The Long Hangover

Description

In The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides a deeply reported, bottom-up explanation of Russia's resurgence under Putin. By cleverly exploiting the memory of the Soviet victory over fascism in World War II, Putin's regime has made ordinary Russians feel that their country is great again.
Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.
The book explores why Russia, unlike Germany, has failed to come to terms with the darkest pages of its past: Stalin's purges, the Gulag, and the war deportations. The narrative roams from the corridors of the Kremlin to the wilds of the Gulags and the trenches of East Ukraine. It puts the annexation of Crimea and the newly assertive Russia in the context of the delayed fallout of the Soviet collapse.
The Long Hangover is a book about a lost generation: the millions of Russians who lost their country and the subsequent attempts to restore to them a sense of purpose. Packed with analysis but told mainly through vibrant reportage, it is a thoughtful exploration of the legacy of the Soviet collapse and how it has affected life in Russia and Putins policies.

About the Author
Shaun Walker is the Moscow correspondent for The Guardian. He studied Russian and Soviet history at Oxford University, and has worked as a journalist in Moscow for more than a decade. Previously, he was Moscow Correspondent for the Independent.

Reviews

The Long Hangover is considered and careful and humane, and should be compulsory reading for any politician considering engagement with either Moscow or Ukraine. It's not only the best book I've read on Putin's Russia, but also has great resonance for the age of Donald Trump and Brexit: no one likes being told they're a loser, everyone needs something to believe in.
- Oliver Bullough, The Observer

[Walker] does an excellent job and ... keeps his narrative relatively short in a gripping and clear-sighted way.
- Eamon Delaney, Irish Independent

[Walker] is more successful than most of his western journalistic competitors in exploring the often contradictory attitudes that Russians hold towards their president and the hybrid system he is building on the basis of Russian nationalism, Soviet nostalgia and a striving for international respect.
- Jonathan Steele, The Guardian

[Walker] looks at the Russia that Putin has created in minute and humane detail ... He does so through intimate conversations with Russians (and others) who have been affected by the way Putin has run his country, and creates composite images of a nation traumatised by its Soviet history but unable or unwilling to face that past.
- Oliver Bullough, Prospect

The best history of the ideologies and politics behind the headlines ... Walker's meticulous documentation of the annexation of Crimea and the subsequent occupation of Ukraine makes this exemplary political history, but The Long Hangover will be remembered, and re-read, as a history of memory.
- Linda Kinstler, Times Literary Supplement

[An] excellent, acutely observed book
- Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Irish Times

It is hard to find fault in such a spectacular book, which deftly weaves personal narratives with grand geopolitical tensions to produce a compelling read ... a real tour de force of book-length reporting.
- Kieran Pender, Australian Book Review

It is ... [the] passages - so charged with personality whilst remaining politically astute that make Walkers prose so compelling to read. He takes the singular melody we trumpet about Russia in the West and adds harmony, dynamics, colour and context. Read this book and you will have a more nuanced understanding of the dissonant symphonies emanating from the east.
- Matthew Janney, Culture Trip

A superb book
- Angus Roxburgh, CABLE Magazine

The Long Hangover thankfully does not fixate on the character of Putin. Instead, it focuses on the social conditions that he taps into (and manipulates). The book is girded by Walker's vivid reporting from every corner of the country - far more valuable than armchair analyzing. It also refrains from offering any easy or sweeping answers.
- William Armstrong, Hurriyet Daily News

Thorough, to the point, occasionally melancholic, yet exceedingly readable, Walker has herein captured all the inflammatory essence of modern day Russia, by way of re-telling what ought to have been told many, many years ago ... The Long Hangover may well be the best book I've read on modern-day Russia in years.
- David Marx: Book Reviews

A brilliant book
- Frost Magazine

The Long Hangover is thoughtful, brave, and full of insight. Anyone who wants to understand Russia now needs to read it.
- John Simpson, BBC News

The heroes of our age of postmodern myth are the investigative reporters. Shaun Walker has not only done the hard and necessary work of reporting from Russia and Ukraine, he has also reflected, with remarkable historical and literary sensibility, on what it means when a great power gives up on its own future and decides instead to market its past.
- Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University, and author of On Tyranny and Bloodlands

In this skillful and vivid book, Shaun Walker allows us to understand the region's current affairs through ordinary and extraordinary people's experience of an un-dealt with past.
- Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

This book has a very Russian feel to it. As with the best works of Russian literature, stories of ordinary people fold into the bigger picture. The characters cry, laugh, drink, fight, mourn, and celebrate all at once. Fear is mixed with hope, sorrow with pride, and things rarely end well. This is a deep, emotionally charged, and enthralling book that leaves a sad and bitter aftertaste.
- Elena Racheva, Novaya Gazeta

Intelligent and ambitious, Walker's book succeeds in providing insight into the recent history of a nation at the center of world attention.
- Publisher's Weekly

Table of contents

List of Maps
Maps of Soviet Union
Map of Russia
Prologue

Part 1: Curating the Past
Chapter One: A first-tier nation
Chapter Two: The sacred war
Chapter Three: Chechnya: the deal
Chapter Four: Kolyma: the end of the earth

Part 2: Curating the Present
Chapter Five: The Olympic dream
Chapter Six: Ukraine is not dead yet
Chapter Seven: The Crimea gambit
Chapter Eight: The Crimean Tatars
Chapter Nine: Russian Crimea

Part 3: The Past Becomes the Present
Chapter Ten: Donbass: the spiral
Chapter Eleven: War

Part 4: The Past in the Future
Chapter Twelve: After the war
Epilogue
Author's Note
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography