books on putin biography

New Times, New Thinking.

The 14 best books to help you understand Vladimir Putin’s Russia

This list offers the most incisive books on the past and present of Russia and its president.

By New Statesman

Putin’s Russia: The Definitive Account of Putin’s Rise to Power by Anna Politkovskaya

Harvill Press, 320pp, £10.99

The journalist Politkovskya told us exactly who Vladimir Putin was back in 2004, two years before she was assassinated in Moscow. It is both sobering and instructive to read her account of the horrors of the Second Chechen War between 1999 and 2009, carried out on Putin’s orders, given the subsequent invasion of Ukraine. A prophetic account of what was to come.

The Return of the Russian Leviathan by Sergei Medvedev

Polity, 140pp, £17.99

A professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Medvedev produces a brilliant collection of essays on the ideas, politics and history that are shaping contemporary Russian society under Putin, and how the Kremlin appeals to nostalgia and nationalism to stoke regime support.

Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia by Samuel A Greene and Graeme B Robertson

Yale, 296pp, £20.00

Drawing on extensive on-the-ground research, including focus groups and opinion surveys, Greene and Robertson examine the roots of Putin’s popularity and his support across different sections of Russian society. The current situation has revealed the importance of understanding who supports Putin and why.

Citizens and the State in Authoritarian Regimes: Comparing China and Russia , edited by Karrie Koesel, Valerie Bunce, Jessica Chen Weiss

Oxford University Press, 344pp, £23.49

Among this collection of articles, Aleksandar Matovski’s chapter on the logic of Putin’s popular appeal and his efforts to position himself as defending Russia against its external enemies and “making Russia great again”, is particularly pertinent. Other scholars examine the role of patriotic education and propaganda in authoritarian systems. This would be a good book to pair with Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies (1995) on why and how public opinion still matters under authoritarian rule.

The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War by Arkady Ostrovsky

Atlantic Books, 400pp, £9.99

This terrific, short history relays the experience of economic chaos and humiliating decline that accompanied the Soviet Union’s collapse for its citizens. It also describes how Putin and his inner circle took power and seized control of the media to shape the president’s popular image during his first decade in power.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia by Peter Pomerantsev

Faber & Faber, 304pp, £9.99

This remains one of the best (and most beautifully written) books on Putin and modern Russia in recent years. Pomerantsev’s work captures both the dizzying pace of change in Russia during the economic boom of Putin’s first two terms, and the endemic corruption and compromise that came with it. Though only seven years old, Pomerantsev’s Russia of excitement and possibility already feels like a different world from the repression and censorship that has since risen to the fore. It ably gives a sense of what has and is being lost.

Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s Russia by Joshua Yaffa

Granta Books, 368pp, £12.99

A fascinating character study of life in contemporary Russia under Putin, this work uncovers the trade-offs and compromises that individuals make under authoritarian rule. It is worth reading alone for the story of the zookeeper from Crimea during Russia’s annexation of the peninsula by Russia in 2014.

Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West by Catherine Belton

William Collins, 640pp, £8.49

An exhaustive account of Putin’s rise, from Dresden in the 1980s to the Kremlin. Belton explores his links with oligarchs, and the way those relationships have evolved over the years – to the point where Putin now uses oligarchs as messengers in return for allowing them to amass huge fortunes. Anyone who steps out of line pays the price. Belton is devastating on the extent of Kremlin-driven corruption and the salting away of illicit wealth overseas.

The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen

Granta Books, 528pp, £10.99

Gessen uses the life stories of four young Russians born in the 1980s to frame how Russia first opened up politically, then closed itself off again, with decreasing space for dissent. A vivid and deeply personal work of analysis.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

Bodley Head, 368pp, £10.99

A historian at Yale, Snyder dissects Putin’s thinking and the philosophers that inspired him. The book is especially good on the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and excoriates the West’s complacency and failure to understand the political and geopolitical forces at work.

Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy

Allen Lane, 432pp, £9.99

Plokhy analyses the ossification of policy and command structures in Soviet Ukraine that allowed the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster to happen. This is a story of how design flaws were compounded by human frailty.

All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin by Mikhail Zygar

PublicAffairs, 400pp, £14.99

Anyone interested in Kremlinology or in separating speculation from reality about the inner workings of the Kremlin and of Putin’s own circle should read this book.

The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past by Shaun Walker

Oxford University Press, 288pp, £14.99

Putin’s call for “denazification” and attempted erasure of Ukrainian history makes this an ideal time to revisit Walker’s work on how historical narratives in Russia and Ukraine are used – and abused – in national politics.

Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

Fitzcarraldo Editions, 704pp, £14.99

Alexievich’s brilliant oral history of the collapse of the Soviet Union reminds us that the best way to understand what is happening to a people is to ask them.

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[See also: Books of the year 2022 ]

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Putin: The explosive and extraordinary new biography of Russia’s leader Hardcover – 30 Jun. 2022

**A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022** 'Anyone wanting to learn more about Putin's personality, ideas, power...should read this outstanding biography' Ian Kershaw, author of Personality and Power This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is happening in Ukraine today. Vladimir Putin has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. Yet many Russians continue to support him. Despite western sanctions, the majority have been living better than at any time in the past. By fair means or foul, under Putin's leadership, Russia has once again become a force to be reckoned with. Philip Short's magisterial biography demolishes many of our preconceptions about Putin's Russia and explores in unprecedented depth the personality of its enigmatic and ruthless leader. What forces and experiences shaped him? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the Cold War? To explain is not to justify. Putin pursues his goals relentlessly by whatever means he thinks fit. But on closer examination, much of what we think we know about him turns out to rest on half-truths.

• Print length 864 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Bodley Head
• Publication date 30 Jun. 2022
• Dimensions 16.4 x 5.8 x 23.6 cm
• ISBN-10 1847923372
• ISBN-13 978-1847923370
• See all details

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Product description, about the author.

Philip Short has written authoritative biographies including Mao: A Life and Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare, following a long career as a foreign correspondent for the BBC in Moscow, Washington and other world capitals. He spent eight years researching and writing this book, working mainly from sources within Russia, but also in Britain, France, the United States and a dozen other countries.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bodley Head (30 Jun. 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 864 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1847923372
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1847923370
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.4 x 5.8 x 23.6 cm
• 156 in Cold War History
• 291 in Russian Historical Biographies

About the author

Philip short.

