'History is made up of myths,' writes the renowned Russian dissident journalist Mikhail Zygar. 'Alas, our myths led us to the fascism of 2022. It is time to expose them.' Drawing from his perilous career investigating the frontiers of the Russian empire, Zygar reveals how 350 years of propaganda, bad historical scholarship, folk tales and fantasy spurred his nation into war with Ukraine.
How did a German monk's fear of the Ottoman Empire drive him to invent the fiction of a united Russian world? How did corny spy novels about a 'Soviet James Bond' inspire Vladimir Putin to join the KGB? How did Alexander Pushkin's admiration for a poem by Lord Byron end with him slandering the legendary chief of the Cossacks? And how did Putin underestimate a rising TV comic named Volodymyr Zelensky, failing to see that his satire had become deadly serious, and that his country would be a joke no longer?
A noted expert on the Kremlin with unparalleled access to hundreds of players in the current conflict - from politicians to oligarchs, gangsters to comedians (not least Zelensky himself) - Zygar chronicles the power struggles from which today's politics grew, and digs out the essential truths from behind layers of seductive legend. By surveying the strange, complex record of Russo-Ukrainian relations, War and Punishment reveals exactly how the largest nation on Earth lost its senses. A work of history can't undo the past or transform the present, but sometimes it can shape the future.
In fact, that's how the story begins.
1670, Kyiv. A German convert to Russian Orthodoxy is writing history. Not merely a book about history: he believes that his work will save his beloved Kyiv from the scourge of Catholicism. Innokenty Gizel has never been to Moscow, but he wants to create the illusion that Kyiv shares a common history with the seat of the Orthodox Church. The story he comes up with - a fantasy - pleases Moscow's rulers so much that it will remain their official line all the way into the 21st century.
1990, Dnipropetrovsk. Twelve-year-old Volodymyr Zelensky is fixated on a group of Ukrainian students. They are participants in KVN , the most-watched program in the Soviet Union. It is a sketch sketch comedy show. In their most memorable routine, the Ukrainian team replaces the chorus of a Soviet pop song with one of Lenin's aphorisms: "Better less, but better." The subtext is clear: the Soviet empire is too big.
One year later, it will dissolve.
Pioneering journalist Mikhail Zygar embarks on a hypnotic and revelatory quest through the myths and stories that motivate Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and traces the eerie ways in which the career of a jobbing comedian of no exceptional ability exploited and subverted them at every turn, from his own first appearance on KVN to his defiant refusal to leave Kyiv as Russian columns approached, in real life now playing a role that he first assumed as a joke. What will be the price of not taking Russia seriously? And what might be the prize?
