Download or read book Pravda Ha Ha written by Rory MacLean and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were - for most Brits and Americans - part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists - both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists - have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.

Download or read book Pravda Ha Ha written by Rory MacLean and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award 'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' John le Carré In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were – for most Brits and Americans – part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists – both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists – have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.

Download or read book OxTravels written by Mark Ellingham and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2011-05-19 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You have to go back to the 1980s and Granta's bestselling travel issue to find a book that compares to OxTravels. Introduced by Michael Palin, OxTravels features original stories from twenty-five top travel writers, including Michael Palin, Paul Theroux, Sara Wheeler, William Dalrymple, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lloyd Jones, Rory Stewart, Jan Morris, Dervla Murphy, Rory MacLean, and others. Each of the stories takes as its theme a meeting - life-changing, affecting, amusing by turn - and together they transport readers into a brilliant, vivid atlas of encounters. This extraordinary collection is published in aid of Oxfam and all royalties from the book will support Oxfam's work.

Download or read book Kutuzov written by Alexander Mikaberidze and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Russian war hero who defeated Napoleon and became a mythic military figure. Alexander Mikaberidze's latest book is the first modern English-language biography of Mikhail Golenischev-Kutuzov, the famed Russian Field Marshal and central character of Leo Tolstoy's epic War and Peace. One of the most important military minds of the period, he is credited with defeating Napoleon and saving Russia, though his fame is not limited to the Napoleonic wars. As it often happens with national heroes, Kutuzov gradually became larger than life, a messianic character who led Holy Russia against the evils of the Revolution and anarchy; the Soviet leaders later exploited his personality for even more grandiose schemes. The real Kutuzov was gradually replaced by a mythical character who appeared at a time of great danger to save Russia. The impact of this propaganda can be still seen in modern Russia: In 2000, the public opinion poll showed that majority of the Russians consider Kutuzov as the Person of the 19th Century, far ahead of famous writers Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy, composer Peter Tchaikovsky or scientist Dmitry Mendeleyev, while the 2017 public opinion poll placed Kutuzov in the top twenty of the most distinguished historical personalities in world history (slightly behind Napoleon). As much as Kutuzov is venerated in Russia, he remains an overlooked figure in the West, with Western historiography comprising of just a handful of titles in English, French or German, the vast majority of them translations of older Soviet works or derived from them. This book provides a new biography of the field marshal, examining his personal life and military/diplomatic accomplishments, and relying on a wide range of primary and secondary sources as well as Russian archival material. Mikaberidze offers a fresh look at the historical figure whose character remains elusive but whose accomplishments are irrefutable.

Download or read book Untraceable written by Sergei Lebedev and published by New Vessel Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A thriller dipped in poison ... shares some of le Carré’s fascination with secret worlds and the nature of evil." —The New York Times The terrifying, lengthening list of Russia’s use of lethal poisons against its critics has inspired acclaimed author Sergei Lebedev’s latest novel. With uncanny timing, he examines how and why Russia and the Soviet Union have developed horrendous neurotoxins. At its center is a ruthless chemist named Professor Kalitin, obsessed with developing an absolutely deadly, undetectable and untraceable poison for which there is no antidote. But Kalitin becomes consumed by guilt over countless deaths from his Faustian pact to create the ultimate venom. When the Soviet Union collapses, the chemist defects and is given a new identity in Western Europe. After another Russian is murdered with Kalitin's poison, his cover is blown and he's drawn into an investigation of the death by Western agents. Two special forces killers are sent to silence him―using his own undetectable poison. In this fast-paced, genre-bending tale, Lebedev weaves suspenseful pages of stunningly beautiful prose exploring the historical trajectories of evil. From Nazi labs, Stalinist plots and the Chechen Wars, to present-day Russia, Lebedev probes the ethical responsibilities of scientists supplying modern tyrants and autocrats with ever newer instruments of retribution, destruction and control.

