Putin: The explosive and extraordinary new biography of Russia’s leader

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Growing up in West Germany, surrounded by American soldiers and with a father who had escaped communist East Germany, the Cold War always fascinated me. What was it about? Would it ever end? When it did, it took everybody by surprise. This lesson, that nothing is certain and that history can always make a turn when you least expect it, stayed with me as I pursued my degrees in history, first in Heidelberg and then at Indiana University Bloomington. As an immigrant to the United States, I study the United States from the outside and the inside. How Americans see themselves, and how they see others, is my main interest that I keep exploring from different angles.

I’m a writer by profession, but until recently I was never in a book club. My wife was, briefly, and my friend Ben’s wife was (he’s also a writer). One day I said to Ben “why don’t we start a book club?”, and we did. Seven years later, the club is not only going strong, but it has assumed a central place in the lives of the seven of us who make it up. The book is the excuse to get together, to create and deepen friendships, to build a community around ideas. Start a book club. Choose some books. These are a good start. At least in my opinion. The rise of totalitarian ideologies and movements such as BLM, critical race theory, Antifa, and woke extremism on the left, and authoritarian quasi-fascist narratives on the right like QAnon, Proud Boys, Orban, Putin, Erdogan, and others represent equally serious challenges that transcend… The raging question in the world today is who is the real Vladimir Putin and what are his intentions. Karen Dawisha’s brilliant Putin’s Kleptocracy provides an answer, describing how Putin got to power, the cabal he brought with him, the billions they have looted, and his plan to restore the Greater Russia. The regional governors and bureaucratic leaders are immovable objects, far more powerful in their fiefdoms than the president himself. So are the gatekeepers-those officials who guard the pathways to… In terms of western relations with Vladimir Putin, Bill Browder has performed the role of the canary in the coalmine – or perhaps goldmine would be more fitting. A graduate of Stanford Business School, he arrived in Moscow in the late 1990s, via a stint in London, determined to make his fortune.

Critics point to Putin’s work for the KGB as revealing the core of the man, as so often investing its members with inhuman powers of control, deception, amorality and evil. Short, instead, places the real shaping of the man both before and after his KGB years. Born in the harsh courtyards of postwar Leningrad, he emerged a cautious operator, shy and unreadable, but with a startling streak of brutality. Working for the city’s famously liberal mayor through the whirlwind of chaos and violence that swept his city and Russia in the early 1990s, he forged lasting bonds with everyone from the new business elite to leading mafia bosses and senior players in the Kremlin. He labelled himself a bureaucrat, not a politician. Avoiding conspicuous consumption and not known for swimming in the oceans of corruption around him, he was at the same time not above buying himself a dissertation towards a Candidate of Sciences degree, whose subject was “Strategic Planning for the Rehabilitation of the Mineral Resources Base in the Leningrad Oblast”. Its true author, according to Short, would later receive “several hundred million dollars’ worth of shares”. Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years, as the puritan has spectacularly lost his inhibitions. His subsequent rise was public yet shadowy, a sequence of well-chosen battles engaged when he knew he could win. Who remembers that Putin asked the BBC’s Bridget Kendall to moderate the first of his annual phone-ins to speak to the nation and the world? The great lesson of the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was the danger of misreading the statements, actions, and intentions of the adversary. Today, Vladimir Putin has become the greatest challenge… GETTING TO GRIPS WITH RUSSIA’S 21ST CENTURY TSAR Vladimir V. Putin has confounded world leaders and defied their assumptions as they tried to figure him out, only to misjudge him time and again. The Putin Mystique takes the reader on a journey through the Russia of Vladimir Putin, named by Forbes magazine in 2013 as the most powerful man in the world. It is a neo-feudal world where iPads, WTO membership, and Brioni business suits conceal a power structure straight out of the Middle Ages, where the Sovereign is perceived as both divine and demonic, where a man’s riches are… It was a time of wild profiteering, as post-Soviet state assets were sold off on the cheap, and a venal oligarchy was created. Business feuds were regularly settled by bullets, and the life expectancy of bankers was radically shortened. When Putin came to power on New Year’s Eve 1999, promising to stamp out corruption, Browder was a relieved man. The West tends to treat Russian espionage as a bit of a joke. What I did in my book was to investigate 10 Russian illegals [spy cells], the most notorious of which was Anna Chapman. I found out they were doing rather a lot and their activities weren’t a joke but were serious and potentially damaging. Russia is still jolly good at spying, and we have lots of vulnerabilities that they are very willing to exploit.

