In this accessible and jargon-free exploration of contemporary Russia and the rise of Putin, who has so expertly manipulated the nation’s sense of identity by emphasising Russia’s victory in the Second World War, the author provides an insightful and comprehensible window into the Russian psyche. He knows Russia well and has a firm grasp of how ordinary Russians view the world. His first-hand knowledge of the country gives authority to the book, and it’s a clear-sighted and comprehensive attempt to explain Putin and the country he rules so successfully. I found the examination of the situation in Ukraine particularly useful and I now understand the conflict there much more fully. Walker’s journalistic skills allowed him to gain the confidence of many interviewees throughout the country, thus gathering many points of view and enabling him to give a balanced and thorough account. Essential reading for anyone interested in modern Russia.

In the Long Hangover, journalist Shaun Walker takes us on a journey through Russia under Vladimir Putin. At first blush, it’s nothing that I haven’t heard before—Putin uses the Soviet past to both legitimize his rule and conduct his foreign policy activities including Ukraine and to a lesser extent Syria. This is done through a creative retelling of the Soviet past that minimizes the bad, while accentuating the good.

Where the Long Hangover differs is how it impacts the people whether it’s an average Russian or a public official. While every country engages in mythmaking, the writer seems to give the Russian case a special place in that in Russia there may be two truths that are becoming harder and harder to separate in what was and the myth that never was.

In 1962, the former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson observed that, “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” Britain could at least take comfort from the fact that, whilst far from painless, its experience of decolonisation was nothing like as traumatic as that of the French or Dutch, and it could, moreover, bask in the moral authority which came from its being the only European state to have fought Nazi Germany continuously from September 1939 until victory in May 1945. Indeed, Churchill’s prophecy regarding “our finest hour” seems to have been realised and pride in its part in the Second World War has become, at least according to some foreign observers, a defining characteristic of British national identity.

The only other country which celebrates the Second World War with the same degree, or even greater, fervour, and whose culture is as deeply impregnated by the conflict is Russia, although for Russians it is, of course, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of 1941-45 that is commemorated.

Although the victory cult dates from Brezhnev, it is under Putin that the presentation of this aspect of the Soviet past - affording most Russians something of which they could be proud - has assumed centre stage, as Putin strove to offset the domestic and international humiliations of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years and restore Russia to the status of a first-tier nation.

How this happened and its consequences for Russia’s relations with other nationalities which were once part of the USSR is what Shaun Walker addresses in his excellent book ‘The Long Hangover. Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past’.

Walker is a first-rate journalist (first for ‘The Independent’ and now for ‘The Guardian’) and at the heart of his book are many interviews with both the powerful and the powerless, many of which were conducted in perilous circumstances, all of which are recalled very vividly and some of which are very moving. In addition to a superb eye for detail, Walker has a great turn of phrase, for example, talking of the way in which some interviewees would gradually open up to reveal new layers of confidences he refers to a “matryoshka nesting doll of painful memories.”

Putin is shown by Walker as having been very successful in manipulating the past so as to give Russia a new sense of national identity and purpose, filling the void left by the 1991 triple blows of implosion of the Soviet system, transformation of the USSR into the Russian Federation, and the loss of lands on the imperial periphery. The human costs of that process are also coolly examined, particularly in relation to the people of Ukraine. Indeed, a secondary theme is how Ukraine, or at least elements in western Ukraine, developed their own rival, anti-Russian, national-historical narrative centring upon the Second World War.

The Orwellian nature of such enterprises is well illustrated by reference to the Kremlin’s ‘Commission to Prevent the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests’, which as Walker points out, carries in its name the implication that falsifying history for the benefit of Russian interests is considered quite acceptable. Most, if not all, countries have their historical blind-spots but Russia has employed all the means open to the state to engage in forced amnesia on a positively industrial scale.

The book is open to criticism on some grounds. Walker’s understanding and application of the term ‘genocide’, equating it with physical extermination, is unduly narrow. He could also be accused of overstating his case when he claims that in addition to his strategic concerns, Putin “could not countenance a Ukraine in which the Soviet period was viewed as an occupation, and the glorious Russian war narrative was turned on its head.” On the contrary, the threat to the Russian Black Sea Fleet base in Crimea was quite sufficient to explain Russian intervention, just as the threat to the Russian naval base at Tartus is sufficient to explain Putin’s intervention to support the Assad regime in Syria. I also think the book deserves a title which better represents its contents, such as ‘Putin’s manipulation of the past’ or ‘Contested versions of the Great Patriotic War in the former Soviet Union’ but these are very minor quibbles when set against the book’s general excellence.

Reading ‘The Long Hangover’ will greatly profit all those seeking to understand recent events in Russia and Ukraine. Gerard Depardieu, Hilary Swank, Seal, Jean-Claude van Damme and Vanessa Mae would do especially well to read it, as even their desire to profit by lending their names to celebrate Kadyrov’s Chechnya might, one hopes, be tempered if they knew more about the nature of the regime there.