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Pravda Ha Ha: Truth, Lies and the End of Europe
'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' John le Carré
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were – for most Brits and Americans – part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev.
As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists – both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists – have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were – for most Brits and Americans – part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev.
As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists – both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists – have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.
368 pages, Paperback
Published August 20, 2020
62 people are currently reading
672 people want to read
About the author
Rory MacLean
29 books66 followersCanadian Rory MacLean is one of Britain's most expressive and adventurous travel writers. His twelve books include the UK top tens Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon as well as Berlin: Imagine a City, a book of the year and 'the most extraordinary work of history I've ever read' according to the Washington Post. He has won awards from the Canada Council and Arts Council of England and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary prize. His works – according to the late John Fowles – are among those that 'marvellously explain why literature still lives'. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he divides his time between the UK, Berlin and Toronto.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 76 reviews
September 10, 2022
Pravda Ha Ha is a romp through Russia's murky fields of truth. A search for a rare mushroom, an oligarch's hallucinogenic treat, sets the ribald tone. The delicacy is known at pipiska Putina or Putin's Pecker. The first seventeen chapters are satirically fine and manage to balance fantastical craziness -- reality -- with pathos. After the Russian sections, though, the book becomes rather repetitive and disjointed. The tone of the book recovers in Chapter thirty-four, as the grotesque oligarch, Dimitri, re-surfaces and goes in search of a holy grail beyond mushrooms: a meeting with Gorbachev. An on-going narrative includes Sami, a refugee fleeing Russia in search of Britain, and that is where the book ends. The closing chapters bring MacLean full circle (36 chapters/decans) and Pravda Ha Ha finishes with post-truth Brexit and its follies. There is much to enjoy and MacLean exposes the truth about Europe (in relation to Russia), but the political diatribe that concludes the book lacks the bite and brilliance of the beginning. MacLean's writing is at its finest when characterising people and depicting an issue in a shocking image. His description of a baby's cradle in the shape of a military weapon encapsulates Russia under Putin.
November 5, 2019
Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989?
I was sitting in the back room of our old house watching music videos on TV.
We didn’t have the specialty channels back then, but the cable company was running a free promo all week, and we could watch the movie channel and the music channel for free.
I was 17 years old, and glued to MuchMusic — the Canadian version of MTV — when the video stream of shoegazer rock was suddenly replaced by images of people kicking down Europe’s most oppressive border.
I don’t even think I could have placed Berlin on a map back then. But I knew something in my childhood had changed irrevocably. The Cold War that had projected oppressive nightmares into our lives was coming to an end. The world of 99 Red Balloons was all we’d ever known.
An entire new world of travel also opened to the West when that Wall came down, and as Eastern Europeans fled the prison their countries had become, the writer Rory Maclean went the other way.
He set out in a farting Trabant — East Germany’s two-stroke cardboard car — on a journey through Europe’s forgotten half, from Berlin to Moscow, through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania.
He met people who hadn’t spoken to a foreigner for 50 years. And he came away with stories of optimism, freedom from fear, and most of all, hope for a new united Europe. That journey became his book Stalin’s Nose.
With Pravda Ha Ha, Maclean has now retraced that journey — in reverse — 30 years later to get a sense of why the hope of those years has come to nothing.
How did we go from Winds of Change to Brexit? From Eastern Europe’s first free elections in half a century to Russian troll factories, populism and Donald Trump? Were we just naive?
Pravda Ha Ha is a beautifully written book — in my opinion, the author’s best so far.
Maclean perfectly captures the sense of purposeless and malaise felt by the people of the countries he travels through.
In Russia, he meets a Chicken Tsar whose cynicism was fuelled by feelings of betrayal towards communism, and by betrayal towards the promise of capitalism, which after the collapse of the Soviet Union plunged Russia into a free-for-all of organized crime, hyper-materialism, and anarchy that resulted in the rise of Putin.
He travels to the Baltic state of Estonia, where fears of a Russian invasion never went away. In the breakaway Modovan republic of Transnistria he finds the opposite: a longing for the glory days of the USSR.
He meets students in the Ukraine who turn to performance art to process the trauma of their ongoing war with Russia. He sees authoritarianism on the rise in Poland and Hungary, where citizens have turned to populist leaders to deliver the sense of national pride they never found in an opaque, decentralized European Union which, all too often, seemed to push new German values on everyone else.
And throughout a content that experienced two World Wars, the Holocaust, and Cold War Communist police states, he finds a growing surge of xenophobia and populist nationalism, sparked in part by Europe’s inability to deal with the migrant crisis.
Pravda Ha Ha feels like an older, wiser book from an older, wiser writer. It contains the magic of great travel writing. It takes us places, and it brings us the voices and stories of real people.
We share their tarnished hope for what remains of a borderless continent, and we share their sense of an exhausted continent struggling for purpose in a world where the values that brought down the Wall don’t seem to matter to a generation of so-called ‘social justice warriors’ who can’t understand why capitalism was a more humane alternative to the Marxist hell of the gulag and the murderous hypocrisy of five year plans.
The Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago this Saturday, and there are a lot of events happening here in the city.
As darkness falls across Poland and Hungary, and Russia works to undermine the Western world, it’s a good time to think about what we’ve gained over the past 30 years of peace in Europe — and what we stand to lose.
I was sitting in the back room of our old house watching music videos on TV.
We didn’t have the specialty channels back then, but the cable company was running a free promo all week, and we could watch the movie channel and the music channel for free.
I was 17 years old, and glued to MuchMusic — the Canadian version of MTV — when the video stream of shoegazer rock was suddenly replaced by images of people kicking down Europe’s most oppressive border.
I don’t even think I could have placed Berlin on a map back then. But I knew something in my childhood had changed irrevocably. The Cold War that had projected oppressive nightmares into our lives was coming to an end. The world of 99 Red Balloons was all we’d ever known.
An entire new world of travel also opened to the West when that Wall came down, and as Eastern Europeans fled the prison their countries had become, the writer Rory Maclean went the other way.
He set out in a farting Trabant — East Germany’s two-stroke cardboard car — on a journey through Europe’s forgotten half, from Berlin to Moscow, through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania.
He met people who hadn’t spoken to a foreigner for 50 years. And he came away with stories of optimism, freedom from fear, and most of all, hope for a new united Europe. That journey became his book Stalin’s Nose.
With Pravda Ha Ha, Maclean has now retraced that journey — in reverse — 30 years later to get a sense of why the hope of those years has come to nothing.
How did we go from Winds of Change to Brexit? From Eastern Europe’s first free elections in half a century to Russian troll factories, populism and Donald Trump? Were we just naive?
Pravda Ha Ha is a beautifully written book — in my opinion, the author’s best so far.
