Sometimes I get curious about all the ways Russia is portrayed in the West, both because I like finding the occasional source in English that I can recommend to English-speaking friends and because I find it tragically and inexplicably hilarious how often the country is misunderstood. It's like people in the West fluctuate constantly between "They're probably just like us, except they act differently for some reason?" and "They're not at all like us, we will never understand them, the Russian soul is as mysterious as the poets say." This book in particular wasn't too bad at the beginning. I felt like a lot of nuance was spotted and acknowledged, albeit often in a cursory way where it wouldn't hurt to dig into it deeply. Very often the author kind of... failed to explicitly connect the dots while getting those dots right. So when you're already familiar with the subject of post-Soviet Russia, the portrayal here feels rather accurate, but I'm not sure if it would feel the same way to someone who doesn't have the inside knowledge of living in that society. I was really surprised at how much the author condensed. Come on, you have the entire book ahead of you! If you want to portray that "long hangover," why move through things so quickly?

Then about one third in, the book stopped being about Russia and started being about the early phase of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War (the events of 2014), and that was when things got messy. I wouldn't call the author a Russia apologist by far; he is very clear on who started the war, etc. He also spells out the ideological reasons of it quite clearly: the attempts to restore the Empire, the fact that Ukraine taking a different path from Russia is unacceptable to Russia's leadership and why, etc. But then he keeps focusing on Ukraine, and... ugh. He clearly tries to be objective! But he doesn't quite succeed. He kind of continues looking at Ukraine through the Russian lens, failing to grasp that the society and culture of Ukraine is very distinct, has its own set of distinct nuance, and is in fact not "just like Russia, but pro-European, and there are those evil nationalists lurking in dark places, too." While the author does include depictions of interviews with Ukrainian people, whenever the people he talks to say things that fall completely outside the scope of the Russian lens, the author in his commentary tries to shove those things back into that narrative and to examine them solely in that context.

I guess in a way, this is a nice way to show how a lot of the "good Russians" view the conflict: "Yes, Russia is the one who started it and war is bad, but look, Ukraine made mistakes that looked so and so from Russia's POV"—which does give extra insight into the "mysterious modern Russian soul." And I guess the war Russia wages against Ukraine is indeed the peak example/result of that titular Long Hangover. But all in all, it feels like the title of the book is misleading in relation to its content, and it only does a good job of doing what it says it set out to do if you're already familiar with the subject—and by that point, you really don't need this book to explain things to you.