Putin's Russia is back in Politkovskaya's paperback book

ANNA POLITKOVSKAJA, PUTIN'S RUSSIA (ADELPHI, PP. 384, EURO 14.00)

'Putin's Russia' by the Moscow journalist Anna Politkovskaya, killed by two assassins in Moscow in 2006, is back in bookstores on March 14, published by Adelphi in a translation by Claudia Zonghetti.

    Special correspondent of the "Novaya Gazeta", winner in 2000 of the Golden Pen Award of the Association of Russian Journalists for her chronicles from the front of the Chechen conflict, famous for her courageous reports on human rights violations in Russia, Politkovskaya reveals to us, in well-documented and dramatic pages, the self-deception with which the West has tried in recent years to reassure itself about Russia by presenting Vladimir Putin as a willing good boy.

    This book is destined, explains Adelphi in the presentation, to remain memorable for the skill and audacity with which the author tells the stories (public and private) of today's Russia, suffocated by a regime which, behind the facade of a democracy in fieri, he still proves to be poisoned by Sovietism.

    But don't think of a cold political analysis: "Mine is a book of passionate notes on the sidelines of life as it is lived today in Russia" wrote Politkovskaya who in October 2002 bravely agreed to negotiate for the release of the hostages prisoners of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow.

Let alone think of a biography of the president: Putin in fact remains in the background, indeed behind the scenes, to be called on the stage only in the sharp final chapter, where he is portrayed as a modest former KGB officer devoured by imperial ambitions.

    In the foreground, instead, glimpses of daily life, grotesque if not tragic, hunt us: the war in Chechnya with its "forgotten" corpses;

the degenerations underway in the former Red Army;

the economic crash that overwhelmed the newborn middle class in 1998, support for an authentic democratic evolution of the country;

the new state mafia, rooted in an unprecedented system of corruption;

the massacre by the special forces in the Dubrovka theater in Moscow;

the massacre of children in Beslan, Ossetia.