THE DESCENT

A longtime foreign correspondent digs deep under the surface of Vladimir Putin’s sepulchral Russia.

Bennetts, onetime Moscow reporter for The Times of London, has been in more than a few police stations in Russia. In one of them, early in his narrative, a secret police agent asks him what he thinks of the country’s leader. “It must be very hard to manage such a large country effectively,” he replies, to which the apparatchik gives him a thumbs-up, “as if I was a contestant in a bizarre quiz show who had just provided the correct answer.” Correct answers are hard to come by in the Russian hall of mirrors. On the Ukrainian front, he ponders the attitude of the Russian soldiers, who, far from being indoctrinated zombies, have just one answer: “Da pokhui—“I don’t give a fuck.” It’s a one-size-fits-all response to just about everything in the country, ruled by cynicism, me-firstism, and, more than anything else, apathy: “Most people were utterly convinced that nothing depended upon them, a conviction the Kremlin did its very best to encourage.” The careful reader will not help but notice parallels in other authoritarian-trending countries, where the bosses are held out as the only possible salvation to the world’s problems and where “state media has become adept at seizing on tiny slices of reality and magnifying them to grotesque proportions, until they block out the truth.” Indeed, by Bennetts’ account, the Russian playbook is a closely followed model: Anti-LGBTQ+ repression here, undeclared war there, corruption, far-right radicalism, and violence everywhere, even as Putin, one Kremlin insider observes, is trying to carve out a politics like no other. Putin’s regime will end, as all regimes do. But so fragile is civil society, Bennetts concludes, that he harbors little hope that Russia will ever be able to dig out from the rubble.

An incisive portrait of what is arguably the world’s preeminent totalitarian regime.