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Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe
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20/99
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31/99
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Scholars' Citation Index
89/99
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26/99
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"He exaggerates the effect of Russian efforts to 'undermine European unity' (though these are real enough)."
"brings the current reality of Russians to light with vivid descriptions of visits with various characters and their views on life and the future, which at first seem surprising, but quickly fall into a recognizable pattern ..."
"In his story, MacLean is a defender of journalistic integrity, an exposer of hypocrisy and a proponent of truth."
"Not just a travelogue, this is a consistently engaging yet fearsome book that effectively traces the rise of national identity as a myth that paves the way for racism, xenophobia, and even genocide ..."
"But if his colourful encounters with Europeans from alt-right Polish executives to German neo-fascists offer a fascinating and grim portrait of our current predicament, how compelling is MacLean's explanation of how we got here?"
"MacLean...is an unabashed anecdote hunter—Alice in dezinformatsiya wonderland."
"The history and politics of Eastern Europe are tackled here with humor and dry wit."
"MacLean is compassionate, and he balances his stories of powerful men and women—a minor oligarch, an American banker—with those of the dispossessed."
"an engrossing travelogue that's both trenchantly observant and deeply felt."
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