Unfailingly engaging and fascinating.
Feature image credit: Wakefield Press
The Cold War officially ended in 1989 after the Berlin Wall was brought down. There followed a period into the ‘90s where Western nations were schmoozing and/or assisting, post-Soviet states in capitalising (literally!) on their new, freer, status. In 1998, long-time respected BBC journalist Michael Delahaye is tasked, through NGOs such as The Thomson Foundation and Internews, with helping bring television news journalism up to snuff behind the leftovers of the Iron Curtain.
After the Fall documents Delahaye’s myriad working trips to places such as Russia (Siberia at that!), Uzbekistan, the Balkan countries, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. As his wife once remarked, ‘He’s very big in the Caucasus.’
Delahaye writes well, as one would expect a journalist to do. But he never falls into what might have been a tempting didacticism. The first half of the book in particular reads more like tales of a devil-may-care travel writer plunging into Dark Tourism: the kind of thing Chatwin or Theroux Senior might write. In other words, it is utterly delicious and engaging, taking us along to meet fabulous characters, and to observe a world few of us will get to see. Nearer the last third of the work he moves into more of an exploration of the usefulness or otherwise of the entire exercise. There is the inevitable questioning of the cultural and political condescension and the lack of deep understanding of the framework within which these post-Soviet states needed (and still need) to operate. This tension provides an opportunity to look more broadly at journalism, and in particular TV news and current affairs, and its role in the functioning of any polity, democratic or otherwise.
After the Fall is a delight from cover-to-cover: informative, engaging, witty, and thought-provoking. You will finish reading it with a refreshed understanding of many matters political and journalistic, and a strange desire to cancel the Bali trip and instead travel to Azerbaijan….
Reviewed by Tracey Korsten
The views expressed in this review belong to the author and not Glam Adelaide, its affiliates, or employees.
Distributed by: Wakefield Press
Released: January 2026
RRP: $39.95