Download or read book Stalin s Nose written by Rory MacLean and published by Tauris Parke. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winston the pig fell into Aunt Zita's life when he dropped onto her husband's head and killed him dead. It was a distressing end to a distinguished life of spying for the U.S.S.R. After the funeral Zita, a faded Austrian aristocrat and vivacious eccentric, refuses to remain at home in East Germany. Instead she hijacks her nephew Rory and, with Winston in tow, sets out on one last ride. Austrians have extended families, their lineage is Europe's history and Zita has decided to rediscover hers. In a rattling Trabant the threesome puff and wheeze across the continent, following the threads of memory Zita's remarkable east European relations - the angel of Prague, the Hungarian grave digger who had buried Stalin's nose, a dying Romanian propagandist - help tie together the loose ends of her life. The travelers picnic at Auschwitz. They meet Lenin's embalmer. They visit the impoverished Czech town where the sewers run with jewels. Everywhere they learn what life had truly been like under totalitarian rule. They hear a torrent of life tales, some heartbreaking, some hilarious, all enriched with the joy of telling after decades of enforced silence. Humorous and black, touched with the surreal and the farcical, Stalin's Nose is a true and exceptionally vivid story of a journey from the Baltic to the Black Sea, between Berlin and Moscow, through an eastern Europe divested of fear and free to face the past.

Download or read book Summary of Rory MacLean s Pravda Ha Ha written by Milkyway Media and published by Milkyway Media. This book was released on 2024-05-20 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get the Summary of Rory MacLean's Pravda Ha Ha in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "Pravda Ha Ha" by Rory MacLean is a poignant exploration of modern Russia and its influence on Europe, woven through the personal stories of individuals navigating the post-Soviet landscape. MacLean's journey begins in the Moscow metro, where he encounters a diverse cast of characters, including Dmitri Denisovich, a businessman whose wealth was built on importing American chicken, known as "Bush legs." Dmitri's transformation from a Soviet citizen to a wealthy 'minigarch' epitomizes the rapid shift to capitalism and the rise of oligarchs in Russia...

Download or read book Russia and the Western Far Right written by Anton Shekhovtsov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growing influence of Russia on the Western far right has been much discussed in the media recently. This book is the first detailed inquiry into what has been a neglected but critically important trend: the growing links between Russian actors and Western far right activists, publicists, ideologues, and politicians. The author uses a range of sources including interviews, video footage, leaked communications, official statements and press coverage in order to discuss both historical and contemporary Russia in terms of its relationship with the Western far right. Initial contacts between Russian political actors and Western far right activists were established in the early 1990s, but these contacts were low profile. As Moscow has become more anti-Western, these contacts have become more intense and have operated at a higher level. The book shows that the Russian establishment was first interested in using the Western far right to legitimise Moscow’s politics and actions both domestically and internationally, but more recently Moscow has begun to support particular far right political forces to gain leverage on European politics and undermine the liberal-democratic consensus in the West. Contributing to ongoing scholarly debates about Russia’s role in the world, its strategies aimed at securing legitimation of Putin’s regime both internationally and domestically, modern information warfare and propaganda, far right politics and activism in the West, this book draws on theories and methods from history, political science, area studies, and media studies and will be of interest to students, scholars, activists and practitioners in these areas.

Download or read book Magic Bus written by Rory MacLean and published by Ig Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The famous hippie trail--forty years later!

Download or read book The Zhivago Affair written by Peter Finn and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on newly declassified government files, this is the dramatic story of how a forbidden book in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West. In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village just outside Moscow to visit Russia’s greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the original manuscript of Pasternak’s first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: “This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.” Pasternak believed his novel was unlikely ever to be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an irredeemable assault on the 1917 Revolution. But he thought it stood a chance in the West and, indeed, beginning in Italy, Doctor Zhivago was widely published in translation throughout the world. From there the life of this extraordinary book entered the realm of the spy novel. The CIA, which recognized that the Cold War was above all an ideological battle, published a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled it into the Soviet Union. Copies were devoured in Moscow and Leningrad, sold on the black market, and passed surreptitiously from friend to friend. Pasternak’s funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands of admirers who defied their government to bid him farewell. The example he set launched the great tradition of the writer-dissident in the Soviet Union. In The Zhivago Affair, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée bring us intimately close to this charming, passionate, and complex artist. First to obtain CIA files providing concrete proof of the agency’s involvement, the authors give us a literary thriller that takes us back to a fascinating period of the Cold War—to a time when literature had the power to stir the world. (With 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.)

