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

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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”. This is a very traditional study of a very contemporary figure. At a time when so many biographies seem either built around some controversial core argument (typically finding some scandal to unearth or invent) or have gone minimalist (my own “We Need to Talk About Putin” is less than one-fifth the size of Philip Short’s doorstop), this is old school in all the best ways. Mr. Short, a British foreign correspondent who has written biographies of François Mitterrand, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong, has pored over all the interviews, followed up on all the leads and spoken to everyone from academics to policy makers. The result is comprehensive, but the fluid prose keeps readers from getting lost or bogged down in details. A specialist may cavil at some points, and at times one could use a brisker pace and lighter touch, but for a complete and judicious biography of this deeply, even pathologically private man, this is the best yet. Even with several rounds of Russia-Ukraine peace talks, there is still no diplomatic resolution and the conflict continues. Many Ukrainians have already fled the country to look for refuge while there are also those who opted to stay and fight. Her lover was so unrecognisable that Alyona could not find him in the morgue until the supervisor pointed out his name tag to her. This was in 2003. The poisonings and the shootings had only just begun. Investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya? Poisoned, later shot. Human rights activist Natasha Estemirova? Shot. Politician Boris Nemtsov? Shot. Opposition leader Alexey Navalny? Poisoned, now in jail. Fascism, tribalism, and the human evolutionary propensity to identify with a tribal group and potentially lose all common sense and reason are ever-present dangers.

Your next choice in your list of books about Putin and his rule in Russia is about the auto industry. OK, let’s move on to Etkind now, who is a Cambridge academic. Can you tell us more about the thesis of this book? I think it’s partly because they can. They don’t have a navy really, they don’t have an air force, they don’t even have a serious space programme compared to what the Soviet Union had, but they can still spy. Second, the leadership is addicted to information. It believes that there are conspiracies out there and with enough spying they will uncover them. So the paradox is that even when there’s no secret, Russian spies are tasked with trying to discover one, which leads to some tragicomic outcomes which I talk about in my book Deception.If you study Putin’s career, you realise that we are dealing with a hyper-aggressive psychopath whose word cannot be relied upon. He is a man who identifies compromise as weakness; who sows dissent and mistrust in the West; who likes killing. The idea that we can negotiate with Putin is foolish. Nobody in the West will be safe until he and his killing machine are stopped. Period.

A] slender but sizzling book . . . essential reading for anyone who wants to know where the regime in the Kremlin is heading – and what it means for the rest of the world.’ — The Times A gripping and explosive account of Vladimir Putin's tyranny, charting his rise from spy to tsar, exposing the events that led to his invasion of Ukraine and his assault on Europe. A friend wrote: “Yuri’s condition worsened by the hour. His temperature rose continuously. His mucous membranes were swollen and his kidneys were failing. Then the worst began. His skin began to peel off as though he had suffered severe burns. Even a layman could see what was happening: it was either due to radiation or to some unknown poisons.” Madeleine Albright is a former US Secretary of State, and this book combines her fascinating political insights with an acute awareness of the ever-present threat of tribal ideologies turning virulent and potentially destroying liberal democracy.Shchekochikhin’s girlfriend Alyona Gromova recalled: “On the day he was taken to hospital, he felt very weak. After he had a shower, his hair was a mess. I went to stroke it and great handfuls of hair came out in my hand. The symptoms were confusing. First, it seemed like a cold but his face was very red, as if he had sunburn, then lumps of his skin started to flake off.” The Chechens are a very tough people who have been brutalised by their historic experience. I don’t think anyone should take a naive, romantic view that this is a captive nation struggling to be free and they’ll become the Switzerland of the Caucasus if they’re allowed to be, because the damage done by history leaves very deep scars on all sides. I wouldn’t want to particularly judge the question of what should be the constitutional arrangements in the North Caucasus – I just think that Russia is struggling and failing to hold on to the North Caucasus. Russians are leaving, and you have bunch of corrupt and very oppressive satrapies that pay lip-service to Russia, but where the Russian constitution doesn’t actually apply any more. They consume very large amounts of Russian money and I just don’t think that’s very sustainable. The combination of some mistakes by the Chechens and many more mistakes by the Russians has created a really horrible situation that is going to be around for a long time.

There are three short answers. For the elite – both money people and power people (the private capitalists have by no means gone away) – the rising price of oil which continued right up to 2008 has been an enormous asset, and provided resources that could have been used to modernise the economy and take the next economic step. There were a lot of conversations about that but not a lot of progress. Then there was the economic crisis of 2008, which was not of Russia’s making, but the opportunity was lost. Strikingly, the occasions Short records when outsiders have witnessed Putin’s inscrutable mask fracture nearly all relate to these “lost” lands, countries whose independent existence was to him an impossible outrage. There is the rant about Estonia to the British ambassador or former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s magnificent record of Putin’s “violent diatribe” over Georgia and its leader, who should be “hung by his balls”. That only ended when Sarkozy retorted: “So your dream is to end up like Bush, detested by two-thirds of the planet?” Putin burst out laughing. “You scored a point there.” Finally, most importantly, over Ukraine, which, whisper it quietly, in its present shape truly was a creation of Stalin and Khrushchev. The tragedy may be that it has taken Putin’s actions, the atrocities committed by the Russian army and tens of thousands of deaths, to finally prove Ukraine’s existence to the man himself.The book also looks at the history of Russia’s interventions in Chechnya, in which both sides have committed atrocities. Is this a conflict that is likely to raise its head again in the near future? Wherever you turn – from contemporary literature to media reporting – there seems to be an unremittingly negative portrayal of modern Russia as corrupt, undemocratic and gangster-run. Is that a fair description? It’s what you might call a literary travelogue, although that sounds possibly a bit disparaging because she’s genuinely well-informed about Russia. When she goes to places she doesn’t have the ingenuous naivety of the travel writer. She hones in on what’s important and what really matters. Before we get to the books you’re recommending, we’re talking about Putin’s Russia – a subject on which you’ve also written your own book. 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?