![Amazon prime logo](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/marketing/prime/new_prime_logo_RGB_blue._CB426090081_.png)
Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
-50% $13.94$13.94
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Take-N-Go
Save with Used - Good
$11.00$11.00
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Books For You Today
Learn more
1.27 mi | ASHBURN 20147
Returnable | Yes |
---|---|
Resolutions | Eligible for refund or replacement |
Return Window | 30 days from delivery |
Refund Timelines | Typically, an advance refund will be issued within 24 hours of a drop-off or pick-up. For returns that require physical verification, refund issuance may take up to 30 days after drop-off or pick up. Where an advance refund is issued, we will re-charge your payment method if we do not receive the correct item in original condition. See details here. |
Late fee | A late fee of 20% of the item price will apply if you complete the drop off or pick up after the ‘Return By Date’. |
Restocking fee | A restocking fee may apply if the item is not returned in original condition and original packaging, or is damaged or missing parts for reasons not due to Amazon or seller error. See details here. |
Return instructions
Item must be in original condition and packaging along with tag, accessories, manuals, and inserts. Unlock any electronic device, delete your account and remove all personal information. |
Returnable | Yes |
---|---|
Resolutions | Eligible for refund or replacement |
Return Window | 30 days from delivery |
Refund Timelines | Typically, an advance refund will be issued within 24 hours of a drop-off or pick-up. For returns that require physical verification, refund issuance may take up to 30 days after drop-off or pick up. Where an advance refund is issued, we will re-charge your payment method if we do not receive the correct item in original condition. See details here. |
Late fee | A late fee of 20% of the item price will apply if you complete the drop off or pick up after the ‘Return By Date’. |
Restocking fee | A restocking fee may apply if the item is not returned in original condition and original packaging, or is damaged or missing parts for reasons not due to Amazon or seller error. See details here. |
Return instructions
Item must be in original condition and packaging along with tag, accessories, manuals, and inserts. Unlock any electronic device, delete your account and remove all personal information. |
![Kindle app logo image](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/app/kindle-app-logo._CB668847749_.png)
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia Hardcover – January 14, 2020
Purchase options and add-ons
From a Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker, a groundbreaking portrait of modern Russia and the inner struggles of the people who sustain Vladimir Putin’s rule
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND KIRKUS REVIEWS
In this rich and novelistic tour of contemporary Russia, Joshua Yaffa introduces readers to some of the country’s most remarkable figures—from politicians and entrepreneurs to artists and historians—who have built their careers and constructed their identities in the shadow of the Putin system. Torn between their own ambitions and the omnipresent demands of the state, each walks an individual path of compromise. Some muster cunning and cynicism to extract all manner of benefits and privileges from those in power. Others, finding themselves to be less adept, are left broken and demoralized. What binds them together is the tangled web of dilemmas and contradictions they face.
Between Two Fires chronicles the lives of a number of strivers who understand that their dreams are best—or only—realized through varying degrees of cooperation with the Russian government. With sensitivity and depth, Yaffa profiles the director of the country’s main television channel, an Orthodox priest at war with the church hierarchy, a Chechen humanitarian who turns a blind eye to persecutions, and many others. The result is an intimate and probing portrait of a nation that is much discussed yet little understood. By showing how citizens shape their lives around the demands of a capricious and frequently repressive state—as often by choice as under threat of force—Yaffa offers urgent lessons about the true nature of modern authoritarianism.
