MATTIA BERNARDO BAGNOLI, 'MODEL PUTIN' (PEOPLE, PP.438, 18 EURO)
There is a lot of talk about Russia in the newspapers, above all to denounce its authoritarianism, its expansionist aims in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, but also and above all to outline its eternal leader, Vladimir Putin, in strong colors.
A president - and briefly premier - who has marked and guided the country's deepest transformation since the end of the USSR thirty years ago.
A huge nation that contains within itself great modernities and still backward regions, tumultuous urban economic development and rural worlds impenetrable to change.
Of all this, and much more, speaks 'Putin Model - Journey to a Country we would do well to know' by Mattia Bernardo Bagnoli, ANSA correspondent in Moscow and writer.
An essay that with an agile and enjoyable prose, using testimonies, analyzes and details of real life told with taste, explains these Putinian years, the undeniable successes on the world chessboard, the constant compression of democracy and dissent - even with toxic methods, such as in Litvinenko and Navalny cases, but not only - macroeconomic dynamics, strategic matches in Ukraine and Belarus.
But also everyday life, the mighty renovation of entire parts of Moscow, the atmospheres, the non-monolithic character of the Russians.
The result is a model of a country and its management that have become hybrids: unbridled capitalism, but also important pieces of surviving Soviet welfare, elections that are said to be free, but where the opposition is not even able to present itself.
And when it does, in the square, the police do not skimp with batons and tear gas.
Bagnoli tells, among the many aspects of Russia, even those experienced firsthand, as in the case of his missions in the mysterious Siberia, where he discovers an original strategy against climate change or the arrival in Syria in the wake of the Russian forces, to see Palmyra's liberation up close.
Until the very personal story of the Covid infection and the vaccination with Sputnik V, a vaccine still mysterious in the eyes of the West, just like the nation that produces it.
And this is precisely the central message of 'Putin Model': enough with the distracted gaze towards Russia, considered an 'other' piece of the world, a threat, or something that concerns us only if some spy is expelled, caught with his hands in the bag.
What Moscow does or does not do has obvious consequences for the West - just think of Donald Trump's opaque relations with the US, and also with the electoral process that led him to the White House - but also less visible and yet strongly held for many, such as the personalistic and increasingly authoritarian management of power, which seems to attract more and more proselytes in Eastern Europe and beyond.
And for another reason: the Putin era is not eternal, and amidst creeping discontent and social and economic transformation, the stabilization of Russia he led after the chaos of the 1990s could end in a few years.
Taking Russia into account and really knowing it could be a precious tool for managing the 'post-Tsar' for the rest of the world, in a not too distant future.