An unsettling, timely, and darkly comic exposé of Putin's Russia and
European disintegration from highly acclaimed travel writer Rory
MacLean.
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.
