Book completed
Apr. 11th, 2026 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeHow to Slay a Dragon: Building a New Russia After Putin, by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The author was one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen in the early Putin years, then spent 10 years in prison for saying what he thought too many times, and now he’s an opposition leader living in exile, in London. He has given a great deal of thought to the practical, policy-related issues for how Russia could make a transition to democracy, and he spells out his ideas in this book.
My only real concern is that I don’t think he’s gone quite far enough, in that he explains that Russia doesn’t really have a “civil society,” where people feel like they’re part of a national community, and presumably they would need that to be able to make this transition, but he doesn’t address how that could be done. Perhaps that’s in his later books, or perhaps he’s leaving that problem to others. (I have my own thoughts…)
My only real concern is that I don’t think he’s gone quite far enough, in that he explains that Russia doesn’t really have a “civil society,” where people feel like they’re part of a national community, and presumably they would need that to be able to make this transition, but he doesn’t address how that could be done. Perhaps that’s in his later books, or perhaps he’s leaving that problem to others. (I have my own thoughts…)
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Date: 2026-04-12 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-13 08:48 am (UTC)