Joshua Yaffa

At the Academy, Yaffa will work on his book manuscript on Russia in the age of Vladimir Putin, under contract with Tim Duggan Books. His book will attempt to narrate and explain how many Russians, long after the Soviet Union has ceased to exist, still find themselves in what the Russian sociologist Yuri Levada called “an intractable and symbiotic embrace with the state.” Yaffa plans to unravel a complicated truth behind the conventional understanding of Russia today: while many think of the nation as held captive by a dictator interested only in his own power and profit, Yaffa argues that the authoritarian system Putin controls is made possible by the business and political compromises the country’s citizens actually make. He details how a wide range of characters has reached an accommodation with a state that, in turn, wants ever more from them. Each of the book’s chapters will focus on one aspect of the Putin state—the media, the church, Chechnya—as seen through the narrative lens of one person’s life. In so doing, Yaffa creates quasi-novelistic portraits of individuals who are in the midst of navigating contemporary Russia, sometimes finding great success and power, other times frustration and failure. American audiences have had little access to such under-reported individual stories: Such figures are telling and important avatars of today’s Russia, Yaffa argues, “as they have contributed to building the Putin system, and to ensuring that it continues to durably function.”