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"The Putin Mystique takes the reader on a journey through the Russia of Vladimir Putin, named by Forbes magazine in 2013 as the most powerful man in the world. It is a neo-feudal world where iPads, WTO membership, and Brioni business suits conceal a power structure straight out of the Middle Ages, where the Sovereign is perceived as both divine and demonic, where a man's riches are determined by his proximity to the Kremlin, and where large swathes of the populace live in precarious complacency interrupted by bouts of revolt. Where does that kind of power come from? The answer lies not in the leader, but in the people: from the impoverished worker who appeals directly to Putin for aid, to the businessmen, security officers and officials in Putin's oftendysfunctional government who look to their leader for instruction and protection. In her writing career, Anna Arutunyan has travelled throughout Russia to report on modern politics. She has interviewed oligarchs and policemen, bishops and politicians, and many ordinary Russians. Her book, which has been translated into 10 languages, is a vivid and revealing exploration of the way in which myth, power and even religion interact to produce the love-hate relationship between the Russian people and Vladimir Putin"--Provided by publisher.
About the author
Anna Arutunyan is author of The Media in Russia (McGraw-Hill, 2009) and co-author (with Vladimir Shlapentokh) of Freedom, Repression and Private Property in Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, Foreign Policy in Focus, and The Moscow News, where she is an editor and senior correspondent. She has lectured on Russian power, politics and media at Tampere University in Finland and at Michigan State University. A bilingual Russian-American, she was born in the Soviet Union in 1980 but grew up and received her education in the United States. In 2002 she returned to Moscow to write about Russia. Anna Arutunyan lives in Moscow with her husband and daughter.
