Tony Wood teaches history at the University of Colorado Boulder. Russia without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War was published by Verso in 2018.
People love to talk about writers who once had radical sympathies but drifted rightwards with age. But the political evolution of the Peruvian writer and sometime politician Mario Vargas Llosa has been so startling as to inject life into that tired trope. Although he still describes himself as a liberal, the stances he has taken in recent years have followed a reactionary pattern. In 2018,...
Whether they killed him quickly or slowly, there is no doubt who is responsible for Alexei Navalny’s demise. Yet even though his was a death many times foretold, the news that came on 16 February was still a profound shock, and a demoralising one for Putin’s opponents.
On 10 December, the far-right libertarian economist Javier Milei takes office as Argentina’s president. To say that his victory in November’s elections was a shock would be an understatement. A few months ago, people who thought that Milei might become the next occupant of the Casa Rosada were largely dismissed as delusional. Widely known by the nickname ‘El Loco’...
The war in Ukraine has prompted a wave of self-critical reassessment among Western scholars of the former Soviet Union. Have studies of the USSR unthinkingly reproduced the logic of a Russian imperial project? Do we need to look at the Soviet period through the lens of ‘decolonisation’? The German historian Karl Schlögel’s own process of introspection began in 2014,...
On 4 September, 62 per cent of Chilean voters chose to reject the newly drafted constitution, designed to replace the one imposed by the Pinochet regime in 1980. Even in the Santiago metropolitan region, 55 per cent were against. Margins were high in every income group. According to a study by Miguel Angel Fernández and Eugenio Guzmán, the bottom fifth of earners voted...
Tony Wood talks to James Meek about his book Russia with Putin, which looks at, among other things, the legacy of Soviet infrastructure and the extent of political opposition in today’s Russia.
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