Maclean perfectly captures the sense of purposeless and malaise felt by the people of the countries he travels through.
In Russia, he meets a Chicken Tsar whose cynicism was fuelled by feelings of betrayal towards communism, and by betrayal towards the promise of capitalism, which after the collapse of the Soviet Union plunged Russia into a free-for-all of organized crime, hyper-materialism, and anarchy that resulted in the rise of Putin.
He travels to the Baltic state of Estonia, where fears of a Russian invasion never went away. In the breakaway Modovan republic of Transnistria he finds the opposite: a longing for the glory days of the USSR.
He meets students in the Ukraine who turn to performance art to process the trauma of their ongoing war with Russia. He sees authoritarianism on the rise in Poland and Hungary, where citizens have turned to populist leaders to deliver the sense of national pride they never found in an opaque, decentralized European Union which, all too often, seemed to push new German values on everyone else.
And throughout a content that experienced two World Wars, the Holocaust, and Cold War Communist police states, he finds a growing surge of xenophobia and populist nationalism, sparked in part by Europe’s inability to deal with the migrant crisis.
Pravda Ha Ha feels like an older, wiser book from an older, wiser writer. It contains the magic of great travel writing. It takes us places, and it brings us the voices and stories of real people.
We share their tarnished hope for what remains of a borderless continent, and we share their sense of an exhausted continent struggling for purpose in a world where the values that brought down the Wall don’t seem to matter to a generation of so-called ‘social justice warriors’ who can’t understand why capitalism was a more humane alternative to the Marxist hell of the gulag and the murderous hypocrisy of five year plans.
The Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago this Saturday, and there are a lot of events happening here in the city.
As darkness falls across Poland and Hungary, and Russia works to undermine the Western world, it’s a good time to think about what we’ve gained over the past 30 years of peace in Europe — and what we stand to lose.
September 15, 2019
While I can't claim to agree with some of the politics here, this book offers a thoroughly interesting charge through Eastern Europe, and the fall-out from the end of the USSR and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. We see a Russia ridiculously weaponised, claiming any patch of land next to it is a threat, we see the edginess that brings to life in places like Estonia and Ukraine, and so on through the old Soviet Bloc countries. Meanwhile our author is not the only person travelling with England as his end destination… Like I say, if you have the affinity for those places (and I do, having been to most of the countries on this book's itinerary) this will interest, but for a book that lambasts people for disbelieving the truth it can be rather free with just half a story. So Putin got the throne by inventing domestic terrorism? Well, there was terrorism elsewhere anyway for him to need to react to – the outvasion of Chechnya just one instance. He doesn't quite go the reductio ad absurdum route to attribute the rise of the far right in eastern Europe to what he does, but he's close at times. And he seems to be desperate to gloss over the post-2008 Europe with the spirit of a hard-core "you're racist, you!" leftie Bremoaner. The spirit of his Euro-zone, post-War, post-Wall, post-Crash, is seen if you fly to Crete. You land on a German-owned runway, go through a German-built airport and drive to your hotel on German-built motorways. Greece will never be able to pay the debts she's run up, but if that attitude to snatching ruins and making a profit out of it is better than the attitude of our author's Russian oligarch friends, then I'm stumped as to why.
So the liberal bent of this book does skew it away from my tastes somewhat (only somewhat, mind), and I'd debate whether to put it on a travel shelf to start with, so much of it concerns geopolitics and sociology. But it is still a firmly interesting read, for all its frustrating elements. Three and a half stars in the end from me.
So the liberal bent of this book does skew it away from my tastes somewhat (only somewhat, mind), and I'd debate whether to put it on a travel shelf to start with, so much of it concerns geopolitics and sociology. But it is still a firmly interesting read, for all its frustrating elements. Three and a half stars in the end from me.
February 5, 2020
I liked the general message of the book regarding nationalism rearing its ugly head all over Europe. I agree with the author on the importance of the topic and the need to stop the hatred and love thy neighbour. I enjoyed the thread of plot woven throughout the book with MacLean crossing paths with the same characters over and over.
What I really dislike was the writing. Lengthy, boring and seemingly irrelevant descriptions made me think of my school papers where the word count was just a third of the required amount after I'd put in all the facts and I would proceed with filling the text with meaningless prose. I feel like the message of this book could have been compressed into half the volume and it would've made a more enjoyable read.
Also, Russians don't toast with na zdorovie. Consider using something else than Hollywood films for linguistic and cultural references in the future. Russians say za zdorovie which translates as "to your health". Na zdorovie is the Polish version, in Russian it means "you're welcome" as in a response to someone thanking you.
What I really dislike was the writing. Lengthy, boring and seemingly irrelevant descriptions made me think of my school papers where the word count was just a third of the required amount after I'd put in all the facts and I would proceed with filling the text with meaningless prose. I feel like the message of this book could have been compressed into half the volume and it would've made a more enjoyable read.
Also, Russians don't toast with na zdorovie. Consider using something else than Hollywood films for linguistic and cultural references in the future. Russians say za zdorovie which translates as "to your health". Na zdorovie is the Polish version, in Russian it means "you're welcome" as in a response to someone thanking you.
February 16, 2020
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, travel writer Rory MacLean retraces the steps of a journey he undertook back then from Berlin to Moscow through a number of Eastern Block states. This time, he's going backwards (much as the area he's exploring appears to be doing ideologically), examining what became of the optimism and hope for a brighter future of those heady days when change swept across half a continent and drawing a bleak yet darkly entertaining portrait of what has become of the European dream in the age of rising nationalism and Euro-sceptic sentiment.
January 10, 2022
It took me a while to figure out why exactly do I feel uncomfortable while reading it; it is nothing unusual for non-fiction to portray the unusual, the interesting. Suddenly it dawned on me: Rory MacLean wasn’t writing about the old – new – reality; he focused on the freak show. Like P.T. Barnum, he is parading in from of the reader the equivalents of bearded women, Siamese twins, dwarves, and shamelessly declares them proper representatives of the whole population. There’s nothing good the East from Oder, only the corrupted, the oligarchs, the drunk, the neo-Nazis.
One of the biggest sins by Rory MacLean is that he isn’t a silent observer. He is not giving voice to the people; he IS the voice. And, as it’s very typical for the privileged Westerners, that voice is very patronizing and very amused. Eastern and Central Europeans are, according to him, a species of superstitious, corrupted, and not fully civilized simpletons. As a cherry on top, Rory MacLean is also a white savior, the only person in Moscow who noticed, embraced, and helped a black man on an invalid visa. That story has really nothing to do with the rest of the book, nothing to do with Russia where the event takes place; it serves the purpose of showing the author as somebody better, as a lonely warrior who singlehandedly saves the world. The time in the described countries stood still, according to him; indeed, the book very much is a blast from the past, when a colonizer gets fascinated with a noble barbarian. Distasteful then, distasteful now.
