The Last Man in Russia The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation

Russia is dying from the inside out. Faced with a staggering population decline--and looming economic collapse--driven in large part by toxic levels of alcohol abuse, the country is on a path to ruin. In The Last Man in Russia, award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough explains that Russia's self-destruction is a representation of a deeper sickness: a spiritual one, born out of the country's long communist experiment. Leading readers on a journey across Russia, from a churchyard in Moscow to the mass graves in a former gulag and the headquarters of a burgeoning white supremacist group, Bullough reveals the extent and nature of the malaise--and the tragic tale of the one man who might have prevented it. The Last Man in Russiacuts to the heart of the Russian experience, forming a narrative that is at once a travelogue, a sociological study, a biography, and a cri de coeur for a dying nation.

Oliver Bullough studied modern history at Oxford University before moving to Russia in 1999. He lived in St. Petersburg, Bishkek and Moscow over the next seven years, working as a journalist for local magazines and newspapers and then for Reuters news agency. He reported from all over Russia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, but liked nothing more than to work among the peoples and mountains of the North Caucasus. He moved back to Britain in 2006, and now lives in Hackney, East London.