I picked up Zhirinovsky’s Russian Empire: An Alternate History on Kindle: it is a distinctly dystopian alternate history where Boris Yeltsin is killed in the 1991 during that counter-coup and Russia ends up being run by a guy named Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who I was distinctly displeased to discover is an actual Russian politician. I was kind of hoping that the author had made the guy up. Anyway, the Soviet Union kind of… mutates under this fellow, and generally turns the next two decades’ worth of world history into various types of excrement.
- Pros: The book is written as a collection of interviews, transcripts, newspaper articles, and book excerpts. Generally the tone is quite well done, with the author simultaneously suggesting a narrative while also allowing for a certain amount of unreliable narrator. The overall scenario is plausible, if you accept the basic premise that the Soviet Union might have been able to function as essentially a Russian-dominated empire (which was, after all, really what the USSR was).
- Cons: It’s a very long book. Almost dauntingly so. And, forgive me for saying this: the book needed a copy-editor’s services. It’s not enough to spell-check; you need to go through each physically printed page, looking for errors.
- Neither Pro nor Con: When dealing with the parts of the book involving American politics, it is impossible to determine whether the author was mocking the Right, or mocking the Left’s favorite stereotypes about the Right. Possibly the author intended to do both.
All in all, for three bucks it’s not bad, if you want to read about just how horrible things could have been over the last twenty years. but I’d maybe wait until the author proofs the book again.