This book will probably be received differently depending on the side of the Iron Curtain the reader is from, but it is obvious, that Rory MacLean, despite his dramatic exclamations about the end of the European Dream, wants to maintain the status quo and the class difference. Travels to “the forgotten realms of Europe” give him thrill; therefore, he prefers them to remain underdeveloped, so that his experience is genuine. When he’s satisfied, he travels safely back to his high-speed internet patting himself on the back.
One of the biggest sins by Rory MacLean is that he isn’t a silent observer. He is not giving voice to the people; he IS the voice. And, as it’s very typical for the privileged Westerners, that voice is very patronizing and very amused. Eastern and Central Europeans are, according to him, a species of superstitious, corrupted, and not fully civilized simpletons. As a cherry on top, Rory MacLean is also a white savior, the only person in Moscow who noticed, embraced, and helped a black man on an invalid visa. That story has really nothing to do with the rest of the book, nothing to do with Russia where the event takes place; it serves the purpose of showing the author as somebody better, as a lonely warrior who singlehandedly saves the world. The time in the described countries stood still, according to him; indeed, the book very much is a blast from the past, when a colonizer gets fascinated with a noble barbarian. Distasteful then, distasteful now.
This book will probably be received differently depending on the side of the Iron Curtain the reader is from, but it is obvious, that Rory MacLean, despite his dramatic exclamations about the end of the European Dream, wants to maintain the status quo and the class difference. Travels to “the forgotten realms of Europe” give him thrill; therefore, he prefers them to remain underdeveloped, so that his experience is genuine. When he’s satisfied, he travels safely back to his high-speed internet patting himself on the back.
December 24, 2019
This book is one that shows that sometimes, the future does not always turn out so great. MacLean retraces his steps through Europe and Russia, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. During those heady days in 1989, there was a sense of optimism, that the down-trodden, oppressed world of Eastern Europe could finally catch up to the West and lead the world into a new era of prosperity and peace. Even in Russia, there was some optimism for reform. 30 years on, that optimism no longer exists. MacLean travels through a Russia and Eastern Europe that is plagued with corruption and a massive disparity in economic and social status. Where 30 years ago, he saw opportunity, he now sees despair. While Moscow is an oligarchic paradise, filled with money (not all of it clean), the rest of Russia is not sharing in that prosperity. Much of Eastern Europe, far from embracing a democratic background is slipping into an authoritarian nationalism, one that is already trying to rewrite its history. Even in England, a bastion of Western Liberalism, the author finds cynicism and corruption in the higher ranks of that society.
Overall, the author's disappointment and despair come across all too clearly in this book. Where he saw hope in the future, that is in short supply here and now. His disappointment is most apparent in how the non-Russian countries treat their populations, especially the poor and desperate (noting the plight of many refugees trying to escape brutal conditions to make a life for themselves). While this work is not intended to represent the thoughts and feelings of all of the countries, the picture that he paints is dark, and given other works/headlines read about that part of the world during this time, it is a fair representation of what Europe is evolving into in the present and near future.
Worth the time to read, no matter how much of a background you have in studying this region of the world.
Overall, the author's disappointment and despair come across all too clearly in this book. Where he saw hope in the future, that is in short supply here and now. His disappointment is most apparent in how the non-Russian countries treat their populations, especially the poor and desperate (noting the plight of many refugees trying to escape brutal conditions to make a life for themselves). While this work is not intended to represent the thoughts and feelings of all of the countries, the picture that he paints is dark, and given other works/headlines read about that part of the world during this time, it is a fair representation of what Europe is evolving into in the present and near future.
Worth the time to read, no matter how much of a background you have in studying this region of the world.
December 24, 2019
I’m not a great fan of travelogues. Too often the author feels a need to put him or herself centre-stage and adopt a faintly mocking tone towards the people they meet, searching out, it feels, for the absurd in order to demonstrate their own superiority to the benighted natives. Rory MacLean doesn’t do that here. He sets out on his journey in the interests of discovery and truth, and I found it a compelling journey indeed. In 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Eastern Bloc opened up to the west, MacLean set out to explore this previously hidden part of the world. Now, 30 years later, he retraces his steps to find out what has changed, what has stayed the same, what the future might hold. He doesn’t assume prior knowledge in the reader and succinctly and accessibly explains the history and the current situation in an intelligent and thoughtful way. I sometime felt that he got a bit carried away with his language and some of the writing seemed overblown and striving too hard for effect. (“…tanks shook the earth, rent the air and caused a child to drop her banana ice-cream cone.” Was it really a banana one? Would it have made a difference if it had been a strawberry one? Too much detail?) And I do wonder about some of the incredible coincidences that happen pretty regularly on his travels. However, I’ve travelled enough in Russia myself to appreciate that the absurd and the surreal can exist side-by-side with the everyday, so perhaps I should have more faith. All in all, I enjoyed accompanying MacLean on his journey; I learnt a lot and gained a better understanding of many issues. This is much more than just a travel book – it’s history and sociology and politics combined and a genuine attempt to ferret out the truth. Highly recommended.
March 2, 2024
One of the weaker books on Russia I’ve read. It didn’t bode well when the author started by explaining his reaction at the collapse of the Soviet Union: “some of us even dared to imagine the end of the nation state.”
It’s difficult to take an adult seriously when they still espouse the politics of a 14 year old, but as a travel writer, MacLean is absolutely tone deaf to anything other than his federalist world view, which makes him completely unable to grasp the mentality and psychology of anyone over 25 in the post soviet states. Time after Time, he’s prepared to overlook any kind of criminality or bullying behaviour, but reacts with horror and incredulity at relatively mild expressions of national pride, patriotism or populism. There’s nothing wrong with being a globalist, I suppose. Everyone’s entitled to their own point of view. But it makes him tone deaf as an anthropologist in Eastern Europe.
To MacLean, all displays of national identity are the deluded dreams of weak minded old men, and patriotism is merely something that manipulative state actors use to play on the insecurities and fears of the masses. His complete inability to allow himself to appreciate and grasp the complexity of the Russian understanding of itself leaves him much like a blind man in the Louvre, wondering why everyone is making so much fuss about squares of canvas on a wall. He walks the land like the man who fell to earth, convinced that his self-righteous inner monologue is the only voice of reason he’ll ever hear.