Download or read book Back in the USSR written by Rory MacLean and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ian Fleming could not have imagined a better place to set a thriller: an upstart mini-state on the edge of Europe, Transnistria is a nowhereland, a Soviet museum occupied by Russian peace-keepers near the Black Sea. Its oligarchs in Adidas tracksuits hunt wild boar with AK-47s. Its young people train for revolution at the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership. Its secret factories have supplied arms to Chechnya and electrical cable to Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant. Its isolation and tiny size belie the real threat it poses to the West. To many observers, Transnistria is the North Korea of Europe. Yet its new president has launched a cunning coup of political marketing, appointing as his top ministers personable young women like the Facebook-savvy Cheryl Cole lookalike Foreign Minister, sexing-up the republic's image abroad, and using their glitter to obscure this internationally unrecognised non-state's shadowy past. Now Western ambassadors and foreign ministers are queuing up to meet them. Rory MacLean and Nick Danziger, two of Europe's most intrepid travellers and chroniclers, document life in the only country in the world not to have recognised the collapse of the Soviet Union. Readers will find themselves truly back in the USSR... with a difference.

Download or read book Macachiavellian Intelligence written by Dario Maestripieri and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judged by population size and distribution, homo sapiens are clearly the most successful primates. A close second, however, would be rhesus macaques, who have adapted to—and thrived in—such diverse environments as mountain forests, dry grasslands, and urban sprawl. Scientists have spent countless hours studying these opportunistic monkeys, but rhesus macaques have long been overshadowed in the public eye by the great apes, who, because of their greater intelligence, are naturally assumed to have more to teach us, both about other primates and about humans as well. Dario Maestripieri thinks it is high time we shelve that misperception, and with Macachiavellian Intelligence he gives rhesus macaques their rightful turn in the spotlight. The product of more than twenty years studying these fascinating creatures, Macachiavellian Intelligence caricatures a society that is as much human as monkey, with hierarchies and power struggles that would impress Machiavelli himself. High-status macaques, for instance, maintain their rank through deft uses of violence and manipulation, while altruism is almost unknown and relationships are perpetually subject to the cruel laws of the market. Throughout this eye-opening account, Maestripieri weds his thorough knowledge of macaque behavior to his abiding fascination with human society and motivations. The result is a book unlike any other, one that draws on economics as much as evolutionary biology, politics as much as primatology. Rife with unexpected connections and peppered with fascinating anecdotes, Macachiavellian Intelligence has as much to teach us about humans as it does about macaques, presenting a wry, rational, and wholly surprising view of our humanity as seen through the monkey in the mirror.

Download or read book Sankya written by Zakhar Prilepin and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sankya, Prilepin's first novel that is widely considered his best, draws on his own experiences to depict life among young political extremists. Sasha “Sankya” Tishin, and his friends are part of a generation stuck between eras. They don’t remember the Soviet Union, but they also don’t believe in the promise of opportunity for all in the corrupt, capitalistic new Russia. They belong to an extremist group that wants to build a better Russia by tearing down the existing one. When they go too far, Sasha finds himself testing the elemental force of the protest movement in Russia and in himself.

Download or read book IN NORTH KOREA written by Rory Maclean and published by eBook Partnership. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Koreans could change the world. Today their country can annihilate South Korea and Japan. By 2020 their aim is to have submarine-launched missiles able to nuke the US mainland. So who are the North Koreans? What do they think and feel? Are they belligerent automatons, indoctrinated by years of propaganda, with fingers hovering over trigger buttons? Or simply ordinary men and women who have been shaped by fear or national idolisation, willing to do anything to be accepted and to survive?To answer these question, photographer Nick Danziger and author Rory MacLean, two of today's most sensitive chroniclers, travelled across the country, meeting farmers, fishermen and the captain of the national football team. They spent a morning one hundred metres underground with a 22-year-old subway train dispatcher and afternoons at the capital's dolphinarium, a lavish entertainment complex created to convince North Koreans of their prosperity. At the Museum of the Victorious Fatherland War, as the Korean War is known in the country, they spoke to a much-decorated national hero who boasted, 'When I was eighteen years old I shot and killed 367 enemy soldiers.'From the spotless streets of Pyongyang to the pine-fringed beaches of Wonsan, along the Youth Hero Road, an all-but-deserted strategic highway built by some 50,000 conscripts out of 'patriotic duty', Danziger and MacLean create a telling portrait of both ordinary and extraordinary North Koreans, catching a glimpse of real life in the world's most secretive nation, at a turning point in its - and our - history.'Danziger is the stuff that legends are made of.' -- Literary Review'One of the world's top photojournalists.' -- Practical Photographer'Rory MacLean is more than a gifted writer. He is a man whose artistry is underpinned by a powerful moral sensibility.' - Fergal Keane, BBC'MacLean is one of the most strikingly original and talented travel writers of his generation.' - Katie Hickman

