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Russia

Power Play

by •
October 2013, no. 355

Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell in and out of Love with Vladimir Putin by Ben Judah

Yale University Press (Inbooks), $36.95 hb, 352 pp, 9780300181210

Russia

Power Play

by •
October 2013, no. 355

On 18 July 2013the Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was sentenced to a five-year jail term on corruption charges. Navalny, in a speech to the court castigating the dispensation which has emerged in Russia since Vladimir Putin first became president in 2000, attacked a ‘system of power in which 83 percent of the country’s wealth is in the hands of half of one percent of the population’. Widely held to be the result of political persecution by the Kremlin, Navalny’s conviction was condemned inside and outside Russia.

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Nick Hordern

Nick Hordern is a former diplomat and journalist. He is the co-author of two histories of crime in Sydney: Sydney Noir: The Golden Years (NewSouth, 2017) and World War Noir: Sydney’s Unpatriotic War (NewSouth, 2019). He edited, and wrote the introduction to, the first English translation of Liu Yichang’s classic 1963 novel of Hong Kong, The Drunkard (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2020). His latest book, Shanghai Demimondaine (Earnshaw Books), the biography of an Australian sex worker in China in the 1930s, was published in October 2023.

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