158 «¬® ̄°±² ³««³°® ́
MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Professor of History at
the Catholic University of America and the
author of the forthcoming book The Abandon-
ment of the West: The History of an Idea in
American Foreign Policy.
The Wily Country
Understanding Putin’s Russia
Michael Kimmage
Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and
Compromise in Putin’s Russia
BY JOSHUA YAFFA. Tim Duggan
Books, 2020, 368 pp.
N
ot since the McCarthy era has
Russia been so present in the
American psyche and so close
to the fevered core o American poli-
tics. But being present is not the same
as being known. Russia’s recent ubiquity
in U.S. politics has coincided with a
precipitous decline in contact between
the two countries: among diplomats (a
result o U.S. eorts to isolate Russia
for its misdeeds in Ukraine and else-
where), among heads o state and politi-
cal elites, among scholars, and among
ordinary citizens. U.S. academic work on
Russia has been steadily diminishing
since the end o the Cold War. Very few
Americans now learn the Russian language
or study Russian history, and a great
deal o U.S. journalism on Russia suers
from hyperbole, paranoia, and clichés.
In this milieu, the journalist Joshua
Yaa has distinguished himsel with his
rigor, his acumen, and his nuanced
voice. Since 2013, Yaa (who earlier in
his career was an editor at this magazine)
has been writing about Russia for The
New Yorker, ¥ling articles on politics,
diplomacy, and culture not only from
the country’s big cities but also from
Russia’s many far-ung regions; he has
also written some o the most penetrat-
ing and well-researched essays on
U.S.-Ukrainian relations in the Trump
era. His in-depth reporting consistently
allows him to move beyond the head-
lines, revealing the deeper historical
and sociological patterns that underpin
that notoriously contradictory country.
Yaa’s excellent new book, Between
Two Fires, traces the lives o a group o
ambitious Russians who lived through
the transition from the Soviet era to the
post-Soviet one. Each is aware o a
certain truth about the Russian world,
and each must navigate a political
system that runs less on tyranny than
on carefully calibrated compromises. A
few o them succeed because they learn
the dance. Others bear the burden o
being principled.
And yet as ¥nely tuned to compli-
cated Russian realities as Yaa is,
Between Two Fires is ultimately a missed
opportunity. Like many other books
written by Westerners about contempo-
rary Russia, it takes as its baseline the
intelligentsia o¤ Moscow and St.
Petersburg, exploring their dreams o
liberty and wondering whether they
will ever come true. That is an old and
venerable subject, one that Russian
and foreign observers alike have
speculated about extensively since the
early nineteenth century. But focusing
on it obscures the more basic and
more consequential task o evaluating
post-Soviet Russia as it is, rather than
as it should be—or should be from an
American point o view.