Ok, I've read a little bit of this now. The concept and the switching of POVS certainly is intriguing; we get to see conversations from Saruman's POV rather than Gandalf's, for example, which makes for interesting reading. Gandalf is the warmonger who believes the transactional nature of the sacrifice he is imposing upon the civilisation of Mordor will be vindicated by those who write the history books. No doubt he is correct, given that the history books would be written by the race of Men under the victorious Elessar II and his descendants.
Also, the familiarity of the setting, geography and characters means it's easy to grasp what's going and become engaged in the story from early on.
However, the problem is the writing itself. Unable to speak Russian, I've no idea for sure whether the problem lies in the translation or the original text, but I suspect it to be the original. Put simply, the author has no concept of how to anchor the language of the work in its proper temporal seeting; stylistically, it does not read like Tolkien's English. I mentioned this above, and this might have been forgivable had the author taken the time at least weed out the numerous anachronisms, which are both material and linguistic. Obviously Tolkien gets a fair bit of stick from using such a highly stylised approximation/bastardisation (delete according to taste) of classical English, but if you're going to set a piece of fiction inside that world (even if that piece is an attempted counter-argument) then IMO it ought to stylistically adhere to the principles of that world. It's far too contemporary. The contemporaneous nature of the language also opens the book up to another criticism, which is that it offers up the perception that the author is only able to view LOTR through a contemporary lens, rather than a historical one.
Here are some choice quotes which made me cringe:
"Dearest Saruman... please forgive an old man, but, erm...I wasn't listening all that closely... even if we start to bicker, what's gonna happen to the world, eh?"
"Gandalf, a child is always a disaster in the house. First, dirty diapers, then broken toys."
"What the hell do they need it for?"
At one point Aragorn calls women "broads". I'm pretty sure Aragorn wasn't a docker from 1940s New York, but there you go.
Then there are some passages which are just nonsensical, and perhaps have been translated badly. At one point Radagast says, "What you are about to do is worse than a crime. It is a mistake." Eh?
Chapter 5 comes across less as a story than a summary of military campaigns that happened either in or just prior to events in LOTR, and is written from the authorial voice rather than being explained through dialogue, as, for example, was the case in The Shadow Of The past (one of the best chapters in LOTR IMO). The fact that it's placed at Chapter 5, after some story has been allowed to roll along, is strange. The whole thing feels a bit first-drafty, as though the author has got very excited by his endeavours and not followed through with a good, hard edit, or even a second opinion from a hardened Tolkien reader. As such, it's like most fan-fiction; an interesting mish-mash of ideas, but chaotic, slipshod and amateurish execution. The reason this has garnered so much attention IMO is simply because of the coat-tails it chooses to ride on. Its lack of professionalism would prohibit the Tolkien estate from ever allowing this to surface as an official publication.
