Christopher Hope’s Moscow! Moscow! is a satirical, essayistic wander through late Soviet Moscow, written at the edge of a political world beginning to crack open.

Hope moves through Gorbachev-era Russia with the eye of a novelist rather than a straight historian: alert to bureaucracy, absurdity, public performance, state language, queues, myths, monuments, suspicion, jokes, fear, masculinity and many, many ghosts.

It is partly reportage, partly travel book, partly political comedy, and partly an outsider’s encounter with a city whose surfaces are never only surfaces. Hope is especially good on the grotesque and ceremonial habits of power: the official phrase, the controlled gesture, the rules everyone knows how to bend, the civic rituals that persist even when belief has gone slack. A good one for readers of Eastern European/Russian political writing, Cold War afterlives, literary travel, Soviet collapse, satire, and books where history appears as both farce and weather.

Minerva paperback edition, published in 1990. First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann in 1990. Good second-hand condition with visible shelfwear, rubbing, edgewear, page toning, and handling to the cover. A readable copy with very strong period cover design.