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Pravda Ha Ha

True Travels to the End of Europe

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Pravda Ha Ha

By: Rory MacLean
Narrated by: Rory MacLean
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Bloomsbury presents Pravda Ha Ha written and read by Rory MacLean.

Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award

'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' John le Carré

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were – for most Brits and Americans – part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine’s bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev.

As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists – both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists – have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.©2019 Rory MacLean (P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Europe Russia Soviet Union Funny
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Critic reviews

Gripping ... part-travelogue, part contemporary history of Europe … MacLean is an accomplished writer; his immersive prose crackles with wit and wry humour, and captures scenes and personalities with aplomb (Daniel Beer)
An eye-opening travelogue, filled with tank parades, AK-47s, casual racism, Maseratis, cyber-hackers, kleptocrats and illiberal authoritarians
Moving ... A timely book. It addresses the challenges of a fractious and fractured Europe … MacLean is a compassionate writer, and he balances his stories of men and women of power … with those of the dispossessed (Sara Wheeler)
This is a tremendous thing that MacLean is creating; a new kind of history, in several dimensions and innumerable moods, that adds up to – across the span of his books – a great and continuing work of literature (Jan Morris)
A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time (John le Carré)
No one writes quite like Rory MacLean (Robert Macfarlane)
MacLean combines vivid reportage with unabashed soapboxing. The result is an engrossing travelogue that’s both trenchantly observant and deeply felt
A triumph … Pravda Ha Ha challenges the reader to decide what is true, what is not … MacLean paints a convincing portrait of a Europe in turmoil (Hugh MacDonald)
Timely
By turns fascinating and chilling ... MacLean sheds some bleak light on the manoeuvers of post-Soviet Russia and populist, post-truth Europe in the decades since the Wall came down (Robert Smyth)
[An] eye-opening travelogue … Sometimes darkly funny, often surprising and always compelling (Tom Hawker)
With vivid images of cities and landscape and his understanding of history, it’s an engrossing, trenchantly observant and thought-provoking read
All stars
Most relevant
This is the second book I’ve read by Rory MacLean after “Berlin: Imagine a City”. He also made a fascinating podcast series called “The Bright Magic Podcast” to accompany the album by Public Service Broadcasting. Published in 2019, this is a travel book that revisits the history of eastern Europe in the 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He travels through Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, tracing the effects of the fall of the Soviet Union, the shadow of power and violence cast by the new oligarchs, and the shift to the right in politics that vilifies the unsettled, stateless people caused by our ongoing wars and arms dealing. Each chapter features encounters with people and their personal histories alongside the grander narratives of political changes. MacLean humanizes the stories of a number of refugees, whose horrific experiences trying to find safety in Europe cause as much trauma as the conflicts they are escaping at home. An important and timely work.

MacLean’s own narration of the audiobook version is compelling and brings to life the voices of the characters he encounters on his travels.

The opposite of bad travel writing

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I recall enjoying the same author's "Stalin's Nose", when I was a teenager. I have grown up since 1995; it is a shame that this petulant, self-satisfied writer has not. A good travel book shows an author learning from his experience: this book, however, starts with insufferable moral and political lecturing , and imposes this trite hectoring on the reader throughout the book. Neither the author nor the reader learns anything.

The Opposite of good travel-writing

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