Michael Kimmage
162 «¬® ̄°±² ³««³°® ́
friendly yet sophisticated. He is a talented
and obedient operator, but even this
Kremlin insider displays sentiments that
cannot be reduced to wiliness. In Yaa’s
observation, Ernst approved o¤ Russian
policy toward Ukraine circa 2014,
sensing in it “a moment o geopolitical
score-settling, o upending a post–Cold
War order that Ernst—like Putin, the
rest o the Kremlin elite, and millions o
Russians—felt had treated Russia harshly.”
Ernst is a sincere propagandist, free o
the implacable cynicism that dominated
the Soviet Union in its ¥nal decades.
One explanation for the pronounced
wiliness o Yaa’s subjects is that almost
all o them were born long before the
breakup o the Soviet Union. They were
forced to move as best they could
between the two “¥res” o the book’s
title: the Soviet Union and the Russian
Federation. In the ¥nal chapter o the
book, however, Yaa writes about a
younger Russian, and the results suggest
that he should have devoted far more
attention to Russians born in the 1970s
or later. Danila Prilepa captured Yaa’s
interest when he asked a question on a
2017 televised call-in show with Putin.
Prilepa, who was 16 at the time, con-
fronted Putin about corruption, asking
him what he planned to do about it and
about the mounting loss o¤ faith in the
government. Some time later, Yaa
visited Prilepa at his family’s home in
Nefteyugansk, far from Moscow. In
conversation, Prilepa revealed himsel to
be very critical o the Russian govern-
ment, but to Yaa’s surprise, he was not
alienated from it. Yaa asked Prilepa i he
“saw a di¾culty in serving a state he
had begun to sour on. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m
planning to serve my homeland, not a
certain circle o people.’” This commentfrom the stability that he imposed on
the country after the messy 1990s, and
not just from the wealth that gave some
Russians an incentive to carry out wily
service to the state, but also from the fact
that most Russians have judged Putin
an eective advocate for Russian nation-
hood. A key part o this advocacy has
been a willingness to confront the West,
which Putin began doing long before
the Ukraine crisis. What Russians want
more than a liberal country—a goal that
galvanizes relatively few people outside
Moscow and St. Petersburg—is an
autonomous country. Putin has arranged
Russian politics to enable such autonomy.
Yaa is aware o this dynamic. He
writes that “the two forces [in Russia]—
state and citizen—speak in dialogue, a
conversational timbre often missed by the
foreign ear.” But only by reading between
the lines o Between Two Fires can one
discern that dialogue. One o Yaa’s
subjects, Oleg Zubkov, is a zookeeper and
entrepreneur living in Crimea. Zubkov
is a free spirit and a bon vivant, and Yaa
relishes his antiauthoritarian spirit. In
the referendum that Putin conducted to
decide Crimea’s future after the Russian
invasion in 2014, Zubkov happily voted
for the territory to join Russia, although
he later found himsel in conict with
the Russian legal system. In the sincerity
o his patriotism and his independence
o mind, Zubkov ends up demonstrating
a lack o wily gamesmanship—“at least
the way the game is played in the Putin
era,” as Yaa notes.
Another o Yaa’s main characters is
the television producer Konstantin Ernst,
who achieves wealth and status through
his profession, assisting the powerful while
retaining the sensibility o an aesthete.
Ernst produces television that is regime-