Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Dressed Up for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin's Moscow

Dressed Up for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin's Moscow

Idov, Michael
Star, Alex

Paperback

Biographies GeneralGeneral Europe

Publisher Price: $21.99

ISBN10: 0374538166
ISBN13: 9780374538163
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Feb 12 2019
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.80
Height: 1.00 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

In this crackling memoir, the journalist and novelist Michael Idov recounts the tempestuous years he spent living alongside--and closely observing--the media and cultural elite of Putin's Russia.

After accepting a surprise offer to become the editor in chief of GQ Russia, Idov and his family arrive in a Moscow still seething from a dubious election and the mass anti-Putin rallies that erupted in response. Idov is fascinated by the political turmoil but nonetheless finds himself pulled in unlikely directions. He becomes a tabloid celebrity, acts in a Russian movie with Snoop Dogg, befriends the members of Pussy Riot, punches an anti-Semitic magazine editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre, sells an autobiographical sitcom pilot that is later changed into an anti-American farce, and writes Russia's top-grossing domestic movie of 2015. Meanwhile, he becomes disillusioned with the splintering opposition to Putin and is briefly attracted to a kind of jaded Putinism lite--until Russia's invasion of Ukraine thoroughly changes his mind.

In Dressed Up for a Riot, Idov writes openly, sensitively, and stingingly about life in Moscow and his place in a media apparatus that sometimes undermined but more often bolstered a state system defined by cynicism, corruption, and the fanning of fake news. With humor and intelligence, he offers a close-up glimpse of what a declining world power can become.

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