Yaffa draws on Soviet and czarist history and literature to describe the persistence of a national archetype — the “wily man,” as a leading sociologist puts it — shaped by the need to survive through adaptation to a repressive system. The book glosses over some of the fundamental reforms of the 1990s, which ended when Putin came to power. But the calculus of compromise Yaffa describes enables him to get to the heart of how the current regime has returned Russia to its traditional political culture.

In the end, Yaffa writes, “for the logic of compromise to work, both parties have to hold up their end of the bargain.” However, as the Putin system becomes ever more authoritarian, “the cost of wiliness goes up ever more, and its benefits become less and less.”

PRAVDA HA HA

True Travels to the End of Europe

By Rory MacLean

343 pp. Bloomsbury. $27.

Three decades after journeying across the crumbling Soviet bloc in heady 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, the travel writer MacLean retraces his route in reverse to explore what’s behind the nationalist sentiment driving the resurgence of authoritarianism across the continent. Wending his way west from Russia — where he captures a sense of its nihilistic excess and colossal disparities, if somewhat in caricature — he describes the desolation of former Communist states on its periphery and disappointed expectations fueling historical amnesia from Eastern Europe to Britain.

Recounted in poetic prose with context from pop-history and cultural commentary, MacLean’s picaresque adventures include poignant reunions and chance encounters with a colorful cast of characters ranging from intellectuals to proletarians, tycoons to destitute migrants. They take place under the menacing shadow of Russia’s escalating attacks on Western liberal democracy and the revisionist mythologizing of right-wing leaders across the continent.

MacLean is a sympathetic and perceptive guide, his characters memorable partly for confirming and sometimes subverting stereotypes. In Russia, he meets a bribe-seeking cop who takes pity on him and a social media troll who doesn’t apologize for spreading disinformation abroad despite disappointment in her own country. He also profiles new dissidents campaigning for open societies.

The episodes evoke a compelling sense of place, from the spiritual emptiness of the Russian Baltic Sea exclave Kaliningrad to the absurdity of Moldova’s impoverished breakaway region Transnistria, largely run by a sprawling private company — a “state within a nonstate,” MacLean calls it. Some of his most lyrical writing describes Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban is manufacturing a collective sense of victimhood to help weaponize the unrealized optimism of the 1990s. An admiring homeless alcoholic in Budapest tells him “Europe is dead.”