It’s difficult to take an adult seriously when they still espouse the politics of a 14 year old, but as a travel writer, MacLean is absolutely tone deaf to anything other than his federalist world view, which makes him completely unable to grasp the mentality and psychology of anyone over 25 in the post soviet states. Time after Time, he’s prepared to overlook any kind of criminality or bullying behaviour, but reacts with horror and incredulity at relatively mild expressions of national pride, patriotism or populism. There’s nothing wrong with being a globalist, I suppose. Everyone’s entitled to their own point of view. But it makes him tone deaf as an anthropologist in Eastern Europe.
To MacLean, all displays of national identity are the deluded dreams of weak minded old men, and patriotism is merely something that manipulative state actors use to play on the insecurities and fears of the masses. His complete inability to allow himself to appreciate and grasp the complexity of the Russian understanding of itself leaves him much like a blind man in the Louvre, wondering why everyone is making so much fuss about squares of canvas on a wall. He walks the land like the man who fell to earth, convinced that his self-righteous inner monologue is the only voice of reason he’ll ever hear.
May 22, 2023
This is the second book I’ve read by Rory MacLean after Berlin: Imagine a City. He also made a fascinating podcast series called “The Bright Magic Podcast” to accompany the album by Public Service Broadcasting. Published in 2019, this is a travel book that revisits the history of eastern Europe in the 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He travels through Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, tracing the effects of the fall of the Soviet Union, the shadow of power and violence cast by the new oligarchs, and the shift to the right in politics that vilifies the unsettled, stateless people caused by our ongoing wars and arms dealing. Each chapter features encounters with people and their personal histories alongside the grander narratives of political changes. MacLean humanizes the stories of a number of refugees, whose horrific experiences trying to find safety in Europe cause as much trauma as the conflicts they are escaping at home. An important and timely work.
MacLean’s own narration of the audiobook version is compelling and brings to life the voices of the characters he encounters on his travels.
January 2, 2020
A sobering corrective to ‘End of History’ triumphalism, this paints a very bleak picture indeed of Central and Eastern Europe thirty years after the wall came tumbling down. Russia is in the dock for the most part and comes across as a place no right thinking person would ever want to visit – and while my own experience of visiting the country saw me robbed within an hour of entering the country (as opposed to my 1986 visit in USSR days) – I did feel that the endless bleakness of the picture could have done with more balance – one’s experiences are shaped by the people one chooses to interview after all. Elsewhere, extreme nationalism in Hungary and Poland is painted in a very bad light but one can’t help but admire some of the cynical techniques used to gain political influence. Fake news looms large and that the Russians employ people to spread hate on western message boards and social media sites is astonishing. Hard not to come out of this fearing that small minded clannism, nationalism and hatred has won.
June 10, 2020
I'm a fan of the writer, but this one did nothing for me. So abstract and overwritten.
For example this opening to a chapter, "Autumn's rains arrived as a sigh, stealing into the night, hissing into the warm earth, all but unheard by the city's sleepers."
For example this opening to a chapter, "Autumn's rains arrived as a sigh, stealing into the night, hissing into the warm earth, all but unheard by the city's sleepers."
November 8, 2021
Bleak and cynical but honest and evocative.
October 22, 2021
I really enjoyed it. Especially as I recently read Balkan Ghosts and just started It Can't Happen Here. It is also quite unsettling.
July 18, 2020
I received an ARC of this title from Bloomsbury. Because it took me so long to read, it barely matters that I received it as an ARC.
Despite the aggressive image of Putin on its cover, I thought this would be a quaint, romantic travelogue about Eastern Europe. Why was I mistaken? I have nothing that would make me think that aside from never having read something like this before.
Pravda Ha Ha is definitely romantic, but it simultaneously maintains a deadly serious tone with an attached message. This novel is an examination of fascism and totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Although the primary focus is Eastern Europe, MacLean continually draws the reader's attention to how Eastern Europe is concretely connected to the Western world, and details how exactly totalitarianism and fascism have already infiltrated the West. Even as I type this, it sounds as if I'm saying (or I'm saying that MacLean is claiming) that totalitarianism and fascism have originated in Eastern Europe. Let me be clear; MacLean's focus is in Eastern Europe, but he is also deeply aware of how fascism originates in the Western World as well.
The unique aspect of this novel is that it is a revisiting. 30 years ago, MacLean met up with a diverse group of people within Eastern Europe, collecting and recording a survey of their everyday life and how that related to societal trends and history within that area. He wrote about these people in his previous novel, "Stalin's Nose: Across the Face of Europe." In this current novel, he revisits those same friends/subjects and records how their life has changed. He writes about people personally and in an immediate way-- how they are at face level. MacLean is friendly and builds close relationships with these people, but he's still studying them under a microscope. They're his friends, but they're also his subjects. The people he visits knows that they are his subjects, but reading this book still made me uncomfortable at times. MacLean doesn't claim to be a scientist, but it seems like a twisted form of cultural anthropology or sociology. The information and stories of daily life are certainly valuable, but the methodology here feels slightly uncomfortable and exploitative, especially because of the romantic tone. People serve as metaphors for a larger point. Maclean retells his subject's stories with the most dramatic flourishes possible. Maclean also likes to be risky and go to places where others tell him not to go. Collectively, it all makes for good reading. But at what cost?
I also felt that the overall message wasn't much deeper than, "totalitarianism and fascism are pervasive and serious threats in our newly globalized world. Totalitarianism and fascism are leading us to late-stage capitalism, and xenophobia is a rapidly emerging threat to a truly democratic way of life." I think it provides entertaining and concrete examples of this, but it doesn't go further beyond this message. It definitely makes this message real, and the stories of the people contained within become immediate through their retelling. I also think that this book doesn't contain a solution for a way out; it is only detailing our modern woes. This is a very specific book for a very specific audience.
Despite the aggressive image of Putin on its cover, I thought this would be a quaint, romantic travelogue about Eastern Europe. Why was I mistaken? I have nothing that would make me think that aside from never having read something like this before.
Pravda Ha Ha is definitely romantic, but it simultaneously maintains a deadly serious tone with an attached message. This novel is an examination of fascism and totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Although the primary focus is Eastern Europe, MacLean continually draws the reader's attention to how Eastern Europe is concretely connected to the Western world, and details how exactly totalitarianism and fascism have already infiltrated the West. Even as I type this, it sounds as if I'm saying (or I'm saying that MacLean is claiming) that totalitarianism and fascism have originated in Eastern Europe. Let me be clear; MacLean's focus is in Eastern Europe, but he is also deeply aware of how fascism originates in the Western World as well.
