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Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Putin
has just consolidated and prolonged
Yeltsin’s regime. Hence Wood’s central
message: don’t focus too much on Putin—
the system over which he presides is
more important, and it can outlast him.Without the Banya We Would Perish:
A History of the Russian Bathhouse
BY ETHAN POLLACK. Oxford
University Press, 2019, 360 pp.Pollack has produced a rarity: a work o
solid scholarship that is also an elegant
page-turner. It traces the history o the
Russian steam bath all the way back to
the Middle Ages, exploring how its
image and function have shifted over
time. Peter the Great, the westernizing
reformer who led Russia in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, saw the banya as an outmoded
habit o the common people. Western-
ized Russian elites o that era readily
agreed with Europeans who ridiculed
the bathhouse as barbarous. But after
Russia defeated Napoleon in the early
nineteenth century, the banya became a
patriotic symbol: a cartoon published at
the time showed the terri¿ed French
emperor in a banya being thrashed by
Russian soldiers. In the early twentieth
century, amid the louche atmosphere o
late imperial Russia, urban bathhouses
came to be associated with sex and sin.
When the Bolsheviks took over after the
Russian Revolution, they sought to
recast the banya as a source o modern-
izing cleanliness: Stalin declared that
Soviet communism would not counte-
nance dirty people. As the Soviet era
drew to a close, the recreational function
o the bathhouse superseded its utilitarian
one. In the words o an Americanthe Soviet Union did in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, under Leonid
Brezhnev: domestic stagnation com-
bined with activism abroad. Stent does
not claim to know exactly which policies
Western countries should pursue in
dealing with Putin, but she counsels
strategic patience and preparedness—
and suggests that it would be wise to
expect the unexpected.
Russia Without Putin: Money, Power, and
the Myths of the New Cold War
BY TONY WOOD. Verso, 2018, 224 pp.
Wood seeks to debunk several common
misconceptions about Russia and its
relations with the rest o the world. One
o them, he contends, is the belie that
today’s tensions between Russia and the
United States stem from Russian Presi-
dent Vladimir Putin’s long-standing
antagonism toward the West. Wood
argues that, in fact, the dramatic deterio-
ration o relations witnessed in recent
years was all but inevitable and is rooted
in the massive power and resource
imbalance between the two sides that was
produced by the collapse o the Soviet
Union. Wood also refutes the idea that
today’s stando is a new Cold War: it
lacks any clear ideological dimension, he
points out, and, unlike the Cold War,
leaves many countries and regions
untouched by the tensions between
Russia and the West. Wood criticizes
some Russian liberals who oppose Putin
for their misplaced faith in an “idealized”
capitalism based on “undistorted” free-
market principles. There is no capitalism
outside o history, Wood reminds read-
ers, and the kind o capitalism found in
Russia today is directly descended from
the postcommunist order installed by