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Overview
Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Remnick chronicles the new Russia that emerged from the ash heap of the Soviet Union. From the siege of Parliament to the farcically tilted elections of 1996, from the rubble of Grozny to the grandiose wealth and naked corruption of today's Moscow, Remnick chronicles a society so racked by change that its citizens must daily ask themselves who they are, where they belong, and what they believe in. Remnick composes this panorama out of dozens of finely realized individual portraits. Here is Mikhail Gorbachev, his head still swimming from his plunge from reverence to ridicule. Here is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the half-Jewish anti-Semite who conducts politics as loony performance art. And here is Boris Yeltsin, the tottering populist who is not above stealing elections. In Resurrection, they become the players in a drama so vast and moving that it deserves comparison with the best reportage of George Orwell and Michael Herr."This is what happens when a good writer unleashes eye and ear on a story that moves with the speed of light. Resurrection has the feel of describing vast, historical change even as it is happening."--Chicago Tribune
Synopsis
Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Remnick chronicles the new Russia that emerged from the ash heap of the Soviet Union. From the siege of Parliament to the farcically tilted elections of 1996, from the rubble of Grozny to the grandiose wealth and naked corruption of today's Moscow, Remnick chronicles a society so racked by change that its citizens must daily ask themselves who they are, where they belong, and what they believe in. Remnick composes this panorama out of dozens of finely realized individual portraits. Here is Mikhail Gorbachev, his head still swimming from his plunge from reverence to ridicule. Here is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the half-Jewish anti-Semite who conducts politics as loony performance art. And here is Boris Yeltsin, the tottering populist who is not above stealing elections. In Resurrection, they become the players in a drama so vast and moving that it deserves comparison with the best reportage of George Orwell and Michael Herr.
"This is what happens when a good writer unleashes eye and ear on a story that moves with the speed of light. Resurrection has the feel of describing vast, historical change even as it is happening."—Chicago Tribune
Publishers Weekly
Following his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lenin's Tomb, a report on the crack-up of the Soviet Union, "New Yorker" staff writer Remnick brilliantly plunges readers into the chaotic, supercharged milieu of Russia since Gorbachev's ouster in 1991. Rejecting gloomsayers' prophecies of anarchy or a return to hardline Communism, he declares that Russia's long-term prospects for stable democracy are promising, though the immediate future looks grim indeed-a prognosis he blames in no small measure on Boris Yeltsin's unwillingness to create a consensus for societal change and his opportunistic oscillation between democratic to nationalistic postures. The book is filled with fresh reportage and trenchant interviews with such figures as reactionary Vladimir Zhirinovsky, messianic free-market economist Yegor Gaidar, novelist and gadfly Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Moscow media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky and many others. Remnick illuminates the recent decline of Russia's newspapers and the emergence of state-controlled TV as the dominant news medium, the growth of both opportunity and inequality, the shrunken status of writers and intellectuals amid a paradoxical flowering of a politicized avant-garde. This is the most comprehensive book we have on post-Communist Russia.