The unique aspect of this novel is that it is a revisiting. 30 years ago, MacLean met up with a diverse group of people within Eastern Europe, collecting and recording a survey of their everyday life and how that related to societal trends and history within that area. He wrote about these people in his previous novel, "Stalin's Nose: Across the Face of Europe." In this current novel, he revisits those same friends/subjects and records how their life has changed. He writes about people personally and in an immediate way-- how they are at face level. MacLean is friendly and builds close relationships with these people, but he's still studying them under a microscope. They're his friends, but they're also his subjects. The people he visits knows that they are his subjects, but reading this book still made me uncomfortable at times. MacLean doesn't claim to be a scientist, but it seems like a twisted form of cultural anthropology or sociology. The information and stories of daily life are certainly valuable, but the methodology here feels slightly uncomfortable and exploitative, especially because of the romantic tone. People serve as metaphors for a larger point. Maclean retells his subject's stories with the most dramatic flourishes possible. Maclean also likes to be risky and go to places where others tell him not to go. Collectively, it all makes for good reading. But at what cost?
I also felt that the overall message wasn't much deeper than, "totalitarianism and fascism are pervasive and serious threats in our newly globalized world. Totalitarianism and fascism are leading us to late-stage capitalism, and xenophobia is a rapidly emerging threat to a truly democratic way of life." I think it provides entertaining and concrete examples of this, but it doesn't go further beyond this message. It definitely makes this message real, and the stories of the people contained within become immediate through their retelling. I also think that this book doesn't contain a solution for a way out; it is only detailing our modern woes. This is a very specific book for a very specific audience.
January 19, 2020
A MUST-READ for every European, and for every democratic person
“Either we shape the future, or we sleepwalk into it.”
This is MacLean’s conclusion, after an awe-inspiring, exciting journey from Moscow to Berlin, and it is more than well worth a read!
MacLean describes the reverse track of a journey he undertook from Berlin to Moscow about 30 years ago. His goal: observing, listening and understanding what happened to the dreams of freedom and democracy of the time immediately after the fall of the iron curtain. The book describes his conversations and interviews with a colourful mix of individuals. Here just three examples:
A Russian businessman explains how some people got rich fast and others not: “Some people got bagel, others got bagel hole.” He also has this comment on Trump becoming president of the US: “… many Russians were relieved. We saw that we were no longer the only fools in the world.”
In Tiraspol, capital of Transnistria, “a breakaway republic of a breakaway republic of the old Soviet Union”, the party leader of the communist party, proudly wearing “a new silver Breitling chronomat” explains that his job “as party leader is to preserve – and carry forward – the positive attributes of the USSR”. Transnistria is a “country”, or intending be a country, not acknowledged by even a single other country in the world.
In Hungary MacLean hears “… I told you: Hungary placed its faith in losers of every war since the sixth century. This twenty-first century will be no exception.”
Many chapters I read with a certain unease, a growing disappointment that the feeling of optimism, of hunger for openness, freedom and democracy of the 1990-ies had melted away in many countries. People were now listening to politicians who promised simple answers to complex questions, willing to dismantle part of the democratic freedom. I was glad to read MacLean’s assessment at the very end of the book about the same unease:
“For many years I have travelled and lived with certain principles, prizing certain values with a firm … believe in the promise of the future. Now I realise it’s us who must fulfil that promise. We kid ourselves if we believe that one day the … demagogues and xenophobes will retire to Foros, Key West or Clacton-on-Sea … Either we shape the future or we sleepwalk into it.”
“Either we shape the future, or we sleepwalk into it.”
This is MacLean’s conclusion, after an awe-inspiring, exciting journey from Moscow to Berlin, and it is more than well worth a read!
MacLean describes the reverse track of a journey he undertook from Berlin to Moscow about 30 years ago. His goal: observing, listening and understanding what happened to the dreams of freedom and democracy of the time immediately after the fall of the iron curtain. The book describes his conversations and interviews with a colourful mix of individuals. Here just three examples:
A Russian businessman explains how some people got rich fast and others not: “Some people got bagel, others got bagel hole.” He also has this comment on Trump becoming president of the US: “… many Russians were relieved. We saw that we were no longer the only fools in the world.”
In Tiraspol, capital of Transnistria, “a breakaway republic of a breakaway republic of the old Soviet Union”, the party leader of the communist party, proudly wearing “a new silver Breitling chronomat” explains that his job “as party leader is to preserve – and carry forward – the positive attributes of the USSR”. Transnistria is a “country”, or intending be a country, not acknowledged by even a single other country in the world.
In Hungary MacLean hears “… I told you: Hungary placed its faith in losers of every war since the sixth century. This twenty-first century will be no exception.”
Many chapters I read with a certain unease, a growing disappointment that the feeling of optimism, of hunger for openness, freedom and democracy of the 1990-ies had melted away in many countries. People were now listening to politicians who promised simple answers to complex questions, willing to dismantle part of the democratic freedom. I was glad to read MacLean’s assessment at the very end of the book about the same unease:
“For many years I have travelled and lived with certain principles, prizing certain values with a firm … believe in the promise of the future. Now I realise it’s us who must fulfil that promise. We kid ourselves if we believe that one day the … demagogues and xenophobes will retire to Foros, Key West or Clacton-on-Sea … Either we shape the future or we sleepwalk into it.”
November 4, 2019
30 years after his initial journey from Berlin to Moscow, travel writer Rory MacLean once again visits the countries of the former Eastern bloc - from Russia all the way to Germany, through Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Belarus and Hungary. He explores the politics then and now, records the experiences and ways of life of old and new acquaintances, and gives a bleak outlook on the dream of European unity.
MacLean paints an increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic picture throughout Eastern Europe. More than once I wished he was exaggerating for the sake of the story but as a Hungarian his account sadly rings very true.
Very well written and highly recommendable!
MacLean paints an increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic picture throughout Eastern Europe. More than once I wished he was exaggerating for the sake of the story but as a Hungarian his account sadly rings very true.
Very well written and highly recommendable!
September 23, 2019
Join historian and travel writer Rory MacLean as he retraces backwards a journey made in the euphoric year of 1989 from Berlin to Moscow. Now 30 years later he makes both a physical and metaphysical journey through the lands that were once part of the unlamented (but not by all) Soviet Union. We are taken on a journey through Russia itself, to former soviet states and struggling Russian enclaves meeting along the way an eclectic collection of colorful characters.
Layer by layer a picture is painted of lands that owing to their geography were subject throughout history to wars, conquest, ever changing borders and a continue struggle to survive and define their purpose and identity. Russia is portrayed as a kleptocracy, Poland and Hungary as descending into illiberal authoritarianism and Estonia and the Ukraine as being trumatised by Russian aggression and interference.
Depopulation, corruption and xenophobia seem to proliferate throughout. The story of Eastern Europe following the collapse of the USSR is indeed a dispiriting one with the evaporation of so much hope and expectation. However with the absence of something like the Marshall Plan the consequences were perhaps inevitable. Not great reading if you take like the author an outward looking liberal approach but it will provide you if nothing else with a glimpse into lands not far away that provide a warning that what happens when truth is replaced by lies and distortion.
