Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia - Hardcover

Joshua Yaffa is a correspondent for The New Yorker in Moscow. For his work in Russia, he has been named a fellow at New America, a recipient of the American Academy’s Berlin Prize, and a finalist for the Livingston Award.

“Joshua Yaffa’s portrait of a people is a triumph—a brilliantly original, deeply literate path through the moral struggles and calculations of a modern Russia he knows in his bones. He is allergic to the caricatures of the ruler and the ruled, and is, simply, a beautiful writer, with the humane, tragicomic eye of a novelist and the tough-minded rigor of the best journalists.”—Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition

“Between Two Fires is a study of compromise, opportunism, and the fraught moral choices available in Putin's Russia. In a series of carefully reported stories, Joshua Yaffa shows how people choose—sometimes consciously and other times not—to adapt, change and otherwise 'make do' in an authoritarian state. This is the real story of how modern authoritarianism works and even thrives, by manipulating the motivations of the regime's most capable and ambitious citizens.”—Anne Applebaum, author of Red Famine and Gulag

“In Between Two Fires, Joshua Yaffa brilliantly captures the complex choices and compromises that Russians make to survive, thrive, or remain true to one’s principles in Putin’s Russia. Through captivating storytelling, Yaffa drills deep into profiles of a very diverse set of Russian personalities, capturing with nuance the contradictions of contemporary Russia.”—Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and author of From Cold War to Hot Peace

“This is a book about Putin’s Russia that is unlike any other—an account not of the leader himself but of the ways in which contemporary Russians reckon with the state he has created. With a novelist’s eye for the telling detail and a philosopher’s grasp of moral nuance, Joshua Yaffa strings together a sequence of unforgettable portraits. The result is a profound inquiry into the myriad gradations of individual compromise in post-Soviet Russia.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing

“Few journalists have penetrated so deep and with so much nuance into the moral ambiguities of Russia. If you want insight into the deeper distortions the Kremlin causes in people’s psyches this book is invaluable.”—Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible