Between Two Fires by Joshua Yaffa
May. 24th, 2020 10:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsBetween Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia
3/5. Interesting, depressing. This is structured around portraits of specific people and how they operate with more or less success in Russian society. There's the news network exec who knows how to do what he is told, the beloved doctor, the compromised and strange human rights activist. The persistent theme is compromise – the things people do to make a living, to get ahead or, most complicatedly, to get something from the system that it doesn't want to give. No one wins here, except that the house wins a bit more often than it should.
3/5. Interesting, depressing. This is structured around portraits of specific people and how they operate with more or less success in Russian society. There's the news network exec who knows how to do what he is told, the beloved doctor, the compromised and strange human rights activist. The persistent theme is compromise – the things people do to make a living, to get ahead or, most complicatedly, to get something from the system that it doesn't want to give. No one wins here, except that the house wins a bit more often than it should.