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Book details

Author: Philip Short

• Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year

1 Baskov Lane Vladimir Putin was born on Tuesday, October 7, 1952, at Maternity Hospital No. 6, known locally as the Snegiryov hospital, five minutes’ walk from his parents’ home on Baskov Lane, which, despite its name, was a straight, wide street of what had once been elegant nineteenth-century apartment buildings, now shabby and dilapidated, just north of Leningrad’s principal thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, leading to the Winter Palace.1 The hospital, founded in 1771 by Catherine the Great, was the oldest in Russia and the largest and reputedly the best in Leningrad.2 That was not saying a great deal. In Russian maternity clinics in those days, expectant mothers were crammed into filthy wards, infested with cockroaches, with blood and faeces on the floor and soiled bedlinen, where they were left to the mercy of nurses who, when they were not sadistic, were often callous. ‘It doesn’t hurt when you’re screwing your husband, does it, but now you’re having a baby, you’re wailing,’ one woman remembered a midwife telling her. Even at the Snegiryov, cleanliness was rudimentary and painkillers were unknown. Babies were separated from their mothers for 36 hours after birth. From the outset it was the survival of the fittest. One newborn in 50 died before leaving hospital.3 Husbands were kept away, and Putin’s father had to stand on the street outside with the other men, hoping to see his wife at one of the windows and to learn from her or another woman if the birth had gone well and whether he had a son or a daughter.4 Other traditions proved equally tenacious. In the cities, infants were no longer swaddled, as they were in the countryside; instead they were ‘wrapped tight’, so that they could not move, which amounted to the same thing. Otherwise, it was believed, their arms or legs would ‘turn out crooked’.5 Forty years later, a French medical team visiting the city was appalled to find that this ‘medieval practice’ continued and ‘no one questions that it is correct.’6 Young Volodya, as his parents called him, spent the first weeks of his life in a wicker basket, suspended from the ceiling, as had been the custom in the countryside.7 Both his father and mother had grown up near Tver, on the Volga River, 110 miles north-west of Moscow along the main highway to Leningrad. They lived in neighbouring hamlets which had once formed part of the domains of a Privy Councillor to Tsar Alexander the First, where Putin’s great-grandfather, Ivan Petrovich, had been a serf. Ivan’s son, Spiridon – Putin’s grandfather – had moved to St Petersburg, then Russia’s capital, in the 1890s, to train as a chef, eventually taking charge of the kitchens at the Astoria Hotel, the newest and most luxurious establishment in the city, built for the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. The family was comfortably off and lived in an apartment in nearby Gorokhovaya Street. It was there, two years earlier, that Putin’s father, Vladimir, had been born. Among Spiridon’s regular clients was Grigory Rasputin, the Siberian mystic whose hold over Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, helped bring about their downfall. According to family legend, when Spiridon cooked for him, the monk would tip him a ten-rouble gold coin.8 But after the Revolution, the hotel closed and the rooms were taken over by Communist Party officials. The banks closed, too, and Spiridon, a frugal man, lost his considerable savings. As the White Russian armies, backed by the European powers, sought to strangle the new revolutionary regime at birth, civil war broke out. The Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, unleashed a ferocious wave of terror against suspected counter-revolutionaries, conducted by the newly established Cheka, the ancestor of the KGB, which claimed at least a hundred thousand lives. Famine set in, killing five million more. In Leningrad two thirds of the population, recent immigrants from the countryside, fled back to the villages from which they had come. The city became a wasteland, with grass growing in the streets.9 Spiridon left, too, taking the family to his birthplace at Pominovo, a tiny settlement of crooked wooden houses straight out of a painting by Chagall, strung out along either side of a narrow dirt road, three hours on foot from Tver. It was there that his second son, Putin’s father, Vladimir, met his future wife, Maria Ivanovna Shelomova, from the hamlet on the other side of the river. They married in 1928, when both were seventeen, and four years later moved to Peterhof, then a small garrison town that had grown up around Peter the Great’s seafront palace on the Gulf of Finland, 20 miles west of Leningrad, where Maria’s elder brother, Pyotr, who had wed Vladimir’s younger sister, was living. At first the two couples shared a single room. But in 1934, after Vladimir had completed his military service as a submariner in the Baltic Fleet, he and Maria finally obtained a room of their own. Two children were born: Albert, who died of whooping cough in infancy, and Viktor, who succumbed to diphtheria when he was about two years old during the blockade of Leningrad in March 1942.10 Viktor’s death has given rise to many unanswered questions. As the Germans advanced on Peterhof at the end of August 1941, Maria and her baby son were alone: her husband was with the Red Army, no one knew where or even whether he was still alive. Another of her brothers, Ivan, a naval liaison officer attached to the Communist Party’s Regional Committee, brought her to Leningrad and found her a place to stay with relatives.11 But the city was already in the grip of famine and as a refugee from the suburbs, she had no ration book and no way of obtaining food for herself and her small son.12 At first Ivan shared his own rations with them, but after he was transferred away from the city, their situation became desperate.13 There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. Putin remembered his parents saying that the authorities took his brother away, against his mother’s wishes, and placed him in an orphanage on the grounds that he would have a better chance of surviving the winter there than if he stayed with her.14 Another version, which may have come from Putin’s mother herself, recounts that one day, when she was too weak to move, ‘two young women came to her door. She asked them, “Take my son. Save him.” And they took the boy away. A few days later she learnt that he had died.’15 Neither version is credible. The city’s orphanages did not accept children under three years old, and Viktor was not yet two. The 30,000 or so orphans rescued from the streets or from empty, freezing apartments in the winter of 1941–2, when the city was blockaded by the Germans and starvation was at its height, were all from families where the adults had died and there was no one left to take care of them. At least as many others were left to fend for themselves because there were not enough places.16 Moreover conditions in the shelters were often appalling. The staff stole the children’s food; the dormitories were unheated; in some establishments, one child in six died in the first weeks after admission.17 Even in Moscow, which was far better provided for than Leningrad, the orphanages had a dreadful reputation. One mother, who had been warned by a friend that she would be well advised to bring her daughter home, found when she went to fetch her that the children’s stomachs were swollen with hunger and they were all covered in lice.18 The story of the two mysterious young women is even less believable. At a time when the whole city – apart from the Party elite, which was well fed throughout the war – was maddened by hunger and everyone knew that there were cases of cannibalism, no parent, however desperate, would surrender their child to strangers. One may legitimately wonder whether, behind Viktor’s death, there lurked a family tragedy which no one would ever discuss. Putin himself did not learn until long afterwards that his brother had been buried in a mass grave in the Piskaryovskoe Cemetery, with some 470,000 others who had died during the blockade.19 Copyright © 2022 by Philip Short

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The first comprehensive, fully up-to-date biography of Vladimir Putin, woven into the tumultuous saga of Russia over the last sixty years Vladimir Putin is the world’s...

