Ebook: Does Russia Have a Future?: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian, American and European Relations, 2013-15

In many respects, the United States has made the destruction of the Putin “regime” and of Russian power more generally, a test of its ability to direct the world according to its own preferences, without compromise or serious discussion with other powers.
The articles in this collection guide the reader through the action-reaction between the US and Russia over the time covered as the USA arguably began losing the tug-of-war with the Kremlin.
The overarching genre of essays in this collection is reports on events and personalities in the news that the author saw firsthand. These essays are not a daily chronicle. The author did not join commentators on the scrimmage pile-up. He concentrated on impressions drawn from personal activism. One of the greatest virtues of this collection is the details on how we approached a catastrophic military confrontation with Russia, especially in the final months of the Obama administration. We are still not out of the woods. This would not have been obvious to most readers because of the blackout on Russian-sourced news imposed from Washington, working hand in glove with major media. A number of essays demonstrate this blackout and its tendentiousness very clearly. There are always two or more sides to an issue, and the author has applied all of his talents and contacts to bring out what the other side has been saying and why, to separate out cause and effect. Essays in this collection draw upon the author’s experience during a nine-month period of “stardom” from May 2016 to January 2017 as one of a handful of foreigners, and of Americans in particular, who were invited to appear on Russian political talk shows for the domestic television audience to comment on the American presidential campaign through the inauguration of Donald Trump.
The author’s time on Russian domestic television was more important for what he heard than for what he said. He was able to see up close some of Russia’s most articulate and impressive legislators, educators, think tank directors and television hosts. In these essays, he shares his impressions of what is a far more vibrant and sophisticated political and intellectual life than one might imagine.
From the Author
This new book shows the future of the US
Review of a collection of essays on Russian-American relations 2015 - 2017 by one of the US's top Russia experts
by Alexander Mercouris in The Duran
November 19, 2017
Gilbert Doctorow's new book brings together his splendid essays about Russia and about Russian-American relations which he has been writing since 2015.
This is of course the same period when in the aftermath of the Ukrainian crisis and because of Russia's intervention in Syria Russian-American relations entered upon their present catastrophic downward spiral.
In this heavy atmosphere of heightened Russian-US tensions, and amidst a shrill media campaign, the Russian side of the story rarely gets told. The huge achievement of Gilbert Doctorow's essays is that they put entirely behind them this disastrous paradigm.
For someone fixated on psychoanalysing Putin's personality and on learning the gossip about the internal squabbles of the Kremlin, this collection of essays has little to offer. Doctorow has as little patience for this sort of thing as do I.
Ultimately far more interesting to anyone genuinely interested in understanding the rapidly recovering Great Power which is Russia, and who wants to get a genuine grasp of the sort of things that move its people, are those essays which touch on topics other Western reporters of Russia tend to ignore.
Here Doctorow's immense knowledge of Russia and of Russian history is essential and it shines through every essay.
Thus we find masterful discussions of works about tsarist history and an outstanding discussion - the best I have come across - of Henry Kissinger's insights and limitations as they concern Russia. There is even a remarkable essay which takes Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina as a starting point to discuss war.
However the single thing which sets the essays which are specifically about Russia apart is the extraordinary rapport Gilbert Doctorow has with Russia's 'everyman'. Take a comment like this one from the very first page of the very first essay in the book .Against a background of deepening recession Gilbert Doctorow tells us:
"I say assuredly that the mood across thesocial spectrum of my "sources" is uniformly patriotic and uncomplaining. These sources range from the usually outspoken taxi drivers; through the traditionally critical journalists,academics, artists and other intelligentsia who are family friends going back many years, to former business contacts and other elites."
How many of those who report from Russia are able to speak to a wide range of contacts like this? How many of them pay heed to the opinions of Russia's "usually outspoken taxi drivers", reliable purveyors of the public mood though those people are? How many of those who report from Russia even know how to talk to such people?
Ofthe essays specifically about Russia, Western readers may find most surprising what Doctorow writes about the Russian media.
As a regular participant in Russia's extraordinarily extended and elaborate political talk-shows - a vital and massively popular information tool for theRussian population - Doctorow shows that the common Western view that Russian television viewers get no exposure to the Western view-point and hear only the Kremlin's view is simply wrong. Doctorow gives vivid accounts of these sprawling and at times chaotic talk shows, which have no precise analogue anywhere else that I know of.
Doctorow's strongest feelings of disappointment remain firmly focused on the US.
In his final chapter, which has the same title - "Does the United States have afuture?" - as the whole book, Doctorow sets out the consequences.
A US which twenty years ago bestrode the world is now incapable of governing itself, whilst its increasingly reckless conduct is spreading conflict and alarm around the world.