Pravda Ha Ha

An unsettling, poignant and darkly comic exposé of Putin's Russia and European disintegration from the highly acclaimed travel writer.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were - for most Brits and Americans - part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on MacLean retraces his original journey, backwards, travelling from revanchist Russia through Ukraine's bloodlands, to illiberal Hungary, Poland, Germany and the UK, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears. Along the way he shoulders an AK 47 to go hunting with Moscow's Chicken Tsar, plays video games with a St. Petersburg cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally on the shores of Lake Geneva he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev.

As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists - both within and without Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists - have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.