Praise for Between Two Fires
“A deep and revealing portrait of life inside Vladimir Putin’s Russia. . . . Yaffa mines a rich vein, describing his subjects’ moral compromises and often ingenious ways of engaging a crooked bureaucracy to show how the Kremlin sustains its authoritarianism.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Few journalists have penetrated so deep and with so much nuance into the moral ambiguities of Russia. If you want insight into the deeper distortions the Kremlin causes in people’s psyches this book is invaluable.”—Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible
“A stunning chronicle of Putin’s new Russia . . . It celebrates the vitality of the Russian people even as it explores the compromises and accommodations that they must make. . . . This embrace of contradictions is what makes Between Two Fires such a poignant and poetic book.”—Alex Gibney, Air Mail
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTim Duggan Books
- Publication dateJanuary 14, 2020
- Dimensions6.35 x 1.13 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-101524760595
- ISBN-13978-1524760595
![]() |
![iphone with kindle app](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/dp/nfcx/PersistentWidget-Ruby-Large._CB485955431_.png)
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Frequently bought together
![Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia](https://cdn.statically.io/img/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71P3lzgTVGL._AC_UL116_SR116,116_.jpg)
Customers who bought this item also bought
- Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000PaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Aug 8
- THE FOUNDERS' SPEECH TO A NATION IN CRISIS: What the Founders would say to America today. (The Founders' Speech Series)PaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Aug 8
- A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to Its LegacyPaperbackFREE Shipping by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Aug 8
- We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him WrongPaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Aug 8Only 6 left in stock (more on the way).
- Russia's WarJade McGlynnPaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Aug 8Only 19 left in stock (more on the way).
- Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at WarPaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Aug 8
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A deeply reported account of what it's like to live in Putin's Russia, but it's not about Twitter bots or influencing foreign elections or even Vladimir Putin himself. . . . Yaffa gives us insight into Putin by helping us better understand the political culture that produced him.”—NPR
“Superb . . . [An] excellent new book. . . . Yaffa has distinguished himself with his rigor, his acumen, and his nuanced voice. . . . His in-depth reporting consistently allows him to move beyond the headlines, revealing the deeper historical and sociological patterns that underpin that notoriously contradictory country.”—Foreign Affairs
“Yaffa skilfully weaves together perceptive descriptions of flesh-and-blood people with a balanced evocation of the wider political and historical context. Yaffa has a good eye for colourful detail . . . and he proves attentive to the subtleties and ambiguities of Russian life.”—Tony Wood, Financial Times
“A fascinating and nuanced account that illuminates the myriad conflicting and often contradictory forces that have shaped the Russia of today.”—Douglas Smith, The Wall Street Journal
“[A] highly original and riveting account . . . Good and not-so-good men and women are forced to make difficult choices—and Joshua Yaffa’s remarkable book is a guide to the pain and pleasure of their lives in the public arena.”—Robert Service, Foreign Policy
“Deeply reported and detailed . . . A fascinating exploration into the beliefs and psyches of Russians in many different career fields who reveal their souls to Yaffa, often to a surprising degree but with little apparent fear of reprisal.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Between Two Fires stands a rank above most publications of its genre because of its effective shoe-leather reporting. Not content with analyzing media coverage or online debates, Yaffa has sought out and interviewed both his central characters and their friends, enemies, and former supporters.”—Greg Afinogenov, Bookforum
“Between Two Fires is a study of compromise, opportunism, and the fraught moral choices available in Putin’s Russia.”—Anne Applebaum, author of Red Famine and Gulag
“In Between Two Fires, Joshua Yaffa brilliantly captures the complex choices and compromises that Russians make to survive, thrive, or remain true to their principles in Putin’s Russia.”—Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia and author of From Cold War to Hot Peace
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Master of Ceremonies
In the final days of 1999, just as he had each December for several years, Konstantin Ernst prepared to film the presidential New Year’s address. Ernst, then thirty-eight, with a face of cheerful, perpetual bemusement and a floppy mane of brown hair that nearly covered his shoulders, is the head of Channel One, the network with the country’s largest reach, a position that grants him the stature of an unofficial government minister. He is not only the chief producer of his channel, but also, by extension, the director of the visual style and aesthetics of the country’s political life—at least the part its rulers wish to transmit to the public. The New Year’s address, delivered at the stroke of midnight, is a way to do exactly that: a way for a Russian leader to impart a sense of narrative to the year past and offer some guiding clues and symbols for the year to come. The tradition took shape in the seventies, under Leonid Brezhnev, whose rule stretched on for so long that his droning, puffy-faced New Year’s addresses all blended together. Gorbachev tried to instill a sense of discipline and purpose in his New Year’s appearances, even as, with each passing year, the country was in a state of slow-motion disintegration.
