In Putin's footsteps : searching for the soul of an empire across Russia's eleven time zones

Author

Nina L Khrushcheva

Call Number

• 947.086 K459 (CEN)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : St. Martin's Press, 2019.

Physical Description

vii,508 pages : color illustrations, maps ; 22 cm

Summary

"In Putin's Footsteps is Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler's unique combination of travelogue, current affairs, and history, showing how Russia's dimensions have shaped its identity and culture through the decades. With exclusive insider status as Nikita Khrushchev's great grand-daughter, and an ex-pat living and reporting on Russia and the Soviet Union since 1983, Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler offer a poignant exploration of the largest country on earth through their recreation of Vladimir Putin's fabled New Year's Eve speech planned across all eleven time zones. After taking over from Yeltsin in 1999, and then being elected president in a landslide, Putin traveled to almost two dozen countries and a quarter of Russia's eighty-nine regions to connect with ordinary Russians. His travels inspired the idea of a rousing New Year's Eve address delivered every hour at midnight throughout Russia's eleven time zones. The idea was beautiful, but quickly abandoned as an impossible feat. He correctly intuited, however, that the success of his presidency would rest on how the country's outback citizens viewed their place on the world stage. Today more than ever, Putin is even more determined to present Russia as a formidable nation. We need to understand why Russia has for centuries been an adversary of the West. Its size, nuclear arsenal, arms industry, and scientific community (including cyber-experts), guarantees its influence"--

Contents

• Kaliningrad: the amber-tinted gaze of an empire
• Kiev: the mother of all Russian cities or the threat to mother Russia?
• Arkhangelsk, Solovetsky Islands, Saint Petersburg, and Moscow: Kremlin time, or Russia's clock of clocks
• Ulyanovsk (Simbirsk) and Samara (Kuibyshev): cities of the mighty Volga
• Perm, Yekaterinburg, and Tyumen: the Urals' holy trinity
• Omsk: a mixed metaphor of Putin's empire
• Novosibirsk: a story of science and serendipity
• Ulan-ude, Irkutsk, and Lake Baikal: Asian abodes of the spirit
• Blagoveshchensk-Heihe and Yakutsk: roughing it
• Vladivostok: rule the East!
• Magadan and Butugychag: from the Gulag capital to the Valley of Death
• Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky: the very far East
• The past of the Russian future.