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

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

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

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Yuri Shchekochikhin was a Russian MP and journalist investigating these mass killings. He had courage, tremendous energy, a nose for a story and, I’ve been told, a fondness for Armenian brandy. In January 2003, he told a friend, “For the first time in my life I feel frightened.”

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? 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. 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?

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Despite the protests from sections from the middle class, Putin does retain quite a large degree of popularity. Even if he did rig the last election, nobody really doubts that he would have won it. 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? 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. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.

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. In Killer in the Kremlin, award-winning journalist John Sweeney takes readers from the heart of Putin's Russia to the killing fields of Chechnya, to the embattled cities of an invaded Ukraine. The result is a step-by-step journey, whose penultimate chapter is a little surprisingly called “The Endgame”, hobbled by being published as the climax approaches, not after the event. 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. Rather than compare Russia with Europe, might it be more appropriate to compare it with other countries whose oil exports make up a disproportionate amount of their wealth and are often ruled by corrupt, undemocratic and potentially dangerous regimes?Satter talks about how the rights and desires of individuals were subjugated in the Soviet era. This tradition has continued under Putin, hasn’t it? 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”. Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years’: Putin speaking at a rally in Moscow, February 2012. Photograph: Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images The dominance of the oil and gas sector has allowed Russia to punch above its weight in the world. Without it, the Russian government would surely behave differently. Etkind’s thesis is that Russia has had a unique model of development, which is that it colonised itself. Lots of European countries had empires, but they colonised other countries and territories across the world – sometimes with conspicuous brutality and other times with a civilising mission, and sometimes a mixture of the two. But in Russia’s case the colonisation started from the very earliest stage of the Russian state. It was initially based on fur and timber and other types of resources and then later moved on to gas and oil. It’s meant that you’ve never had a proper relationship between the rulers and the ruled. It encouraged the impetuous and exploitative acts of behaviour, first by the barons of the feudal overlords, then the aristocracy of the Tsarist era and then the communist aristocracy. It’s always based on contempt and brutality and it hasn’t really changed.

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’s strength is . . . its mapping of the wider intellectual climate in which Putinism has thrived. . . Eltchaninoff manages to sketch an evolution in Putin – or at least in Putin’s self-portrayal – from westward-looking moderniser to unapologetic conservative, a shift traced through the increasing presence of chauvinist, anti-western thinkers in his writings.’ — The Irish Times 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?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. Expertly explores the intellectual influences on Russian President Vladimir Putin . . . Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the book is the way it easily moves from philosophical interpretation to discussion of geopolitical realities. This book is necessary to understand Russia and its influence in the world today.’ — Choice 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.

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? It’s a very polemical portrait of Putin, a man whom she detests. I think she nails a lot about him. She really focuses in on Putin the man and inverts this common picture of a glamorous, decisive, tough guy to show that the reality is sordid, scary and in a way rather pathetic.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. This book is, first of all, a great account of trade unionism in the car industry, but it goes much deeper into why the labour movement has suffered under the dead weight of communism, and the inertia and fear it produced in a whole generation of Russian workers, even though it was supposed to be a workers’ paradise. The author was deported from the Soviet Union for trying to interview workers who participated in the workers’ uprising in Novocherkassk in 1963. He is the foremost expert on the Russian workers’ movement.



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