Hi there. You're listening to NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Alyssa Adwarni.

Exiled Russian journalist Mikhail Zegar now lives in New York after fleeing Russia in 2022.

A court there sentenced him in absentia to eight and a half years in prison after he spoke out about the war in Ukraine.

In his latest book, The Dark Side of the Earth, he says the Soviet Union's collapse

wasn't a victory for democracy and that many unresolved issues led to the world order we have

now.

He tells NPR's Nick Spicer how the history of Russia helps explain the forces shaping moves

by President Vladimir Putin today.

In my book, I cover 30 years. I start with the early 60s, the moment when the first man

goes to space, Euro-Gygarian, and that's the highest peak of the Soviet civilization.

And only in 30 years after that, Soviet Union collapses. So it takes 30 years for the country to disappear. And I think what was really important, the Soviet Union started collapsing decades before 1991. Because a lot of people in the Soviet Union stopped believing in any possibility of any bright future for Soviet Union.

They stopped believing in communism.

And in late 80s, they saw different perspective.

They started believing that democratic Russia was possible.

So I think that psychological dimension was really important. And it's the most

important approach in my book. So sort of a crisis of faith, it sounds like. Absolutely.

One of the big changes in the late 80s and 90s, you described that moment so well at the end of the

Cold War when everything seemed to be opening up, reform, new freedoms, McDonald's, you know, near Red Square. I remember visiting that. In a sense

that history had turned, but you argued that it had not. Why not? We see now that the world today

looks like not as if Democrats had prevailed back in the 90s, but on the contrary.

And today's Russian President Vladimir Putin shares the same rhetorics as the old

hardcore conservatives used to have in the late years of the Soviet Union.

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