Boris Yeltsin, who took power in 1991, continued the tradition. And so, on December 27, 1999, three days before the new millennium, Ernst and a crew from Channel One made their way to the Kremlin to film Yeltsin’s address ahead of time, to have everything ready in advance per long-standing practice. By the late nineties, Yeltsin, once a feisty, charismatic advocate of democratic reform, had entered a spiral of decay of both body and spirit, becoming an enervated shell of his former self. He was still capable of episodic vitality, but was largely weakened and chiefly concerned with leaving office in a way that would keep him and his family safe and immune from prosecution. The country was only a year removed from a devastating financial crash that had led the government to default on its debt and saw the ruble lose 75 percent of its value; at the same time, Russian troops were fighting their second costly war in a decade in Chechnya, a would-be breakaway republic in the Caucasus. Ernst watched as Yeltsin sat in front of a decorated tree in the Kremlin reception hall and spoke a few saccharine words into the camera, the standard appeal to unity and patriotism and the opportunities of the new year—including, as Yeltsin mentioned, the upcoming presidential election in the spring that would determine his successor.
After he finished, as the Channel One crew was packing up, Yeltsin told Ernst that he wasn’t satisfied with his address. He said he didn’t like the way his words had come out, and he was also feeling hoarse—could they rerecord a new version sometime in the coming days? Ernst said yes, of course, but they should hurry, since there wasn’t much time left before the new year. Yeltsin proposed the thirty-first of December; Ernst pleaded for an earlier appointment, reminding him that given Russia’s massive size and eleven time zones, the clock strikes midnight in Chukotka—the first place the president’s address is aired—when it is still the early afternoon in Moscow. Fine, Yeltsin said, come on New Year’s Eve at five in the morning.
Ernst and his crew set up their equipment the night before, and returned before dawn on the morning of the thirty-first. Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s son-in-law and confidant, quietly handed Ernst the text of Yeltsin’s new address. Ernst tried to contain his shock: Yeltsin was about to announce his resignation, departing the presidency in sync with the close of one millennium and the dawn of another. His successor would be Vladimir Putin, a politician whom most Russians were just getting to know: Putin had risen from bureaucratic obscurity to become head of the FSB, the post-Soviet successor to the KGB, and had been named Yeltsin’s prime minister four months earlier. Even as Yeltsin’s administration sputtered to a close, he was still capable of the dramatic, unexpected flourish—no one in his government, let alone the country at large, expected him to leave office before the end of his term. Ernst told a production assistant to enter the text into the teleprompter without letting anyone else in on the news. It should come as a surprise to everyone. At ten in the morning, Yeltsin entered the reception hall, took a seat, and began to speak.
“I have taken a decision, one which I pondered long and painfully. I am resigning today, the last day of the departing century,” Yeltsin began. He spoke with the labored cadence of a tired man. “Russia should enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new people who are intelligent, strong, and energetic,” he said. His speech turned reflective, intimate even, spoken in a language of fallibility that Russians had not seen from their leaders before, and have not seen again. “I want to ask your forgiveness—for the dreams that have not come true, and for the things that seemed easy but turned out to be so excruciatingly difficult. I am asking your forgiveness for failing to justify the hopes of those who believed me when I said that we would leap from the gray, stagnating totalitarian past into a bright, prosperous, and civilized future. I believed in that dream, I believed that we would cover the distance in one leap. We didn’t,” he said. His physiognomy matched his words: his eyes were narrow and tired, his breathing heavy and full of pained effort. “I am leaving now. I have done everything I could.”