Book Details

The first comprehensive, fully up-to-date biography of Vladimir Putin, woven into the tumultuous saga of Russia over the last sixty years Vladimir Putin is the world’s most dangerous man. Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbors, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections, and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. His regime is autocratic and deeply corrupt. But that is only half the story. Unflinching, hard-hitting, and objective, Philip Short’s biography gives us the whole tale, up to the present day. To the fullest extent anyone has yet been able, Short cracks open the strongman’s thick carapace to reveal the man underneath those bare-chested horseback rides. In this deeply researched account, readers meet the Putin who slept in the same room as his parents until he was twenty-five years old, who backed out of his wedding right beforehand, and who learned English in order to be able to talk to George W. Bush. Vladimir Putin is wreaking havoc in Europe, threatening global peace and stability and exposing his fellow citizens to devastating economic countermeasures. Yet puzzlingly many Russians continue to support him. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the many facets of the man behind the mask that Putin wears on the world stage. Drawing on almost two hundred interviews conducted over eight years in Russia, the United States, and Europe and on source material in more than a dozen languages, Putin will be the last word for years to come.

Imprint Publisher

Henry Holt and Co.

9781627793667

In The News

Praise for Philip Short's Putin “A compelling, impressive and methodically researched account of Putin’s life so far. [It] extensively covers the dark moments of Putin’s career…. The Putin of Short’s book is not someone you would invite to dinner: he is crude and cold, arrogant and heartless.” — Peter Baker, The New York Times “Convincing. . . . The most comprehensive English-language biography to date of the Russian leader.” — The New Yorker “Anyone wanting to learn more about Putin’s personality, ideas, power and the threat he has come to pose to world peace should read this outstanding biography.” — Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler “A biography years in the making offers a thorough look at the Russian president’s life, career and concentration of power. Short…draws on hundreds of interviews for this portrait, charting Putin’s transformation into a ruthless autocrat.” — The New York Times Book Review “Magisterial…. Illuminating…. Short’s Putin is a man of violent emotions ruthlessly repressed; habitually late (a power play over those kept waiting); devoid of small talk; so inscrutable that when he proposed to his wife she initially thought he was dumping her.” — The Guardian “Philip Short’s elegantly written and pacy Putin is a doorstopper and the product of eight years of research. Its publication, a few months after the invasion, makes it the most up-to-date biography available of Vladimir Putin.” — Gideon Rachman, Financial Times “Compelling and nuanced.” — San Francisco Chronicle “An unflinching, comprehensive, up-to-date biography of autocratic Russian President Vladimir Putin as he wreaks havoc on the global stage, digging deep to reveal the man behind the mask.” — USA Today Praise for Biographies by Philip Short “[Short] is excellent at coining pithy summations of political motives that ring humanly true.” — The New York Times Book Review “Achieves the near impossible feat of translating madness into logic. This biography is a tour de force.” —David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W.E.B. Du Bois “Nowhere has the story . . . been told with greater authority.” — The Washington Post “Unerringly broadens the inquiry to the point where serious history begins, and serious judgments can be made.” — Financial Times “Masterfully prob[ing].” — Wall Street Journal “The best sort of biography—deeply informed, entirely readable, and at the level of sophistication and complexity needed for its particular subject.” —Richard Bernstein, coauthor of The Coming Conflict with China “Chillingly clear . . . Complete and unflinching.” — The Economist

What Is Driving Vladimir Putin?

Understanding Putin is crucial to deciphering his goals in attacking Ukraine. The Russian American journalist Masha Gessen recommends books on the Russian president and the forces that shaped him.

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By Alexandra Alter

In an interview more than two decades ago, Vladimir V. Putin described his younger self, with a hint of self-congratulation, as “a hooligan.” When the interviewer asked if he was exaggerating about his tendency to get into brawls as a schoolboy, Putin took offense.

“You are trying to insult me,” he said. “I was a real thug.”

Masha Gessen, a Russian American journalist and Moscow native, recounts this exchange in a 2012 biography, “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,” which was praised as “part psychological profile, part conspiracy study” in The New York Times Book Review. To Gessen, Putin’s unabashed description of himself as “a thug” was key to his self-image: someone who could not be bullied, who would lash out unpredictably if he felt slighted and who relished violence.

Understanding Putin and the forces that shaped him has become an urgent global concern, as leaders around the world try to determine his motivations in launching an unprovoked and disastrous invasion of Ukraine , how to best engage with him and how the conflict might evolve .

So far, the military assault appears to be a catastrophic misstep , one that has resulted in crippling economic sanctions and heavy military losses for Russia, as well as mass civilian casualties and destruction in the very Ukrainian cities Putin claims he wants to “liberate.”

To all this, Putin has said, repeatedly, in public comments that the war is going “according to plan.”

As the conflict escalates, the question of what is driving Putin has become an increasingly perplexing one, with no obvious answers, but with enormous consequences : The war will end, some experts say, when the Russian president allows it to end.

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Top 10 books on Vladimir Putin's Russia

I used fiction to depict the catastrophe that the president has inflicted on Russia, but these terrifying stories about him include much nonfiction

T he Russia of President Vladimir Putin is both wearyingly familiar and appallingly unique. A corrupt pseudo-democracy run for personal enrichment by its leader and his cronies? Hardly enough to raise an eyebrow in our sadly flawed world. But one that also happens to be a nuclear-armed leviathan, which gave personal and economic freedom a whirl, but has been yanked back into authoritarianism – not so common.

In my novel, The Senility of Vladimir P, I have tried to convey some sense of the catastrophe that Putin has inflicted on Russia . Set in an isolated dacha outside Moscow, where the now senile ex-president wiles away his days in imaginary conversations, while the staff busily milks him for every last kopeck, it is a tragicomedy from which not even one honest man can emerge uncorrupted.

There are numerous factual books exploring the impact of Putin’s rise and rule over Russia. In the list below I have included a sample of those that I have found most revealing – but others could just as well have made the cut. I have included a couple of contemporary novels to pass the lens of fiction over the society that has evolved under the Russian leader.

