Marc Bennetts’ new book pretty much hits the spot for anyone who wants a comprehensive and accessible journalistic treatment of ‘how we lost Russia’. Now, to those who know my extreme prejudice against journalists, this might sound like a backhanded compliment but it’s not. Having met Marc after he returned to the UK after more than half a lifetime of living in Russia, I knew how angry he was at the country he’d devoted so much to. I was frankly a bit scared that his book would join a long shit list I’ve made of ranty, self-indulgent and poorly researched takes puking on their own moral clarity.

Thank God I was wrong. What Bennetts has produced is a product of anger and disappointment, but it’s all the better for that. Many of my well-informed readers will not need to read this book. But then it was not written for them. It does exactly what it needs to do to inform the educated Western reader and actually give them a real taste of the foreign journalist’s life in Russia and, as the title says, a ‘spiral’ into madness.

I may quibble at the psychological metaphors at the best of time, but Bennetts is very careful to document things he’s experienced – like the utter cynicism and mendaciousness of other – particularly Russian – journalists and broadcasters like Kiselyov and Popov. These are the scenes that stand out – as one would expect from probably one of the best embedded and connected foreign journalists in Russia. Standout moment in this genre for me was when Bennetts phones up an ailing Gleb Pavlovsky after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine to ask him about D. Medvedev’s transformation. He’s told curtly: Medvedev ‘is not a popular person’.

Now, the insider journo view, while welcome and interesting, is not even the main thing though. Thank goodness. We’ve got chapters on Galina Starovoitova (assassinated 1990s politician who represents the ‘road not travelled’ and where Bennetts examines the question of lustration). We have zoom-ins on Nemtsov, Navalnyi, Zhirinovsky, the Orthodox Church, the occult, and plenty of Bennett’s exceptionally good Ukraine journalism post-2022. And a lot on Putin. But in a good way, trust me.

I particularly liked the way that the book moves back and forth from Russia to Ukraine – this is surely something that will give it lasting power given the allergy journalists have towards such an approach. The book actually opens with the liberation of Kherson – which is both extremely smart and also serves to illustrate one of the main conundrums: the production of pathological indifference (in this case Bennetts; supposition about the motives of Russian soldiers).

Off the bat, Bennetts doesn’t shy away from strong metaphors (like the title and subtitle of the book) and for a little while I wondered whether he’d also go off the deep end. However, even in the preface he says that he’s given the material enough space to ‘control my hatred’. He wonders for moment whether his relationship to Russia is like the conflicted emotions of the relatives of brutal criminals. It could have all unravelled after this. So too could have a thematic commitment to the topic of ‘collective delusion’. It’s there, but only to the extent it should be – the first-hand accounts of people denying the reality beyond their bubbles and contorting themselves to protect their received views. The depiction of how people avoid cognitive dissonance is almost identical to that I describe in my own book. Overall then, two shit-list bullets dodged.

The opening chapter ends then with a question that really sums up the problem with journalistic accounts: why has Russia ‘allowed itself’ to be ruled by the same ‘unremarkable’ man for a quarter of a century and so quickly slide into ‘violent nationalism’. This is again, shit-list territory for me. Thankfully, Bennetts doesn’t give in too much to amateur political science and the book quickly settles down after this to the much more revealing, rewarding, and informative work of explaining why the British gen-Xers are so Russia pilled. Much of what Bennetts writes applies to so many of us. For shame! When he returns to the ‘why’ questions, it’s generally along the lines of what one would expect: Putin bought people off. Which is not exactly wrong.

Early in the book, Bennetts is effective in portraying the ‘revenge’, ‘humiliation’ motivations among interlocutors as they sometimes gleefully indulge their geopolitical id and cathetically (not cathartically) allocate their darkest mental energy to the dreadful objects of Ukraine and West. This somewhat undercuts the earlier ‘apathy’ musings. But that’s ok, I think. Some of the time one gets the impression that already long ago Bennetts had become more than a little jaded – as one might expect – and that he enjoyed baiting and provoking ‘believers’. I’ve done the same, I have to admit. He doesn’t seem to reflect on how this approach might affect the kind of defensively consolidating reaction he often describes

I’ve also experienced the same ‘demonic’ reactions when cognitive dissonance threatens to come undone (when he tells someone Ukraine is not being ‘liberated’). I too could have used the term ‘poisoned’ to talk about the effect of continuous exposure to Russian TV. Nonetheless, for a fourth time, Bennetts avoids the easy moral pandering of 95% of his colleagues when he quickly follows all this up by reminding us that none of his Russian acquaintances supported the war or Putin and later discusses the thousands of anti-war arrests. I’m genuinely surprised when a journalist resists the temptation to do this nowadays. Even after meticulous descriptions of wartime Mariupol, Kharhiv and Kherson, Bennetts returns immediately to undercut the implication of collective guilt by focussing on the organized and principled opposition within Russia to the invasion.

As I mentioned – the sections about Putin are surprisingly nuanced: especially where Bennetts does the job so many émigré Russian experts (and scholars!) are unable to do and expertly dismantles the myth that Putin is popular or represents some secret connection between state and people. We also have multiple excellent takedowns of the fellow-travellers and state propagandists – acid depictions of their intellectual and moral corrosion.

Bennetts’ book has something of the John Reed about it. Sincere, insider, adventurer and shrewd observer. That’s probably less of a compliment than it sounds, because despite its skill and immediacy it has some of the same blinkers, as one would expect. But overall, it is excellently done. I cannot say I agree with all of it, especially when it gets psychological or sociological, but I’m glad I read it.