Layer by layer a picture is painted of lands that owing to their geography were subject throughout history to wars, conquest, ever changing borders and a continue struggle to survive and define their purpose and identity. Russia is portrayed as a kleptocracy, Poland and Hungary as descending into illiberal authoritarianism and Estonia and the Ukraine as being trumatised by Russian aggression and interference.
Depopulation, corruption and xenophobia seem to proliferate throughout. The story of Eastern Europe following the collapse of the USSR is indeed a dispiriting one with the evaporation of so much hope and expectation. However with the absence of something like the Marshall Plan the consequences were perhaps inevitable. Not great reading if you take like the author an outward looking liberal approach but it will provide you if nothing else with a glimpse into lands not far away that provide a warning that what happens when truth is replaced by lies and distortion.
September 25, 2021
Even though some countries are represented in the book fairly well, you can easily draw similar conclusions from reading the news, following current affairs as well as visiting the countries. As someone who has been in most of the places covered in the book, I didn't learn anything new - it was more like reading an overly long article.
I found the book being very one-sided and lacking further research. All countries are portrayed as desperate and bleak, which made me question why there was no balance in the book - was it perhaps skewed by the people the author spent time with? I understand that the point of the book is to return to the same destinations as 30 years ago and try to speak to the same people now as back then. However, I didn't really connect this with 'true travels' as the book title suggests.
I quite liked Hungarian part and I would have been interested the author to answer the question: "But what would you do?"
I found the book being very one-sided and lacking further research. All countries are portrayed as desperate and bleak, which made me question why there was no balance in the book - was it perhaps skewed by the people the author spent time with? I understand that the point of the book is to return to the same destinations as 30 years ago and try to speak to the same people now as back then. However, I didn't really connect this with 'true travels' as the book title suggests.
I quite liked Hungarian part and I would have been interested the author to answer the question: "But what would you do?"
March 20, 2021
DNF. So badly written. Melodramatic and weirdly sentimental, trying to depict poetic significance in the most mundane things, eg a scraggy bird getting trapped on an underground train (cos that doesn’t happen, like, every day on most cities’ transport networks).
“In the wild woods west of Moscow, slender birch saplings leaned together, leaned apart, like elegant dancers swaying to the music of the wind”. Just terrible. Clichéd.
There may be some interesting info or insights to be found here but you’re a better person than me if you have the patience to wade through the author’s attempts to be a great ‘Writer’ to find them.
“In the wild woods west of Moscow, slender birch saplings leaned together, leaned apart, like elegant dancers swaying to the music of the wind”. Just terrible. Clichéd.
There may be some interesting info or insights to be found here but you’re a better person than me if you have the patience to wade through the author’s attempts to be a great ‘Writer’ to find them.
September 18, 2022
Abandoned. I was really interested in the content but the writing style was too choppy and difficult to engage with.
May 3, 2020
In early 1990, Rory Maclean traveled from Berlin to Moscow in a Trabant, documenting the tremendous changes Central and Eastern Europe was going through. 30 years after, he is back for an update, more or less on the footsteps of his first journey (published and multi-awarded as Stalin´s Nose, that I haven´t read it yet, therefore I may miss a couple of references).
There are completely new realities settled since: the oligarchs in Russia, the cyberattacks, the immigration from outside Europe, the old myths and a new golden age of mystifications.
Writing travel stories is mostly a subjective endeavour, like writing in general. Every writer, journalist or blogger and travel enthusiast makes a selection based on his professional, personal and academic background. A historian will be interested in facts from the past reflected into the present, the journalist of the latest events and political skirmishes, the cultural writer about the specific spiritual works encountered around the way.
In Pravda HaHa the Canadian-British writer Rory Maclean is talking with people, new and old acquaintances, hearing their histories of life in the new realities. Although he may have a plan of people he wants to meet, some of them part of his journey 30 years ago, there is the spontaneous human contact which makes the best of the story. Like, for instance, the Michael Jackson fan Sami, the Nigerian illegal immigrant he will help to get out of the (new) Russia.
One of the many reasons I love to read travelogues is for the huge diversity of characters and stories. If you are reading the good ones, there is rarely a story which may repeat itself. Rory Maclean repertoire of adventures is a high-end human selection. He is going harvesting with an minigarch (not an oligarch) a phallus shaped truffle mushroom (locally named pipiska putina), is playing in a casino in Kaliningrad, is interviewing the then social media star of the Transnistrian diplomacy. Are times changing so fast? Are those tremendous changes a firm ´good bye´ to the past?
Rather the opposite, among the old and the new generation, there are old behaviors reapprehended. A certain wariness of not stepping out lines, an acceptance that the direction of the things is decided elsewhere and there is not other way than to follow. And there are the dreams of impossible greatness shared in common, but with a different content in Russia, Poland or Hungary. What about the German state of Saxony, introduced as a kind of German Texas? Where Rory Maclean is checking his priviledge of enjoying freedom of speech and movement, young or less young people in Central and Eastern Europe want to build more walls because ´xenophobes only stand in their own shoes, of course´.
But what is Europe nowadays? How do you define it? Is the so-called West safer from illusions? ´Where there is the real end of Europe? I once thought it to be a physical place, perhaps the line of the river Oder or the Urals. I realise now that it is not a freak of geography and far more a question of culture and morality, a matter of principles. It´s the point where antique forms of identity clash with modernity, where tolerance, decency and a certain way of thinking end, where openness meet a wall´.
In fact, there is a very long discussion with no end in sight. 30 years after the end of the Cold War, there are many things boiling hot in this part of Europe. And as a matter of fact, everywhere. Travel stories are one of the most direct way to connect to those nascent realities.
Rating: 3.5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review
There are completely new realities settled since: the oligarchs in Russia, the cyberattacks, the immigration from outside Europe, the old myths and a new golden age of mystifications.
Writing travel stories is mostly a subjective endeavour, like writing in general. Every writer, journalist or blogger and travel enthusiast makes a selection based on his professional, personal and academic background. A historian will be interested in facts from the past reflected into the present, the journalist of the latest events and political skirmishes, the cultural writer about the specific spiritual works encountered around the way.
In Pravda HaHa the Canadian-British writer Rory Maclean is talking with people, new and old acquaintances, hearing their histories of life in the new realities. Although he may have a plan of people he wants to meet, some of them part of his journey 30 years ago, there is the spontaneous human contact which makes the best of the story. Like, for instance, the Michael Jackson fan Sami, the Nigerian illegal immigrant he will help to get out of the (new) Russia.