Inevitably, the selection is idiosyncratic. Another confession: my linguistic limitations mean that the list is restricted to books that have appeared in English.

1. First Person by Vladimir Putin Start with the man himself. This is an account of six interviews given by Putin to a trio of handpicked Russian journalists. The outstanding impression that emerges is of blankness – a moral vacuum at the core of Putin’s being. You understand that this isn’t incidental, but utterly integral to his personality, only when you realise that this book was commissioned and released to help Putin become known when he was first running for president. In other words, he wanted to present himself like this. The emptiness at his core is so profound that it can’t even see itself.

2. One Soldier’s War in Chechnya by Arkady Babchenko If a measure of a society is the way it treats its children, then it is also, at least in part, the way it treats its soldiers. Written by an ex-soldier who fought in both the first Chechen war and Putin’s second Chechen campaign, it sketches a world of unrelieved brutality within the ranks of the Russian army, a vicious microcosm in which the officers, or “jackals”, relentlessly assault the expendable soldiers, or “vouchers” under their command. Here is a spotlight into one corner of the alienated, demoralised society on which Putin set to work.

3. Babylon by Victor Pelevin Tatarsky, the hero of Pelevin’s novel, is a failed poet who finds himself earning unimaginable sums as a copywriter plagiarising western advertisements for Russian clients in post-Soviet Moscow – and sinking into a world of drugs, guns, gangsters, and more drugs. Reality becomes thinner and finally seems to tear away altogether. Although the hallucinogenic quality of some of the writing won’t be to everyone’s taste, Babylon captures the disorientation of a society cut free from its moorings in which old certainties have been replaced by naked opportunism and aggression.

4. The Man without a Face by Masha Gessen One of many books tracing the rise and crimes of Putin, Gessen’s appeals for the interweaving of her personal story with Putin’s progressive domination of Russian society. In one unforgettable scene, Gessen, a journalist, is called in for a meeting by Putin, who is unaware that her excoriating critique of him has already been published abroad. Her account of the brief flowering of hope after the disputed parliamentary elections of December 2011 – followed by the inevitable crackdown – is particularly poignant.

5. Mafia State by Luke Harding Another journalist writing about Putin’s Russia from a distinctively personal standpoint, Harding was a British correspondent [ for the Guardian ] posted to Moscow during Putin’s second term in office. He soon became the subject of a campaign of harassment and intimidation by the FSB – the successor organisation to the KGB – culminating in his deportation from the country. Harding’s experiences at the hands of the Russian security services give a glimpse of the world in which the opponents of the Putin regime struggle to survive.

6. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev Pomerantsev relocated from London to Moscow to work in television and ended up writing an account of the characters he met during his years in the Russian capital. We meet the provincial girls, or “cattle”, looking for their sugar daddy (or “Forbes”); the entrepreneur who found her business confiscated and herself in jail because she happened to be on the wrong side of an intra-Kremlin dispute; a gangster turned novelist; the super-rich on planes out of Putin’s Russia to London – and many others in between. A patchwork tapestry that leaves you shaking your head in disbelief.

7. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin Sorokin’s dystopian satire is set in the Russia of 2028, which is now ruled by a tsar. Andrei Komiaga, the hero of the novel, is an Oprichnik, one of the tsar’s security operatives whose main role is state-sponsored terrorism against uncooperative elements of society. This blood-spattered novel of brutality and decadence pushes political satire to its limits but is a sharp reflection on the corruption and authoritarianism of Putin’s Russia.

8. Fragile Empire by Ben Judah Journalist Ben Judah’s book is the fruit of extensive travels and interviews within Russia. Judah seeks to set the country that he finds on his journeys against the stated intentions of Putin at the time of his rise to power and the propaganda of the Putin regime in the years that have followed. The picture that emerges is of a society pervaded by corruption and instability, and divided between the urban elites of Moscow and St Petersburg and grim reality in the provinces.

9. Putin’s Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha Published in the US but not in Britain – for fear of the UK’s tyrant-friendly libel laws – American academic Karen Dawisha’s book provides a dispassionate, extensively researched account of Putin’s early criminality and the descent of the Russian government into an engine of organised crime. A must-read for anyone asking if the Putin regime is really as corrupt as people say and who wants to see the balance of evidence for themselves.

10. The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith Finally, a book that is not about Russia at all, but a classic work of political science that lays bare the reality of how political leaders acquire and retain power. The book goes a long way to explaining how a man like Putin came to power at a unique moment in Russian history – and why the only way he’ll be got rid of in the foreseeable future is if the Russian security establishment loses faith in his ability to feed their insatiable greed for graft.

• The Senility of Vladimir P by Michael Honig is published by Atlantic Books, priced £12.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £10.39, including free UK p&p .
• Vladimir Putin
• History books

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9 Books That Can Help You Understand Russia Right Now

A s an influx of news comes out about Russia ‘s potential influence on the U.S., many Americans may be curious to learn more about the country’s recent history. What has motivated Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and what defines its president, Vladimir Putin ?

In times of rapid breaking news and quickly shifting political positions, it can be helpful to take a step back and read something substantive for context. TIME asked experts from the Atlantic Council, the Wilson Center and other institutions to recommend books on Russia that would be accessible and illuminating for the general interest reader. Here are the volumes they suggested, covering everything from Kremlinology to the country’s cyber landscape.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014)

By Peter Pomerantsev

Both Alina Polyakova, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, recommend this cross-section of Russian society. “The book stands out because it manages to be entertaining and very accessible to a general reader while capturing a key moment of Putin’s Russia: the emergence and consolidation of the tools of state-sponsored propaganda,” says Polyakova.

All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (2016)

By Mikhail Zygar

McFaul and Anders Åslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, both recommend this book, with Åslund calling it an “excellent recent presentation of the people around Putin and how Russian policy is made,” though he notes “it downplays Putin’s importance too much.”

The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (2015)

By Steven Lee Myers

Åslund, McFaul, and Sestanovich all recommend this account of the president’s ascent from a childhood of poverty, through his work for the KGB, to his powerful role at the center of the Kremlin. Åslund calls it “the best political biography of Putin.”

Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (2013)

By Ben Judah

John Herbst, director of the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, recommends this different look at Putin’s regime, calling it “a good overall look at Russia” that is “easy to read and impressionistic.”

Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (2016)

By Charles Clover

Åslund recommends this historical exploration of “Eurasianism,” a theory of Russian nationalism based on geography and ethnicity. Clover traces its roots from the White Russian exiles of the 1920s through today, including interviews with close advisers to Putin.

Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (2012)

By Thane Gustafson

Åslund calls this volume “outstanding on Russian oil.” The book explores the massive market for Russian oil, as well as the country’s economic and political dependence on the industry.

The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries (2015)

By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan

Åslund calls this book “excellent on Russian cyber.” Through analysis of everything from hacking to digital surveillance, Soldatov and Borogan explain the potential for the Internet to either solidify or undermine totalitarianism in Russia.

Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire (2016)

By Agnia Grigas

Herbst suggests this book for its “insight into the Kremlin’s effort to regain control in the post-Soviet space.”

Peter the Great: His Life and World (1980)

By Robert K. Massie

“I think in many ways reading some really foundational but still accessible and entertaining works of history and literature will teach Americans much more about Russia that’s relevant to today, than if they simply read the latest trade or scholarly book on Russian foreign policy or Putin,” says Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Case in point: this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of “Russia’s most extraordinary autocrat, a man whose imprint is still felt on people, places and politics from the Far East to the heart of Europe, even three centuries after his death.”

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New biography 'Putin' takes a deep dive into the Russian leader

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• Emiko Tamagawa

Editor's note: This segment was rebroadcasted on Dec. 26, 2022. Find that audio here .

Vladimir Putin may be the most dangerous man in the world. But longtime foreign correspondent Philip Short is taking a closer look into the Russian President’s story.

Short’s new book “Putin” examines Putin’s life and how he became the leader he is today, one that associates describe as a shapeshifter or unreliable narrator. The book also dives into Putin’s complicated relationship with the West, how he functions as a leader in Russia, and how Russia has become more authoritarian over time.

Interview Highlights

On Putin’s story working as a KGB intelligence officer in the ‘80s, where a mob allegedly threatened to storm the KGB headquarters “It's theatrical, isn't it? Moscow is silent and it's a paraphrase of [​​Alexander] Pushkin. He is a person who is in many respects an actor. He assumes guises. If you actually look back at what happened that day, there wasn't a mob storming the KGB headquarters. Yes, there was a crowd who were pretty angry, but they weren't going to do anything. And he dramatized that in his mind. And he said Moscow was silent.

“Actually, the local Red Army base sent in troops to help him within thirty minutes. So this is typical. You have to be very, very careful in what you believe in. One of his friends, a German businessman in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, says he's a shapeshifter. He assumes guises, he assumes images which fit with the narrative that he wants to tell and with the person he's talking to.”

On how Putin spun the narrative when discussing the story years later “The narrative essentially is one which we've heard very often since that the collapse of the Soviet Union, the humiliation of the Soviet Union, the failure of the Soviet Union to defend its friends. This was a monumental tragedy. But again, you've got to watch it rather carefully, because he's also said anyone who doesn't want the Soviet Union back again, anyone who doesn't regret the collapse of the Soviet Union doesn't have a heart. Anyone who actually thinks that it should be brought back, who think they could bring it back, doesn't have a head.”

On if Putin was open to closer relations with the U.S., NATO and Western Europe “Putin did genuinely believe that Russia's future was with the West, that Russia's future was certainly as part of Europe, and that Russia should become part of what he called the ‘civilized world,’ which was the Western led-world. So when people say he's been kind of acting from the very beginning and he was always deeply hostile to the West. That is simply not true. There's been an incremental change which has spread out. It's been a kind of tragic inevitability in many ways of what has happened over the last twenty years from really genuinely pro-Western Putin to a very hostile Putin.”

On what Putin thought about George Bush’s 2005 inaugural address, which acknowledged Central and Eastern European citizens’ right to decide their future. “[Putin] was reading it as a commitment by the United States to promote democracy in the rest of the world, but not just democracy, but the American conception of democracy. And it was one of the elements which convinced Putin that America wanted to call the shots and that Russia would absolutely have to follow both countries.

“I think it's really important to say this. Both countries, the United States and Russia, made mistakes. Things could have worked out differently. But who won the Cold War? America won the Cold War. It's always the victor in a war who determines what the subsequent evolution of events is going to be. If you look at the various things that America did, it's not just NATO's expansion, that's possibly not even the most important. But walking away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty because it was was seen as constraining ability, America's ability to develop new weapons systems.

“The Iraq War, where not just Russia, but many of America's allies were in disagreement. The decision to set up a national missile shield in Europe against missiles supposedly coming from Iran and North Korea. There were a whole load of things which the Russians really didn't like and they felt, look, after 9/11, we gave you enormous help. We gave you transit rights through Russian airspace. We helped to make available bases in Central Asia and so on. And what did we get back? So rightly or wrongly, and this is a question of perception as much as anything else, a perception developed that America was trying to constrain Russia, to contain it, to bring it to its knees and make it follow American diktat. And that is what over the years and again, lots of Russian fought, that has led to the situation we're in today.”

On what’s happening in Russia as relations with the West deteriorate “I think it's a kind of vicious circle. As relations with the West deteriorate. Russia becomes more authoritarian. This is not something which just happened under Putin. If you look back at the Soviet Union, that was a trend then and indeed even earlier in imperial times. And what you've had, is as everything has turned sour with the West, Russia has moved and Putin's regime has moved from a kind of relatively open authoritarianism to a very closed dictatorship, becoming not yet completely totalitarian, but it's moving closer and closer to a totalitarian system.”

On if there’s a connection between outside relations and how Putin rules Russia “As relations with the outside deteriorate, the hard liners, the hawks in Russia say, ‘Look, we've always told you this, those westerners were completely untrustworthy.’ And their influence increases. And the liberals, those who want closer relations with the West, they are increasingly excluded from decision-making. So it kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Relations go down, hawkishness goes upward in Russia, the dictatorial part of the regime gets stronger and freedoms are restrained increasingly, and you get a much more dictatorial system. And that's exactly what we've been seeing happening over the last three or four years.”

On if Moscow’s relationship with the West will change in the future “I don't think it will. Not quickly in 20, 30 years time, perhaps. Indeed, probably because there is a generation that will be a generation that comes to power that was not alive in Soviet days. But it depends not just on Russia. It depends on us as well, whether we are capable of bringing about a security architecture in Europe, which the Russians feel is not threatening and where conflict is ruled out. It's both sides. It takes two to tango. We both have to change our attitudes, the Russians in particular. But us too.”

Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Gabe Bullard . Jeannette Muhammad adapted it for the web.

Book excerpt: 'Putin'

by Philip Short

Baskov Lane

Vladimir Putin was born on Tuesday, October 7, 1952, at Maternity Hospital No. 6, known locally as the Snegiryov hospital, five minutes’ walk from his parents’ home on Baskov Lane, which, despite its name, was a straight, wide street of what had once been elegant nineteenth-century apartment buildings, now shabby and dilapidated, just north of Leningrad’s principal thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, leading to the Winter Palace.

The hospital, founded in 1771 by Catherine the Great, was the oldest in Russia and the largest and reputedly the best in Leningrad.  That was not saying a great deal. In Russian maternity clinics in those days, expectant mothers were crammed into filthy wards, infested with cockroaches, with blood and faeces on the floor and soiled bedlinen, where they were left to the mercy of nurses who, when they were not sadistic, were often callous. ‘It doesn’t hurt when you’re screwing your husband, does it, but now you’re having a baby, you’re wailing,’ one woman remembered a midwife telling her. Even at the Snegiryov, cleanliness was rudimentary and painkillers were unknown. Babies were separated from their mothers for 36 hours after birth. From the outset it was the survival of the fittest. One newborn in 50 died before leaving hospital. Husbands were kept away, and Putin’s father had to stand on the street outside with the other men, hoping to see his wife at one of the windows and to learn from her or another woman if the birth had gone well and whether he had a son or a daughter.

Other traditions proved equally tenacious. In the cities, infants were no longer swaddled, as they were in the countryside; instead they were ‘wrapped tight’, so that they could not move, which amounted to the same thing. Otherwise, it was believed, their arms or legs would ‘turn out crooked’. Forty years later, a French medical team visiting the city was appalled to find that this ‘medieval practice’ continued and ‘no one questions that it is correct.’

Young Volodya, as his parents called him, spent the first weeks of his life in a wicker basket, suspended from the ceiling, as had been the custom in the countryside. Both his father and mother had grown up near Tver, on the Volga River, 110 miles north-west of Moscow along the main highway to Leningrad. They lived in neighbouring hamlets which had once formed part of the domains of a Privy Councillor to Tsar Alexander the First, where Putin’s great-grandfather, Ivan Petrovich, had been a serf. Ivan’s son, Spiridon – Putin’s grandfather – had moved to St Petersburg, then Russia’s capital, in the 1890s, to train as a chef, eventually taking charge of the kitchens at the Astoria Hotel, the newest and most luxurious establishment in the city, built for the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. The family was comfortably off and lived in an apartment in nearby Gorokhovaya Street. It was there, two years earlier, that Putin’s father, Vladimir, had been born. Among Spiridon’s regular clients was Grigory Rasputin, the Siberian mystic whose hold over Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, helped bring about their downfall. According to family legend, when Spiridon cooked for him, the monk would tip him a ten-rouble gold coin. But after the Revolution, the hotel closed and the rooms were taken over by Communist Party officials. The banks closed, too, and Spiridon, a frugal man, lost his considerable savings. As the White Russian armies, backed by the European powers, sought to strangle the new revolutionary regime at birth, civil war broke out. The Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, unleashed a ferocious wave of terror against suspected counter-revolutionaries, conducted by the newly established Cheka, the ancestor of the KGB, which claimed at least a hundred thousand lives. Famine set in, killing five million more. In Leningrad two thirds of the population, recent immigrants from the countryside, fled back to the villages from which they had come. The city became a wasteland, with grass growing in the streets.

Spiridon left, too, taking the family to his birthplace at Pominovo, a tiny settlement of crooked wooden houses straight out of a painting by Chagall, strung out along either side of a narrow dirt road, three hours on foot from Tver. It was there that his second son, Putin’s father, Vladimir, met his future wife, Maria Ivanovna Shelomova, from the hamlet on the other side of the river. They married in 1928, when both were seventeen, and four years later moved to Peterhof, then a small garrison town that had grown up around Peter the Great’s seafront palace on the Gulf of Finland, 20 miles west of Leningrad, where Maria’s elder brother, Pyotr, who had wed Vladimir’s younger sister, was living. At first the two couples shared a single room. But in 1934, after Vladimir had completed his military service as a submariner in the Baltic Fleet, he and Maria finally obtained a room of their own. Two children were born: Albert, who died of whooping cough in infancy, and Viktor, who succumbed to diphtheria when he was about two years old during the blockade of Leningrad in March 1942.

Viktor’s death has given rise to many unanswered questions.

As the Germans advanced on Peterhof at the end of August 1941, Maria and her baby son were alone: her husband was with the Red Army, no one knew where or even whether he was still alive. Another of her brothers, Ivan, a naval liaison officer attached to the Communist Party’s Regional Committee, brought her to Leningrad and found her a place to stay with relatives. But the city was already in the grip of famine and as a refugee from the suburbs, she had no ration book and no way of obtaining food for herself and her small son. At first Ivan shared his own rations with them, but after he was transferred away from the city, their situation became desperate.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. Putin remembered his parents saying that the authorities took his brother away, against his mother’s wishes, and placed him in an orphanage on the grounds that he would have a better chance of surviving the winter there than if he stayed with her. Another version, which may have come from Putin’s mother herself, recounts that one day, when she was too weak to move, ‘two young women came to her door. She asked them, “Take my son. Save him.” And they took the boy away. A few days later she learnt that he had died.’

Neither version is credible.

The city’s orphanages did not accept children under three years old, and Viktor was not yet two. The 30,000 or so orphans rescued from the streets or from empty, freezing apartments in the winter of 1941–2, when the city was blockaded by the Germans and starvation was at its height, were all from families where the adults had died and there was no one left to take care of them. At least as many others were left to fend for themselves because there were not enough places. Moreover conditions in the shelters were often appalling. The staff stole the children’s food; the dormitories were unheated; in some establishments, one child in six died in the first weeks after admission. Even in Moscow, which was far better provided for than Leningrad, the orphanages had a dreadful reputation. One mother, who had been warned by a friend that she would be well advised to bring her daughter home, found when she went to fetch her that the children’s stomachs were swollen with hunger and they were all covered in lice.

The story of the two mysterious young women is even less believable. At a time when the whole city – apart from the Party elite, which was well fed throughout the war – was maddened by hunger and everyone knew that there were cases of cannibalism, no parent, however desperate, would surrender their child to strangers.

