The Oh, Hello and

I'm published a few months ago by Verso. Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin

exert a mysterious hold over what people call the West.

For just over 70 years, an expanded version of Russia,

the Soviet Union was a major world power, a model of a different kind of economic system,

a rival to the capitalist world led by the U.S. had once feared and disparaged.

And then the USSR collapsed, which we were told for a long time could never happen.

Its allegedly totalitarian system was frozen and presumably immortal.

It collapsed into Iraq.

The 1990s were a miserable time for the former Soviet Union, with Russia's entire society

collapsing into impoverishment and early death.

Its once mighty role in the world shrunk to insignificance, and led by a drunken and occasionally

clownish Boris Yeltsin.

American advisors told it how to run its government an economy.

Yeltsin stole the 1996 election with plenty of assistance coming from

US political consultants and a timely loan from the IMF.

That electoral meddling, which extended far beyond what Russia has been accused of in our 2016 election,

is largely forgotten in the US, as was Yeltsin's earlier shelling of the

building housing the Russian parliament just to show it who was boss. Yeltsin robbed

the legislative branch of any power and consolidated the victory of neoliberalism in an extremely corrupt form in Russia.

Yet somehow he's remembered as a liberal in the West. The deep corruption and messy transition to

capitalism left the Russian population miserable and confused.

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