Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus

“Central to the Putin project was this savage military expedition into Chechnya in 2000 – a war Putin essentially won where Yeltsin had lost. What’s wonderful about this book is that it’s by an academic, a sociologist who comes from southern Russia but who now works in the United States. It takes an unusual look at social relationships in that part of the world, but it does not start with the war in Chechnya or nationalism. He comes from a sociologist’s point of view. To explain the title, the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s secret admirer is a guy called Musa Shanib who became a rebel fighter. He started off as a member of the Soviet intelligentsia and came to the fore in the Gorbachev period. The author, who had known this guy since he was young, discovered that Shanib was reading Bourdieu, and he takes this as a starting point to look at the way the Soviet intelligentsia ended up in a place they never expected to be. He sees how one section of that intelligentsia joined in with the ripping-off of state property and self-enrichment, and another section joined various types of revolt. The way he unpicks this is marvellous, and is a subtle and unusual approach to that part of the world that confounds our expectations and stereotypes.” Read more...

The best books on Putin’s Russia

Simon Pirani, Historian