Peace or war
E-book, Czech
Peace or war
What lies behind the fall of Putin's regime and its invasion of Ukraine? To explain the current escalation, the author goes all the way back to the Middle Ages. He analyses the roots of Russia's problems from the rise of Kyivan Rus, through the establishment of the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the empire of Peter the Great, to the ever more visible backwardness of the Romanov tsardom and the two revolutions of 1917, the Soviet Union, four decades of the Cold War and the birth of the multi-ethnic Russian Federation. He points to the relationship of the Russian state to its citizens, to the curtailed conception of democracy and human rights there. This book, a sharp critique of the Kremlin's authoritarianism, summarises astute political analyses with historical insight and a view to the future, becoming an essential guide in a restless Europe.
Mikhail Shishkin (1961) is a prose writer and essayist, a member of the fifth wave of Russian emigration. He graduated from the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute with a degree in English and German and taught both languages for a short time. He has lived in Basel since 1995, where he married, and despite his love for the Russian language, publishes some of his work in German. His reflections are regularly published in European and overseas newspapers. In 2000, he won the Russian equivalent of the Booker Prize for his novel Vzyatiye Izmaila (The Taking of Izmail), and in 2005 he received the National Bestseller award for his prose work Venerin volos (Maidenhair). Czech readers so far only know his epistolary romance novel Listovnik (The Light and the Dark) (Big Book Award 2010, Czech edition 2013).
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