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Understanding how Putin switches from one role to another atop the Russian political system is crucial to understand that system. My grandfather was forced into the Wehrmacht as a young man, who managed to escape to the UK and join the Polish Army in exile, eventually going back to fight against the Germans. Then there was the economic crisis of 2008, which was not of Russia’s making, but the opportunity was lost. We won, they didn’t,” trumped Bush senior in 1991; Clinton said “Yeltsin could eat his spinach”, while Obama more recently dismissed Russia as simply a “regional” power. Short, let alone history, has not had time to judge the success or failure of the latest horrifying act in Putin’s astonishing drive to make Russia great again.
There are now good news stories about people organising themselves and finding a collective voice, but those stories often concern a younger generation who don’t know the fear of Soviet times. Miller] brings a seasoned, personal perspective to his account of both the 16-month conflict and its wider roots. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. That’s a story that Putin doesn’t want to remind the world of, because of course he did not – as his telling would have it – come from a security services background to centralise and rescue the nation, and deal with the oligarchs who had been running riot since the 1990s.Putin: Operative in the Kremlin goes beyond the standard biographies of Vladimir Putin’s rise from the streets of Leningrad to the KGB to the Kremlin. As Short observes, however authoritarian and corrupt modern Russia may be, “national leaders invariably reflect the society from which they come, no matter how unpalatable that thought may be to the citizens”. 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. The prolific military chronicler and analyst Mark Galeotti has produced exactly the right book at the right time.
Rents is a rather technical economic term, but it’s the windfall money you get from just digging something out of the ground and selling it for a lot of money. S. Congress” in 2010 when in fact the treaty was ratified in 1996 — but these invariably slip into any work of this size and scope. Putin relies on standard populist rhetoric to justify his attack on Ukraine — corrupt Ukrainian elites, beholden to foreign influences, are looting the country and turning the people against their Russian brethren, he claims — and he blithely combines World War II-era threats (Nazis overrunning Ukraine) with those of the Cold War (Ukraine acquiring nukes).
My Vodka Politics book takes a deep dive into Russian history but is ultimately focussed on better understanding contemporary social, economic, and political developments in Russia, where Putin and Putinism are at the core. Acquiring tactical nuclear weapons will be much easier for Ukraine than for some other states I am not going to mention here,” he declared. The judges of the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize look for books that explain high quality science in an engaging and accessible way. This is an antidote to the popular image promoted by Putin, and shows the connection between the regimes. 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.
He plumbs an array of sources, including his own interviews, to reconstruct the tale of a street brawler from a bleak communal apartment in postwar Leningrad who embarks on a mediocre career as a midlevel K. I found out they were doing rather a lot and their activities weren’t a joke but were serious and potentially damaging. I love this book because it holds a mirror to American views of innocence and benevolence and paints a much more realistic picture of great power conflict than is presented in the news.Short relentlessly traces the journey Putin has taken in rejecting that “peace”, the Pax Americana, the unipolar world in which, according to Russia expert Strobe Talbott, then US deputy secretary of state, “the US was acting as though it had the right to impose its view on the world”. Ironies haunt the book: “Those who believe that [military force] is the most efficient instrument of foreign policy in the modern world will fail again and again… One cannot behave in the world like a Roman emperor,” he said after one US military adventure. Can the ageing tsar, whose acolytes still seem keen to educate their offspring in Britain and the US when not out sailing on ever-larger yachts, really believe himself a persuasive model for those ancient values?
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