Download or read book The New Nobility written by Andrei Soldatov and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The New Nobility, two courageous Russian investigative journalists open up the closed and murky world of the Russian Federal Security Service. While Vladimir Putin has been president and prime minister of Russia, the Kremlin has deployed the security services to intimidate the political opposition, reassert the power of the state, and carry out assassinations overseas. At the same time, its agents and spies were put beyond public accountability and blessed with the prestige, benefits, and legitimacy lost since the Soviet collapse. The security services have played a central -- and often mysterious -- role at key turning points in Russia during these tumultuous years: from the Moscow apartment house bombings and theater siege, to the war in Chechnya and the Beslan massacre. The security services are not all-powerful; they have made clumsy and sometimes catastrophic blunders. But what is clear is that after the chaotic 1990s, when they were sidelined, they have made a remarkable return to power, abetted by their most famous alumnus, Putin.

Download or read book Under the Dragon written by Rory MacLean and published by HarperPerennial. This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TRAVEL WRITING. The memory of a brief visit to Burma had haunted Rory MacLean for years. A decade after the violent suppression of an unarmed national uprising, which cost thousands of lives and all hopes for democracy, he seized the chance to return. Travelling from Rangoon to Mandalay and Pagan, into the heart of the Golden Triangle, he hears stories of ordinary people struggling to survive under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes in the world and meets Aung San Suu Kyi, perhaps the most courageous woman of our time and the embodiment of all Burma's hope. On his journey MacLean exposes the tragedy of a hundred betrayals. "Under the Dragon" is a perceptive and heartbreaking portrayal of contemporary Burma, a country that is shot through with desperation and fear, but also blessed - even in the darkest places - with beauty and courage.

Download or read book From Russia with Blood written by Heidi Blake and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how Russia refined the art and science of targeted assassination abroad -- while Western spies watched in horror as their governments failed to guard against the threat They thought they had found a safe haven in the green hills of England. They were wrong. One by one, the Russian oligarchs, dissidents, and gangsters who fled to Britain after Vladimir Putin came to power dropped dead in strange or suspicious circumstances. One by one, their British lawyers and fixers met similarly grisly ends. Yet, one by one, the British authorities shut down every investigation--and carried on courting the Kremlin. The spies in the riverside headquarters of MI6 looked on with horror as the scope of the Kremlin's global killing campaign became all too clear. And, across the Atlantic, American intelligence officials watched with mounting alarm as the bodies piled up, concerned that the tide of death could spread to the United States. Those fears intensified when a one-time Kremlin henchman was found bludgeoned to death in a Washington, D.C. penthouse. But it wasn't until Putin's assassins unleashed a deadly chemical weapon on the streets of Britain, endangering hundreds of members of the public in a failed attempt to slay the double agent Sergei Skripal, that Western governments were finally forced to admit that the killing had spun out of control. Unflinchingly documenting the growing web of death on British and American soil, Heidi Blake bravely exposes the Kremlin's assassination campaign as part of Putin's ruthless pursuit of global dominance-and reveals why Western governments have failed to stop the bloodshed. The unforgettable story that emerges whisks us from London's high-end night clubs to Miami's million-dollar hideouts, ultimately rendering a bone-chilling portrait of money, betrayal, and murder, written with the pace and propulsive power of a thriller. Based on a vast trove of unpublished documents, bags of discarded police evidence, and interviews with hundreds of insiders, this heart-stopping international investigation uncovers one of the most important--and terrifying--geopolitical stories of our time.