This is a timely book. It addresses the challenges of a fractious and fractured Europe. The first word of the title means ‘truth’ in Russian, and the author’s point is that we have collectively lost sight of that essential commodity.
Rory MacLean, whose previous books include Stalin’s Nose, Under the Dragon and Falling for Icarus, retraces in reverse a journey he made 30 years ago. Starting in Moscow this time and ending in London, his aim is ‘to understand what had gone wrong’ since the heady optimism following the fall of both the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall: ‘I wanted to learn how refugees, the dispossessed and cyberhackers had been used by nationalists.’
After sketching the 20th-century history of each region with a sure hand, MacLean proceeds with a series of vignettes. He visits ‘Russia’s military Disneyland’, a glitzy weapons bazaar where balaclava-wearing dancers in SAS uniforms perform a robot ballet. In Estonia he travels to one of that tiny country’s 1,500 islands and learns about the Forest Brothers, wartime partisans who harried occupation forces. In Transnistria, a banana-shaped breakaway republic of a breakaway republic of the former Soviet Union, he reveals the horrors of illegally traded weapons-grade uranium-235.
The author is a fine sleuth. Driving south out of the Carpathians onto the Great Hungarian Plain he manages to find the man who welcomed him to his home on his earlier journey a generation past, and they glug Crimean champagne set aside for Maclean’s return. In this way the author lets people describe in their own words what has happened as new ‘demigods’ — usually more draconian than the previous incumbents — took over the reins of government. One hears again the refrain that at least everyone had work under the communist regime, and that ‘migrants steal jobs’.
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