Published in 2016, two years after Russia successfully took Crimea from Ukraine, ‘Putin Country’ is the result of 40 years of Anne Garrels’ reporting in Russia. Set in Chelyabinsk, Russia’s industrial region on the edge of Siberia, the books looks at Russian institutions chapter by chapter, to unpack the mystery of why the collapse of the USSR in the late 1980s into the 1990s did not result in a more free and prosperous country. In spite of the unimaginable cruelty and corruption she finds in business, media, prisons, schools, and the nuclear industry, Garrels manages not to find fault with the Russian people, which is admirable; she is clear-eyed but compassionate. She acknowledges that western sanctions have driven ordinary Russians deeper into Putin’s arms, underlining his argument that the West’s goal is to humiliate and undermine Russia. But as she described it, theirs is a loyalty based in fear: “Whatever sense of community the ‘collective’ once enforced is gone,” she writes. “Everyone now lives behind high fences, suspicious of neighbors and the local government, which is dependent on the regional government and ultimately on the Kremlin. But no one is protesting” (210). Even those environmentalists, victims’ advocates, lawyers, and journalists willing to sound the alarm become exhausted by the apathy, fear, and cynicism around them, until their only choice is to emigrate or give up. The one glimmer of hope she offers is the internet: most believed in 2016 that if Putin tried to be overly restrictive of access to technology, young Russians would not stand for it. With 900,000 Russians to date having fled the country since Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, many of them young professionals, that demographic crisis may have already begun.