but Zygar traces those back farther, from Khrushchev’s post-Stalin reforms to the decision to allow the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Another step forward was the airing in 1965 of Sergei Parajanov’s film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestor, which was in Ukrainian, “an unusual choice in the USSR.” There are surprises throughout Zygar’s long but flowing narrative: Yuri Gagarin, the great cosmonaut, reads and praises Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 just before his perhaps not accidental death; a sit-in in Red Square leads to a trial of eight defendants at the same time that the Chicago Seven were hauled before the bench. One of the greatest surprises is the impetus for Vladimir Putin’s evolution from street thug to KGB agent: He was enthralled by a Soviet spy film released in response to the West’s James Bond franchise and attempted to enlist, only to be told that “first, he must get a higher education, perhaps in law.” Voilà: the dawn of the restitution of Soviet power by a different name—which, Zygar writes, Gorbachev also attempted, even disavowing some of his own reforms. “The people now in power in Russia are the last Soviet generation,” Zygar concludes, “those who absorbed Soviet culture but not Soviet faith.”

An extraordinarily revealing account of how the Russia we know from today’s headlines came into being.