One may legitimately wonder whether, behind Viktor’s death, there lurked a family tragedy which no one would ever discuss. Putin himself did not learn until long afterwards that his brother had been buried in a mass grave in the Piskaryovskoe Cemetery, with some 470,000 others who had died during the blockade.

Excerpted from 'Putin' by Philip Short, published by Henry Holt and Company July 26 2022. Copyright © 2022 by Philip Short. All rights reserved.

This segment aired on July 26, 2022.

Scott Tong Co-Host, Here & Now Scott Tong joined Here & Now as a co-host in July 2021 after spending 16 years at Marketplace as Shanghai bureau chief and senior correspondent.

Emiko Tamagawa Senior Producer, Here & Now Emiko Tamagawa produces arts and culture segments for Here & Now.

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Make Your Own List

World » Asia » Russia

The best books on putin and russian history, recommended by edward lucas.

The New Cold War by Edward Lucas

Journalist and author Edward Lucas gives an excoriating critique of Putinism and explains how Russia's amoral present is rooted in a failure to come to terms with its past.

It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway by David Satter

Internal Colonization by Alexander Etkind

The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen

Molotov’s Magic Lantern by Rachel Polonsky

Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus by Oliver Bullough

1 It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway by David Satter

2 internal colonization by alexander etkind, 3 the man without a face by masha gessen, 4 molotov’s magic lantern by rachel polonsky, 5 let our fame be great: journeys among the defiant people of the caucasus by oliver bullough.

W herever 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?

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.

You’ve written about the threat that the current Russian regime presents to Western interests, and argue that the West has been complacent in dealing with Russian espionage.

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.

Why do they still play these spying games?

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 .

“The Communist Party has gone but the KGB is still there”

One of the big priorities is getting their money into the West. They need to understand how our decision-making works – who makes the rules on money-laundering, who makes the rules on stock exchange listings and who makes the rules on energy regulation. They want to know whether they can change the rules, evade them or subvert them. So we do have secrets and for them espionage is one of the best ways of trying to secure their objectives, and my book is meant to be a bit of a wake-up call and say this is what’s going on. There is also a historical pattern to it. In the past we have been comprehensively suckered by the Soviet KGB, which ran rings around us in many respects. I uncover some glaring historical scandals of operations by MI6 and the CIA in the Soviet Union which went completely wrong, and provide an important contrast to the rather more successful operations that Russia is running against us now.

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?

There’s a danger of being patronising and deterministic. It’s like saying African countries can’t be democratic or Asian values are antithetical to democracy . Actually, what we have seen in Europe in the last 25 years is that countries that conventional wisdom thought were doomed to poverty and chaos have become very successful ones and countries that we thought were doing very well have fallen into great difficulties. So I’m very hesitant to say that Russia is beset by eternal woes that mean it can never be democratic, prosperous or law abiding.

I do think the shock of the Soviet collapse was very deep, and many people underestimated how difficult things were going to be after that. The country was ruined in so many ways – from brains to bridges – and a huge work of reconstruction is still needed to get over the terrible damage done by communism. I think it was fanciful to think it was ever going to be very easy, but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t deplore things that have gone wrong. I think the 12-year Putin experiment in retrospect looks like a very serious wrong turn for Russia, rather than being a gateway to a bright and better future as it was portrayed at the time.

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.

I think that’s true. The main business of the regime is stealing natural resource rents. 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. There are also what people call bureaucratic rents, which is a fancy word for bribes. I think there are two pyramids in Russia – one of natural resource rents and one of bureaucratic rents or bribes. The regime sits at the top and sucks money up from both of those and then squanders some of it on high living in Moscow but pumps a lot of it into the West, where it’s laundered in places like Vienna and even London and New York .

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?

I think history and the legacy of the past is something of a thread. The Communist Party has gone but the KGB is still there, and the difficulty in confronting the crimes of KGB – and the regimes whose instrument it was – is a very big deal. I spent a lot of time in West Germany in the 1980s and was very aware of the very painful and sometimes rather intrusive idea of Vergangenheitsbewältigung , which is the coming to terms with the past. It’s always been striking that once you go east of the Iron Curtain, people are often ignorant about the misdeeds of their country’s history or relativise them in a way that is really shocking by the standards of Western Europe.

Well that segues nicely to your first book choice which talks about this question of Russia coming to terms with its past. Please tell us more about It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway .

I think David Satter has really captured the role of the past in the present in Russia. He’s a very experienced correspondent from the Soviet era who has maintained his interest in post-Soviet Russia. He’s a really energetic, gumption reporter – he just goes to places that foreign correspondents don’t often go to in the provinces and follows up stories he first reported in the 1970s. Also, he’s unashamedly interested in morality. He feels that the Soviet Union hollowed out both public and private morality and left people without a moral compass when it collapsed. He highlights some of the extraordinary instances of casual, amoral treatment of people by the system and by other people in the book. It’s quite a pessimistic book. He feels Russia has been poisoned by the Soviet past and until that poison is out of the system it is going to be sickened by it.

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His reportage is based on real life things. He has a gripping, haunting story of this guy who’s got drunk and ended up in a rubbish bin. The bin is then emptied into a garbage truck. The man wakes up and has his mobile phone on him. He phones from the back of the garbage truck and gets through to the police and tells them that he’s about to be crushed to death by the crusher. He tells them the part of Moscow he thinks he’s in and asks them to do something. And the police react with such casual boredom to this – the whole conversation is recorded – and you can hear the man becoming more and more desperate. You just think, when you have such a vivid human tragedy here, what kind of person would be a police dispatcher answering these emergency calls who wouldn’t sympathise with this person’s plight?

The title of his book is the quintessence of the Putinist attitude to the past. On the one hand, it’s a long time ago, so it’s irrelevant. On the other, if you say it is relevant, it wasn’t like that anyway – Stalin wasn’t such a bad man and his crimes really weren’t committed. It’s a classic Russian contradiction and an excellent title. Another thing he’s touching on is the role of the secret police in Russian thinking. The current regime is a corrupt secret police state and the role of the FSB [Federal Security Service] as an enforcement agent for the Kremlin is absolutely vital and Satter touches on that too and illuminates it.

Does he give any cause for optimism?