One of the many reasons I love to read travelogues is for the huge diversity of characters and stories. If you are reading the good ones, there is rarely a story which may repeat itself. Rory Maclean repertoire of adventures is a high-end human selection. He is going harvesting with an minigarch (not an oligarch) a phallus shaped truffle mushroom (locally named pipiska putina), is playing in a casino in Kaliningrad, is interviewing the then social media star of the Transnistrian diplomacy. Are times changing so fast? Are those tremendous changes a firm ´good bye´ to the past?
Rather the opposite, among the old and the new generation, there are old behaviors reapprehended. A certain wariness of not stepping out lines, an acceptance that the direction of the things is decided elsewhere and there is not other way than to follow. And there are the dreams of impossible greatness shared in common, but with a different content in Russia, Poland or Hungary. What about the German state of Saxony, introduced as a kind of German Texas? Where Rory Maclean is checking his priviledge of enjoying freedom of speech and movement, young or less young people in Central and Eastern Europe want to build more walls because ´xenophobes only stand in their own shoes, of course´.
But what is Europe nowadays? How do you define it? Is the so-called West safer from illusions? ´Where there is the real end of Europe? I once thought it to be a physical place, perhaps the line of the river Oder or the Urals. I realise now that it is not a freak of geography and far more a question of culture and morality, a matter of principles. It´s the point where antique forms of identity clash with modernity, where tolerance, decency and a certain way of thinking end, where openness meet a wall´.
In fact, there is a very long discussion with no end in sight. 30 years after the end of the Cold War, there are many things boiling hot in this part of Europe. And as a matter of fact, everywhere. Travel stories are one of the most direct way to connect to those nascent realities.
Rating: 3.5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review
February 14, 2020
Rory MacLean wrote a book 30 years ago after the fall of the Berlin Wall, travelling across Europe as it entered a new era of hope and promise. Now MacLean retraces his steps trying to figure out where it all went so horribly wrong. Instead of hope and openness, there's increasing blood-and-soil nationalism, fear, and and hatred. He spends much of his time in Russia, before working his way to central Europe, then flying back to England.
His stories are interesting, but often they just seem like stories. I got a better since on Hungary and Poland than of Russia, even though he spends far longer in Russia. In Poland and Hungary, right-wing nationalist parties promote hatred and fear of immigrants, especially Muslim ones, despite the fact there are hardly any in those countries. MacLean meets a 90-something freethinker in Hungary he met 30 years ago, and discovers the man's son has completely thrown in his lot with the rightist movement. There is a cyncial disinterest in the truth in these movements.
Multiple times he runs into an African migrant/refugee named Sami. The parts on Sami are the best, and ultimately most uplifting, parts of the book. He gives a face to Europe's refugee issue.
While MacLean's stories don't always make a clear broader point of Europe, his conclusion is interesting. Seeing some of the same problems in Britain he saw in East Europe, he returns to the central question: How could things have gone so horribly wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall? He comes to a conclusion: We just lazily thought things would get better on their own, without having to work for it. That's bullocks. If we want that happily ever after, that'll take effort. "Either we shape the future or we sleepwalk into it." (p.343). He finally concludes that Europe's boundaries aren't a matter of geography, like the Ural Mountains. Instead, Europe exists where there is openness, and ends where that openness meets a wall. Thirty years ago, it was the Berlin Wall. Now, it's becoming a series of self-imposed nativist walls.
His stories are interesting, but often they just seem like stories. I got a better since on Hungary and Poland than of Russia, even though he spends far longer in Russia. In Poland and Hungary, right-wing nationalist parties promote hatred and fear of immigrants, especially Muslim ones, despite the fact there are hardly any in those countries. MacLean meets a 90-something freethinker in Hungary he met 30 years ago, and discovers the man's son has completely thrown in his lot with the rightist movement. There is a cyncial disinterest in the truth in these movements.
Multiple times he runs into an African migrant/refugee named Sami. The parts on Sami are the best, and ultimately most uplifting, parts of the book. He gives a face to Europe's refugee issue.
While MacLean's stories don't always make a clear broader point of Europe, his conclusion is interesting. Seeing some of the same problems in Britain he saw in East Europe, he returns to the central question: How could things have gone so horribly wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall? He comes to a conclusion: We just lazily thought things would get better on their own, without having to work for it. That's bullocks. If we want that happily ever after, that'll take effort. "Either we shape the future or we sleepwalk into it." (p.343). He finally concludes that Europe's boundaries aren't a matter of geography, like the Ural Mountains. Instead, Europe exists where there is openness, and ends where that openness meets a wall. Thirty years ago, it was the Berlin Wall. Now, it's becoming a series of self-imposed nativist walls.
July 28, 2022
Penned in 2109, 30 years after the author took the same path post the fall after the Belin Wall and the transition from Communism in Easter Europe, this is a work of the authors stark observation of the post three decade reality of the hopes of the early 1990’s to where Europe was in 2019. A time, only three years ago, but poignantly, before Russia’s current incursion into the Ukraine, and as I write this in July 2022, into the comments of the last few days by Georgia of Russian incursions into their “disputed” territories. So too in the wake of the Hungarian presidents comments over this last week.
With on the ground experiences of individuals in Russia, Hungary, Poland, Transnistria, Ukraine, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, retravelling a path he took in 1991 the authors words convey a harrowing journey through the sordid bastardisation of the hopes for the establishment of freedoms and Western style democracies in the parts of eastern Europe who were under Communist regimes from the 1940’s to 90’s. It is not however an anti-Communist work, rather it covers the reality on the ground of what has transpired in the vacuum of those 50 years being expectantly rapidly wiped away.
There are several passages I could quote, but won’t as they would be mere extractions that will not accurately reflect the entirety of the picture, images, assessment and for-telling that the author weaves with intricate skill throughout, and in completion of, this excellent work.
The author is recognised as one of Britain’s most expressive and adventurous writers, with his works translated into dozens of languages. I hope therefore that many people have, and will hear, of his name and find this work in their language, because his thoughts, expressions and observations should, hopefully will, become very wide known, considered and appreciated.
An excellent work, very, very worthy of your consideration. 4.5 stars
With on the ground experiences of individuals in Russia, Hungary, Poland, Transnistria, Ukraine, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, retravelling a path he took in 1991 the authors words convey a harrowing journey through the sordid bastardisation of the hopes for the establishment of freedoms and Western style democracies in the parts of eastern Europe who were under Communist regimes from the 1940’s to 90’s. It is not however an anti-Communist work, rather it covers the reality on the ground of what has transpired in the vacuum of those 50 years being expectantly rapidly wiped away.
There are several passages I could quote, but won’t as they would be mere extractions that will not accurately reflect the entirety of the picture, images, assessment and for-telling that the author weaves with intricate skill throughout, and in completion of, this excellent work.
