Power, protest and corruption

MARC Bennetts, a British journalist who’s lived in Moscow for 15 years, has a very specific perspective on Russia’s most famous modern-day political prisoners, Pussy Riot. In this book, he uses the protest-punks as a prism to illuminate the new generation of Russian dissidents, disillusioned by the current regime and rallying in the guise of a hundred causes to make their fight against Putin’s power heard.

Bennetts illustrates case after case of power, protest and corruption, which can be felt, he argues, across the country and beyond.

The extension of anti-Putin sentiment stretches beyond the confines of the Kremlin, as the author demonstrates, travelling to the Black Earth region to meet those who too have been compelled to fight back – here against the exploitation of the land – and to other communities where formerly opposing people, crowds of hard-right and hard-left, meet over common causes.

This book gives a fascinating peek at the shifting political landscape in one of the world’s most opaque nations.

Acts of Union and Disunion by Linda Colley (Profile Books, £8.99) 5/5

THIS book, by eminent Princeton University historian Linda Colley, demonstrates in a way which has not, to my knowledge, been essayed before, how the United Kingdom, over the centuries, has been glued together, become “unglued” and, following more attempts with varying degrees of success, sought to find unity once again.

But it is an ongoing process with no finality, the imminent referendum on Scottish independence is merely the latest of these “acts of union and disunion” and one, which because of its topicality, will command the most attention.

There is nothing new, as Colley points out, about the continued uneasy relationship between Scotland and England.

She recalls, as an example, how Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe when he toured Ross and Cromarty in the northern Highlands, found it safer to pass himself off as a Frenchman to avoid “the mockery or worse” which often befell Englishmen intrepid enough to cross the border.

She also points out some little-known and fascinating facts. For instance, in the early 12th Century, Scottish kings briefly established dominance over north Lancashire and parts of Yorkshire, as well as all over Cumberland and Northumberland.

Colley makes no bones, either, about the discrepancies between North and South in the British Isles, the socalled North-South divide.

Another surprising fact she adduces is that it is not wars but periods of protracted peace which have repeatedly presented the most profound threats to union in the UK.

This is a compelling read, even for people who do not profess any interest in the evolution and devolution of the component parts of the British Isles. Put it on your book list.