Dressed Up for a Riot (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780374538163)

A memoir of revolution, reaction, and Russian men's fashion

In this crackling memoir, the journalist and novelist Michael Idov recounts the tempestuous years he spent living alongside--and closely observing--the media and cultural elite of Putin's Russia. After accepting a surprise offer to become the editor in chief of GQ Russia, Idov and his family arrive in a Moscow still seething from a dubious election and the mass anti-Putin rallies that erupted in response. Idov is fascinated by the political turmoil but nonetheless finds himself pulled in unlikely directions. He becomes a tabloid celebrity, acts in a Russian movie with Snoop Dogg, befriends the members of Pussy Riot, punches an anti-Semitic magazine editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre, sells an autobiographical sitcom pilot that is later changed into an anti-American farce, and writes Russia's top-grossing domestic movie of 2015. Meanwhile, he becomes disillusioned with the splintering opposition to Putin and is briefly attracted to a kind of jaded Putinism lite--until Russia's invasion of Ukraine thoroughly changes his mind.

In Dressed Up for a Riot, Idov writes openly, sensitively, and stingingly about life in Moscow and his place in a media apparatus that sometimes undermined but more often bolstered a state system defined by cynicism, corruption, and the fanning of fake news. With humor and intelligence, he offers a close-up glimpse of what a declining world power can become.

Author: Michael Idov
ISBN-10: 0374538166
ISBN-13: 9780374538163
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Language: English
Published: 02/12/2019
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 1.00d