Michael Kimmage
160 «¬® ̄°±² ³««³°® ́
mechanism” evolved into an ethos:
“citizen and state subconsciously worked
together to ensure that the individual
took agency in stiing his own freedom
and chances for self-realization.”
Putin has cultivated the Russian
talent for wiliness, Yaa explains. Putin
constructed a regime that is knowingly
arbitrary in its depredations, forcing
any ambitious person to ¥gure out the
rules o engagement and decide how
much personal freedom and initiative to
carve out and how opportunistic to be.
This compromising balance o reward and
punishment, o liberty and state con-
trol, describes “the future contours o
Russian society,” in Yaa’s words.
Yaa wisely avoids prophecy, yet he is
convinced that wiliness has an enduring
appeal in Russia. I¤ Putin can continue
harnessing it, he will go forward. I the
wily Russian mind starts to see diminish-
ing returns in the house that Putin built,
the social contract will unravel, and
Putin will become a politician in search
o a constituency.
Wiliness is a universal trait, and for
Yaa, it serves as a reasonable enough
bridge between the Soviet past and the
Russian present. It’s debatable whether
Russia is a country where “venal self-
interest had long become the norm” and
is therefore especially prone to wiliness,
as Yaa asserts. But his beautifully
wrought portraiture more than proves the
residual nature o wiliness in Russian
society. As an explanation for why con-
temporary Russians think and act as they
do, the persistence o wiliness is more
convincing than the return o a totalitar-
ian political culture, which many Putin
critics allege has taken place. “Most
people are neither Stalin nor Solzhenit-
syn,” Yaa writes, “but, in their own way,Ramzan Kadyrov, a relationship that
helps her with her day-to-day projects and
helps Kadyrov with his public image.
The coils o co-optation are not necessar-
ily chains. They can be worn lightly
and, at times, in the name o doing good.
In the past few years, Yaa relates,
the early Putin period has faded into an
ongoing third act, in which “things begin
to look a lot more fragile.” Inequality is
rising, the middle class is under pres-
sure, and Putin is getting old. Russians
today are “open, curious, and ambitious,
but not—at least not yet—desperate
and insurrectionary,” Yaa writes. Their
quiescence or their rage will set the stage
for the fourth act, post-Putin. Yaa
devotes an intriguing chapter to the sad
story o¤ Pavel Adelgeim, a Russian
Orthodox priest who suered for his faith
during the Soviet era and who, until his
death in 2013, refused to align himsel
with the hierarchy o the Russian
Orthodox Church in post-Soviet Russia
and supported protests against Putin.
Adelgeim personi¥es a regime-critical
Christianity that could ¥t into a future
pro-democracy movement, one in which
dissent would be a vehicle o patriotism
and empathy would act as a social glue.
SURVIVAL OF THE WILIEST
Although Yaa’s three acts coincide
with periods in Putin’s rise and rule,
Between Two Fires does not put the
Russian leader at the center o the
drama. Yaa contends that Putin is “less
the country’s captor than a manifesta-
tion o its collective subconscious.” And
the wellspring o the collective Russian
subconscious, according to Yaa, is
wiliness. Soviet citizens were reliant on
the state. They had to adjust to its
demands, and in the process, a “survival