Review of Arkady Ostrovsky’s “The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War”

by Walter G. Moss

After the USSR fell Russia needed an ideology.  Putin settled on patriotism, collectivism, derzhavnost—a tradition of being a great geopolitical state power that commands the attention of other countries—and gosudarstvennichestvo, the primacy of the state.