Yeltsin finished by rubbing a visible tear from his eye. The air in the room was heavy with emotion. Someone from the Channel One crew started to clap, then another, and soon they had all risen to give Yeltsin a standing ovation. They swarmed around him. The most experienced member of the team was a woman named Kaleria Kislova, a veteran producer, then seventy-three, who had filmed every New Year’s address going back to Brezhnev. She walked up to Yeltsin, her face ashen and uncertain, and asked him, “Boris Nikolayevich, how can it be?” He gave her a reassuring hug and said, chuckling, “Here it is, babushka, Saint George’s Day.” It was a moment of wry humor: Saint George’s Day, a holiday in late fall, entered Russian lore during serfdom, as the one time each year when an otherwise indentured peasant was free to move from one baron to another. Yeltsin and the Channel One crew drank champagne, toasting the new year and the import of the scene they had all just shared. Ernst was impressed by the gravity of Yeltsin’s decision: he had voluntarily given up power, an essentially unprecedented move in Russia’s political history—and, in so doing, had restored in Ernst’s mind the image of Yeltsin as a decisive and courageous politician. All the equivocating and sloppiness of the past few years seemed instantly swallowed up by this one moment.
The next order of business was for the Channel One crew to film a New Year’s address by Putin, which would air at midnight, after Yeltsin’s. Putin’s face looked young and taut on camera, a picture of vitality compared to the obviously unwell Yeltsin. “The powers of the head of state have been turned over to me today,” Putin said. His tone was serious, reassuring, businesslike. “I assure you that there will be no vacuum of power, not for a minute. I promise you that any attempts to act contrary to the Russian law and constitution will be cut short.”
Ernst got into a waiting car and set off with copies of both speeches, Yeltsin’s and Putin’s. He sped from the Borovitsky Gate, a commanding tower of red brick on the Kremlin’s western edge, and rode through the capital with a police escort, blue sirens flashing. He headed toward Ostankino, the sprawling complex of television studios and a 2,000-foot-high broadcast tower that beams out the country’s main stations, including Channel One. Once he arrived, Ernst handed over the cassettes and, exactly at noon, gave the order to broadcast Yeltsin’s address.
Ernst watched from his perch in the channel’s control room. Yeltsin hosted a lunch reception with ministers and generals in the Kremlin’s presidential quarters. “The chandeliers, the crystal, the windows—everything glittered with a New Year’s glow,” Yeltsin remembered later. A television was brought in, and his guests, some of the toughest men in the country, watched the announcement in total silence. Putin’s then wife, Lyudmila, was at home and hadn’t watched Yeltsin’s midday address, which meant she was confused when a friend called her five minutes after it ended to congratulate her. She presumed her friend was offering her a standard New Year’s greeting—until the friend explained that Lyudmila’s husband had become the acting president of Russia. A news segment on Channel One showed Yeltsin and Putin standing side by side in the Kremlin’s presidential office, a ceremonial passing of authority more persuasive than any election campaign event. On their way out, Yeltsin told Putin, “Take care of Russia.”
Product details
- Publisher : Tim Duggan Books (January 14, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1524760595
- ISBN-13 : 978-1524760595
- Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.35 x 1.13 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,102,810 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #318 in Russian & Soviet Politics
- #1,644 in European Politics Books
- #2,282 in Russian History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Joshua Yaffa](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61dqhxpcacL._SY600_.jpg)
Joshua Yaffa is a correspondent for The New Yorker in Moscow. For his work in Russia, he has been a fellow at New America, a recipient of the American Academy’s Berlin Prize, and a finalist for the Livingston Award. He has also written for the Economist, The New York Times, National Geographic, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs, where he was also an associate editor. He is originally from San Diego, California.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
This well-written book should be added to the reading list for classes on modern ethics, as well as purchased by those simply wanting to know more about contemporary Russia.
As an aside, those interested in this general topic would profit from reading "The Return of the Russian Leviathan" by Sergei Medvedev (2019).
Top reviews from other countries
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
![](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
![](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
![](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)