{"id":1152,"date":"2018-09-10T19:24:13","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T19:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/?p=1152"},"modified":"2018-09-10T19:24:13","modified_gmt":"2018-09-10T19:24:13","slug":"michael-danahy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/2018\/09\/10\/michael-danahy\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Danahy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Russia\/USSR has long been a place that fascinates me. \u00a0As a kid growing up in the 1980\u2019s, some of my earliest memories were of Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s visits to the US. \u00a0As a product of a liberal arts college, I took classes in Russian language, history, and literature (in addition to my chemistry classes). \u00a0The Russia of my childhood\/college years was very volatile and oftentimes confusing. \u00a0Journalist Arkady Ostrovsky\u2019s book <em>The Invention of Russia<\/em> tackles this time period in Soviet\/Russian history. \u00a0The main thrust of his book is that Russia was (and perhaps still is) volatile and confusing because post-Soviet Russian leaders were (and are) quite literally <em>inventing<\/em> Russia. \u00a0With the end of a Communist Party monopoly on politics, what would the Russian people\u2019s relationship with their government look like? \u00a0With the end of the Soviet Union empire, what would Russia\u2019s place in the world be? \u00a0Ostrovsky highlights the role of the media (and media oligarchs) in the invention process, and how they steered the invention process from the idealistic days of the early 1990\u2019s (would it be possible Russia become a liberal democracy?) to the present state of affairs. \u00a0The book helped me put together the pieces of Russia in those hectic days of the mid-90\u2019s. \u00a0Why did Yeltsin order the shelling of the Russian Duma? \u00a0What were the Chechen Wars all about? \u00a0How did a low level KGB agent become president of Russia and why is he still as popular as ever? \u00a0If you\u2019re interested in Russia and want to try to \u201cfigure out\u201d this enigmatic country, <em>The Invention of Russia<\/em> is a good step in that direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Russia\/USSR has long been a place that fascinates me. \u00a0As a kid growing up in the 1980\u2019s, some of my earliest memories were of Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s visits to the US. \u00a0As a product of a liberal arts college, I took classes in Russian language, history, and literature (in addition to my chemistry classes). \u00a0The Russia &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/2018\/09\/10\/michael-danahy\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Michael Danahy&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-readers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1152"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1157,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions\/1157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}