The Country That Chose Not to Be

Russia spent decades moving toward the abyss—and the abyss has finally opened its arms. Putin’s "underground man" has built a hell first for himself, and now is constructing one for the rest of the world.
This book explores how catastrophe emerged from seemingly insignificant details that are easy to overlook: the incessantly blaring music in cafés, the language of violence embedded in everyday speech, the self-censorship in cinema that erased the memory of the transformative 1980s and 1990s, the way the abdication of personal responsibility begins with phrases like "ordinary people" or "the intelligentsia," and how capitalism without ethics turns into a machine gone mad

Andrei Arkhangelsky. The Country That Chose Not to Be. — Berlin: Freedom Letters, 2025.
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