Behind the fake news
Travel
Pravda Ha Ha
Rory MacLean (Bloomsbury, £20)
RETRACING a journey he made 30 years ago across a continent filled with optimism after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Rory MacLean discovers the evaporation of hope into despair and disillusion in a world where obsessive power, exploitation and greed have become the disturbing norm.
A travel writer by reputation, Mr MacLean belies the description by delivering incisive analysis, often with a humorous touch, largely through the eyes of those living through a post-Communist political upheaval founded frequently on lies in which everyone but today’s establishment is at fault. ‘A continent that learned nothing from history because at every turn it is re-written to suit the fledgling dictatorships now in power.’
‘Pravda’, which means ‘truth’ in Russian, is not merely—in supreme irony—the part-title of this book, but also of the official state newspaper and disseminator of ‘fake news’ in Russia a century before the term was coined in the West. The people the author meets, many of whom he first came across when he travelled the same route in the opposite direction —from Berlin to Moscow—include Russia’s ‘Chicken Tsar’, an oligarch who takes him under