Between Two Fires – Joshua Yaffa

Seryozha was in a jittery, nervous state. He said he hadn’t eaten or slept in three days. Vera had him lie down for a while. Adelgeim took him to meet some other young people who had come to visit him from Moscow, but Seryozha ran away and rolled around in the grass. Adelgeim and Vera brought him home to rest, but he took off again.

Finally Seryozha’s father arrived to check on him and announced that he would take him back to Moscow on the train that evening. Before leaving, Seryozha told Adelgeim he “understood everything,” without saying what; he then asked Adelgeim to take him in or, barring that, find him a place in a monastery. Let’s first talk about Orthodoxy a bit, Adelgeim said. We can do that next time. Go home for now and we’ll think about monasteries later. The next day Adelgeim and Vera got a call that Seryozha had run away from his father and was still in Pskov, at the city’s hospital, with no money or phone.

Adelgeim went to pick him up. Back at the Adelgeim home, Seryozha ate a bowl of soup, then disappeared once again, this time returning after an hour or two. He seemed to Vera “uncollected, anxious, unnatural, twitchy. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to sit down, stand up, run away, come back.” That evening, Vera started to make dinner, and handed her husband a knife so he could peel a squash from the backyard garden.

He and Seryozha sat on a mustard-colored couch in the corner of the kitchen and started to talk about Saint Luke of Crimea, an Orthodox bishop and surgeon who defied the Bolsheviks in the years after the revolution. Vera could hear their conversation as she walked to the stove. A minute later, Vera heard a terrible scream. She ran back to the couch. Her husband sat in a pool of dark blood, frozen and quiet, bent over toward the table. Seryozha yelled, “Demon!

Demon! Demon!” dropped the knife, and ran out onto the street. Vera called an ambulance; as she waited, she could hear Seryozha pacing up and down the road in front of the house, still in a dark trance, screaming out: “I have sinned! I have killed a holy man!”

A police car chased after him and a number of officers threw him to the ground. Paramedics showed up and made their way to the kitchen. One bent down to look at Adelgeim, then turned to Vera: “A direct strike to the heart. That’s it. He died right away.” Father Pavel Adelgeim left this life four days after his seventy-fifth birthday.

“A deeply reported account of what it’s like to live in Putin’s Russia, but it’s not about Twitter bots or influencing foreign elections or even Vladimir Putin himself….Yaffa gives us insight into Putin by helping us better understand the political culture that produced him.” —NPR “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 “Superb…[an] excellent new book…Yaffa has distinguished himself with his rigor, his acumen, and his nuanced voice….His in-depth reporting consistently allows him to move beyond the headlines, revealing the deeper historical and sociological patterns that underpin that notoriously contradictory country.”

—Foreign Affairs “A wonderfully insightful book…well-told and neatly interlinked stories… It is to Mr. Yaffa’s credit that in general he avoids simplifying. Even when he describes people who seek cynical advantage from the powerful, the picture is never completely dark; when he portrays moral heroes, he never presents them as infallible. That is how things are in life, perhaps nowhere more so than in Russia.”

—The Economist “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.” —Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition “Yaffa skillfully weaves together perceptive descriptions of flesh-and-blood people with a balanced evocation of the wider political and historical context.

As we follow these individuals, we come to understand many of the developments of the post-Soviet era…through the eyes of those who have lived through them. Yaffa has a good eye for colourful detail…and he proves attentive to the subtleties and ambiguities of Russian life.” —Tony Wood, Financial Times “A fascinating and nuanced account that illuminates the myriad conflicting and often contradictory forces that have shaped the Russia of today.” —Douglas Smith, The Wall Street Journal “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.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Red Famine and Gulag “[A] highly original and riveting account…Good and not-so-good men and women are forced to make difficult choices—and Joshua Yaffa’s remarkable book is a guide to the pain and pleasure of their lives in the public arena.”

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 2cc2d9c8f9ed565e
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 6,385,659 bytes (6.09 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781524760601, 9781524760618
• Pages: 370
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 655.47 minutes
• Total Words: 131,093
• Total Characters: 791,040
• Average Words per Page: 354.31
• Average Characters per Page: 2137.95

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