The titles of the four parts to the book are instructive: ‘Curating the Past’, ‘Curating the Present’, ‘The Past Becomes the Present’, and ‘The Past in the Future’. Walker begins with World War II, ‘the defining cataclysmic event for generations of Russians’, before tracing the use and abuse of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in Russian popular consciousness to the present day. Putin, Walker suggests, has distorted, overlooked, and reinvented Soviet history to suit his political desires.

Stalin poses an interesting paradox for the propagandists in 2018 Russia. Given the centrality of the Soviet Union’s 1945 success over Nazi Germany to Putin’s overarching Russian narrative, the image of the communist leader can hardly be denigrated by talk of the millions of deaths for which he bears responsibility. But nor can he and the system he represents be glorified, lest Putin lose control over such potent nostalgia for the past. Stalin thus occupies a position of historical limbo in contemporary Russia. Interviewing a history teacher, Walker recalls: ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, was Larisa’s basic take on Stalinism. No matter that making this particular omelette had involving not only breaking a few eggs, but also requisitioning the chickens, destroying the kitchen, then executing the chef and half the diners.’

The Long Hangover is noteworthy for its depth of reporting. Walker first travelled to Russia in 2000, spending four months teaching English in Moscow before riding the Trans-Siberian Express to the nation’s far-eastern extremities. After studying Russian and Soviet history at Oxford, Walker returned to Moscow in late-2003 and has been there ever since. He speaks fluent Russian, unlike some monolingual Westerners who write about the former Soviet Union.

Walker ranges far and wide across the largest country in the world over his twelve chapters. Attending the funeral of newlyweds in Grozny, Chechnya, who had been brazenly kidnapped in broad daylight, Walker explains how Putin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov have twisted the region’s history to their own destructive ends. He visits the Buddhist region of Kalmykia near the Caspian Sea as part of a broader discussion on the wholesale deportation of minorities perceived as troublesome during World War II. He travels to the former Siberian gulags of Magadan – ‘the end of the earth’ – and roams through war-torn Eastern Ukraine.

At a time when Russian–Western polarisation is not far from its Cold War zenith, Walker’s nuanced analysis of modern Russia is much needed. The journalist is critical of all parties involved in Ukraine’s spiral into civil war in 2014; he acknowledges Russia’s central role while also attributing considerable fault to leaders in Kiev and their allies. Discussing the separatist territories in Eastern Ukraine, Walker diagnoses: ‘Beyond labelling them idiots, or brainwashed by propaganda, not many people in Kiev or the West wanted to think more deeply about the problem.’ He recalls meeting a European ambassador in Kiev who ranted about ‘criminal, evil, deceitful Russia’. The ambassador had never been to Donetsk, but had no interest in Walker’s empirically informed perspective.

Walker contextualises his grand thesis. ‘Probably, some level of distortion and wilful amnesia are inevitable parts of any country’s historiography,’ he concedes. But Walker suggests that the Russian case is exceptional, and dismisses parallels with Spain. ‘The Spanish forgetting had a clear goal of moving on and entering the European family. In Russia too, the broad idea was to unite the nation, but the ultimate aim was not to transcend the pain of the difficult history, but to retain glory for those bloody years, and ensure legitimacy for the successor state.’

Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov in 2015 (kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons)

Even Putin benefits from a balanced appraisal, depicted here in the middle ground between his lionisation on Russian state television and common demonisation by Western critics. ‘This book is not an apology for Putin’s policies,’ Walker declares. ‘But neither is the book an anti-Putin polemic ... Putin was, to some extent, the director of the post-Soviet story for modern Russia, but he was also very much a character in it.’

Underlying these perceptive assessments is a striking empathy for the men and women of post-Soviet Russia. Some of the book’s most powerful moments are when Walker reflects on the fate of ‘ordinary’ Russians stranded in the internecine battle for Russia’s past, present, and future. This poignant human element offers a stark contrast to the sweeping historical revision wrought by Putin and his cabal.

In Siberia, Walker interviews the only Gulag survivor willing to tell him her story. Olga Gureyeva was deported from a Polish-controlled Ukranian village as a seventeen-year-old in 1945, sentenced to two decades of hard labour on the other side of the world. She suffered unimaginable pain throughout her life, but – aside from a brief period of openness during perestroika – the experiences of Gureyeva and thousands of others have been forgotten as part of Russia’s collective amnesia. ‘I don’t know why God chose such a life for me,’ she murmurs to Walker. The modern Russian state does not want to know either.

It is hard to find fault in such a spectacular book, which deftly weaves personal narratives with grand geopolitical tensions to produce a compelling read. Unlike the works of some journalists-turned-authors, the book does not read like a disjointed conglomeration of reporting. If anything, Walker’s desire to thread a cohesive thesis can at times feel overdone. Symbolic meaning is imputed, and narrative arcs are stretched in attempts to accommodate on-ground complexity within the broad central argument. But these minor flaws barely detract from a real tour de force of book-length reporting.

Russia will be in the spotlight throughout 2018. Russians head to the polls in mid-March for a presidential election, timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary of Crimea’s annexation. With chief anti-regime antagonist Alexei Navalny barred from the ballot, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. In June and July 2018, the attention of the sporting world will be transfixed as Russia hosts the FIFA World Cup, Putin’s second attempt at brand-building through sport following the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Across the Pacific, startling allegations surrounding Russia’s involvement in the electoral victory of Donald Trump show no signs of fading. The war in Eastern Ukraine continues unabated and Putin remains the kingmaker in Syria. In these interesting times, The Long Hangover is an excellent companion.