The author is recognised as one of Britain’s most expressive and adventurous writers, with his works translated into dozens of languages. I hope therefore that many people have, and will hear, of his name and find this work in their language, because his thoughts, expressions and observations should, hopefully will, become very wide known, considered and appreciated.
An excellent work, very, very worthy of your consideration. 4.5 stars
August 16, 2020
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Canadian travel writer/historian MacLean set out on a road trip through formerly inaccessible Eastern Europe, which he chronicled in his debut book, Stalin's Nose. Some thirty years later, he revisited those places to learn what has taken root in the intervening years. The first third of the book is devoted to Russia, before moving on to Estonia, Transnistria, Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, and finally Britain.
He's a travel writer with a good eye and ear for drawing the reader into the scene -- which is a bit of a double-edged sword in this instance, since the book is pretty depressing for anyone with humanist values. The hope raised by the end of the Iron Curtain has largely given way to one authoritarian populist kleptocracy after another, with corruption, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and fake news at the heart of it all.
Throughout the trip, he talks with some exceptional people (and some truly awful ones as well), and while there are glimmers of hope and humanity to be found, it's hard to see how such voices will prevail over the guns and money that dictate who makes the decisions that cause suffering. It's a very uncomfortable read in, and even though America is never really mentioned that I can recall, it's hard not to draw depressing parallels.
He's a travel writer with a good eye and ear for drawing the reader into the scene -- which is a bit of a double-edged sword in this instance, since the book is pretty depressing for anyone with humanist values. The hope raised by the end of the Iron Curtain has largely given way to one authoritarian populist kleptocracy after another, with corruption, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and fake news at the heart of it all.
Throughout the trip, he talks with some exceptional people (and some truly awful ones as well), and while there are glimmers of hope and humanity to be found, it's hard to see how such voices will prevail over the guns and money that dictate who makes the decisions that cause suffering. It's a very uncomfortable read in, and even though America is never really mentioned that I can recall, it's hard not to draw depressing parallels.
January 30, 2021
Learned a lot from this — a whirling spin through Russia and Eastern Europe with a bit of England tossed in. Why not, given London’s role as the capital of the international money grift. The world has changed so dramatically and quickly since, say the 1980s, when the political and economic seeds for this book first sprouted — Gorbachev’s Russia, Walesa’s Poland, for example. These epic shifts represented hope for millions. But some 30 years later, any happy endings have disappeared. The author emerges just as sober and wizened by the stories of card-carrying members of ultra-right parties; life-beaten immigrants; hard-hearted bankers; shady global operators; and crafty politicians trying to rewrite history as his readers. I confess I felt a bit like a sucker reading it — paying my taxes, working a three-decades-long career, obeying the law, minding my business. I felt like I should be squirreling money away and battening down the hatches for when the End Times come. For surely they must be coming.
March 7, 2025
I agree with a lot of things said in the book. “They claim to represent the people, the real people. Their promise to save the nation from a corrupt elite is a fiction, of course, unlike their willingness to override constitutional checks and balances with ‘the people’s will’ in Budapest and Moscow (side note a negative writing trait this author has is he loves listing places in a pretty decent quote. Once is enough but this becomes repetitive) Westminster and Washington, these populists simply want power” but holy shit was this an over written slog to get through. A lot of it was a mix of current day and old politics which is a bit interesting but just written pretty poorly. And it honestly comes across as someone looking at a zoo and not at a place if that makes sense. The stories of these people are interesting (except the russian guy he was pretty dull) anyway this was written before trump took office again and AFD scored more of the vote since post war Germany meaning reading this book was pretty bleak.
February 3, 2020
About 1992, we took an inexpensive bus tour from Berlin to Poznan, Warsaw, Krakow, Budapest, Prague, and Vienna. Before or after the trip, I profited much by reading Andrew Nagorski's "The Birth of Freedom," which covered some of the same territory as "Pravda Ha Ha." Roroy MacLeans's 2020 narration has a different strength, since it is mainly vignettes with friends Mr. MacLean encountered in each country and what these residents state about recent depressing developments. The countries and locales he visits are: Russia, Estonia, Kaliningrad, Transnistria, Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, and his native Britain.
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The book is captivating. keeping me late. However, because of his focus on interviews, he omits important figures as Donald Tusk. Also, for further news and analysis, I depend on the reports by Jonathan Luxmoore in The Tablet (London) and National Catholic Reporter (Kansas City, Mo.). I should have kept up with my Polish lessons.
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The book is captivating. keeping me late. However, because of his focus on interviews, he omits important figures as Donald Tusk. Also, for further news and analysis, I depend on the reports by Jonathan Luxmoore in The Tablet (London) and National Catholic Reporter (Kansas City, Mo.). I should have kept up with my Polish lessons.
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May 13, 2024
The first chapter in this travelogue is a banger. Hanging out with a minor oligarch who made his money from chickens, MacLean goes hunting in the forest with AK47s before they return to the oligarch’s crumbling dacha to get high on magic mushrooms colloquially known as “Putin’s pecker”. The following chapters can only be a letdown. It picks up again towards the end, when MacLean visits countries he knows better (Hungary, Poland, Ukraine) and catches up with people he’d met on his previous journey 30 years earlier. Ultimately it’s a depressing read, the optimism of 1989 long gone, destroyed by ultra-liberals and autocrats. And I thought the refugees’ stories were shoe-horned in rather awkwardly. But MacLean is a good writer, and it’s a worthwhile read with a neat ending as he catches up with his oligarch again.
March 6, 2020
A thoroughly enjoyable book.
Mr. MacLean starts in Russia and makes his way out towards the west. He confronts the rampant corruption that has overtaken Russia, parts of eastern Europe and former "SSRs" who either still fear Russia or long for the glory days of the USSR, and countries who have taken a hard turn to the right and are fearful of the new immigrants coming into Europe. The people in his network, from oligarchs to performance artists to everyday workers, tell the story of how the dreams with the collapse of communism haven't exactly all come true, how the changes aren't always clearly for the better. A book with a lot of grey, not so much black and white. Makes me want to go back and read his first trip from west to east...
Mr. MacLean starts in Russia and makes his way out towards the west. He confronts the rampant corruption that has overtaken Russia, parts of eastern Europe and former "SSRs" who either still fear Russia or long for the glory days of the USSR, and countries who have taken a hard turn to the right and are fearful of the new immigrants coming into Europe. The people in his network, from oligarchs to performance artists to everyday workers, tell the story of how the dreams with the collapse of communism haven't exactly all come true, how the changes aren't always clearly for the better. A book with a lot of grey, not so much black and white. Makes me want to go back and read his first trip from west to east...
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