Pulitzer prize finalist Arkady Ostrovsky provides a history of Russia since the collapse of the USSR, explaining how the country went from being open to the West to closed and hostile in just three decades.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the prevailing mood, both in the West and in Russia, was hope that the country would become like other European liberal democracies.

Instead, as the decades passed, Russia's relationship with the West became increasingly frosty.

Arkady Ostrovsky is a Russian-born journalist and an outspoken critic of the Kremlin who has written for the Financial Times and is now the Russia and Eastern Europe editor for The Economist.

Published in 2016, The Invention of Russia explains the phenomena that took Russia from Mikhail Gorbachev's openness to Vladimir Putin's hostility.

Ostrovsky skillfully charts the role of politicians and the Russian media, and how the two work in tandem.