An interesting summary of the changes that led to Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014 by a regular contributor to The Economist magazine. It feels like the events that led to the collapse of the USSR and Yeltsin's rise to power and subsequently falling out of favour fill a lot of the book. The pace positively gallops once Putin appears. A lot of the book deals with the importance of television for communicating to the masses, both in the USSR and in Putin's Russia.