Here is the paradox: Putin is no philosopher-king, yet he overtly and repeatedly evokes a series of Russian thinkers and writers and expects his people to know them. In this thought-provoking book, Michel Eltchaninoff explores Putin’s philosophical pantheon and the ways he appropriates and sometimes simply misunderstands them, in pursuit of his political and ideological programme for Russia.’ — Mark Galeotti, author of The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia For months, the omens had pointed in one scarcely believable direction: Russia was about to invade Ukraine. And yet, the world was stunned by…I mentioned before that central to the Putin project was this savage military expedition into Chechnya in 2000 – a war Putin essentially won where Yeltsin had lost. What’s wonderful about this book is that it’s by an academic, a sociologist who comes from southern Russia but who now works in the United States. It takes an unusual look at social relationships in that part of the world, but it does not start with the war in Chechnya or nationalism. He comes from a sociologist’s point of view. Journalist Orth delivers a jaunty description of his travels...[that] armchair travelers will enjoy." You’ve chosen five books for us, all of which have been published relatively recently. Is there a single thread that ties your choices together? Then in 2003 Putin jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at the time the richest oligarch in Russia, and instead of opposing corruption, began putting the squeeze on the duly intimidated oligarchy. That meant putting a stop to Browder’s busy-bodying by deporting him from Russia in 2005.

The Russian president’s landmark speeches, interviews and policies borrow heavily from great Russian thinkers past and present, from Peter the Great to Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. They offer powerful visions of strong leaders and the Russian nation: they value conservatism and the Slavic spirit. They root morality in Orthodoxy, and Russian identity in the historic struggle with the West. Indeed, Short accepts Putin’s explanation for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. “The State Department,” he writes, “insisted that the war had nothing to do with NATO enlargement and everything to do with Putin’s refusal to accept Ukraine’s existence as an independent state, which may have been good spin but was poor history.” Unless you read Putin’s own 5,000-word poor history published last year refusing to accept Ukraine’s existence as an independent state or remember that the invasion took place many, many years after the main NATO expansion and at a time when NATO membership for Ukraine was not seriously on the table. You’ve touched on the question of whether Putin will last the six years of the presidency. Masha Gessen, who is a Russian American journalist, also thinks the Putin bubble is likely to burst at some point. Can you tell us about her book, The Man Without a Face? I’ve always been fascinated by different cultures. I started to learn Russian in 1998, and intrigued by the language, I began to study Russia more—delving into history and politics and then doing a PhD in Russian foreign policy. Ever since, trying to learn about and understand Russia has been my professional focus. Alongside books in Russian, these books are all to hand on my reference shelf, well-thumbed and marked up, as I try to write my own work. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!But I think things are also better, because you have a new generation of Russians who don’t remember the Soviet Union, except possibly for childhood memories, are living lives largely unclouded by fear and official propaganda, and are integrated into the world in a way in which Russians haven’t been for 100 years. It’s those people who made up a chunk of those protesters who were filling the streets of Moscow and other cities during the weeks after the phony Duma elections in December 2011. There’s cause for hope there, and the Putin propaganda bubble seems to have popped pretty substantially. Although he’s still in power he no longer enjoys the hypnotic popularity that he’s had over the last 10 years. Don’t be under any illusion,” he told the future president. “We only look like you. … Russians and Americans resemble each other physically. But inside we have very different values.” Certainly, Biden would agree with that today. As terrifying as this incident must have been, in a way it pales by comparison with another moment in the book in which Browder recalls the 2018 Helsinki summit between Putin and Donald Trump. Out of the blue, Putin offered to swap some Russian intelligence agents for Browder, and in a joint press conference Trump said that he thought it was “an incredible offer”. OK, let’s move on to Etkind now, who is a Cambridge academic. Can you tell us more about the thesis of this book?