I think what he feels is that you’ve got to have a change at the top and you’ve got to have a government that tells the truth to its citizens about the past and deals with it and until that happens you’re always going to be navigating with a wonky compass. He doesn’t really write so much about the current political situation, which I think gives an opening at the moment. Putin’s looking quite weak and it’s unclear that he will last the full six years. It’s at least possible that out of that weakness will come a change in the regime or even a change of the regime. But it could also go wrong. It could be that the regime chucks Putin overboard and survives in some other form. It’s a stealing machine based on tens of billions of dollars, which the people in charge aren’t going to give up lightly.

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?

OK, let’s move on to Etkind now, who is a Cambridge academic. Can you tell us more about the thesis of this book?

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.

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 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.

One quite interesting thing she notes is that he has a kind of kleptomaniac streak. She points out the occasions where he has embarrassingly pocketed trinkets. Once there was a glass model of a Kalashnikov filled with vodka and he just swiped it. He also took a ring from an American sports tycoon who had to claim he had given it to Putin as a gift. She concedes that you can’t do an armchair diagnosis, but she thinks he is afflicted by a rare form of kleptomania called pleonexia, where you get quasi-sexual satisfaction from expropriation.

“A huge work of reconstruction is still needed to get over the terrible damage done by Communism.”

The book tells the story of this small, grey man from the back rooms of the KGB – he was not even a distinguished frontline spy but a pretty unimpressive backroom boy – and how he worms his way into the inner councils of the St Petersburg city administration, then enriches himself hugely before moving to Moscow. Then there is an account of him rescuing the Yeltsin family from possible impeachment and disaster and then taking over the whole country. It’s a compelling biographical story. But what she also does is place it in a very impressive political and bureaucratic context. She says the hybrid of the old KGB and the new mafia in St Petersburg – which sort of mated and mutated under Putin in the years he was there – transposed to Moscow and then took over the whole country. I found that a convincing and compelling account of what’s happened. You have on the one hand these “espiocrats”, these people whose mindset is absolutely conditioned by the world of the secret police and the secret service abroad. On the other hand is this mafia and its basic motivation, which is money and the ruthless desire to steal as much as possible from anybody who gets in their way or anybody they can reach.

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.

A free election is not just about counting the votes correctly; it’s about what happens in the campaign. And I think that the way the campaign was constructed meant there wasn’t any doubt about Putin winning it because you didn’t have any serious challenger on the ballot – you had two professional losers, a clown and a stooge. So obviously Putin looked good against them. The other thing is that he had the relentless support of all the mainstream media and particularly television where most Russians get their news. The rigging you do on election day is the least important bit of election rigging.

Tell us about your next choice, Rachel Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern .

Both Etkin’s and Polonsky’s books have an admirable way of taking cultural allusions from Russian literary history and using them to explain the history of the time but also the present. Rachel Polonsky’s book is based on her chance discovery of [Vyacheslav] Molotov’s library. Polonsky finds out that her upstairs neighbour’s flat in Moscow still had Molotov’s library in it. Molotov was of course Stalin’s great henchman. He signed 373 death warrants for senior officials, including his close colleagues during the Great Terror, so he was a very bad man. He was also the principal Soviet signatory to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. But he was a bibliophile – he loved books. He had made lots of notes in the books and occasionally even used his moustache hairs as page markers.

That’s one axis of this book. The other is the author’s own travels. She goes around all sorts of places in Russia and describes what she finds and links that back into Russian literature, chiefly Molotov’s books but others as well. It’s a very captivating read. You don’t feel you are being bombarded by learning when you’re reading it. But at the end you feel a great deal better informed.

Would you describe it as a travelogue?

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.

Your final book, Let Our Fame Be Great , is by former Reuters Moscow bureau chief Oliver Bullough and looks at the history of the Caucasus.

I think the Caucasus is Russia’s Achilles heel, really. It was the great triumph of the Tsarist empire getting the Caucasus. It was a great military feat trouncing these supposedly barbarian, wild mountain people. So it was celebrated in Russian literature and history as a great conquest. Then in the 1930s and 1940s it was the site of the extraordinary great deportation of the Chechen and Ingush people – tens of thousands of people driven from homes in the middle of the night, put on cattle trucks and dumped on the Steppe in central Asia with appalling casualty rates. And then when the Soviet Union broke up, Chechnya tried to regain independence and conflict ensued.

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Actually, what we are seeing is the point at which the Russian empire busts. It’s tried to digest the Caucasus but it hasn’t. What Oliver Bullough does absolutely brilliantly is look at the forgotten history of the Caucasus. What I particularly like about it – although he writes very well about all the bits of the Caucasus – is his focus on the Circassians and one of the great untold stories of the 19th century. This was a large country which had the misfortune to be on the southern fringe of an expanding Russia. There was what nowadays we would call a genocide, and one that rivals the treatment of the North American Indians or the Australian Aborigines or any of the other victims of European imperialism. But it has just vanished from our collective memory. I don’t think one person in a thousand knows about tens of thousands of Circassians who were massacred on the beaches of the Black Sea, in fact very close to Sochi where Russia will host the 2014 Winter Olympics.

What Bullough does brilliantly is to bring to our attention the fragments of documents we have from these pathetic remnants of cemeteries in Turkey – where the ships laden with dead bodies arrived. He also goes to places like Syria and Jordan where the Circassian diaspora has now become very influential and well-established and interviews them, and you get this feeling for this whole world you just don’t know about. These people with their language, their history, their culture and their colossal tragedy behind them, trying with satellite television, Twitter and the Internet and all these modern means, to get themselves back together again and get their story told.

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.

This interview was published in 2012

August 18, 2012

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Edward Lucas

Edward Lucas  is a British journalist. He is a senior editor at The Economist, where he was Moscow bureau chief from 1998 to 2002, and later central and east European correspondent. Lucas is author of The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West , and the ebook The Snowden Operation

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Vladimir Putin's 10 favorite books & authors

Vladimir Putin during a meeting with the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2016

Putin's personal library contains a wide variety of books: from the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov to Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of Earth by Lev Gumilyov and the Chinese Book of Changes . The president is a great admirer of Russian poets, from Alexander Pushkin to Sergei Yesenin. In addition, as someone who knows German, Putin also has a high regard for the poetry of Heinrich Heine and Wolfgang Goethe. The president also claims he hasn't read a single book about himself because he "knows everything" anyway.

Here are the books which the president has talked about most often and most memorably.

1. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

During his "Direct Line with Vladimir Putin" annual phone-in news conference in June 2021, the president said the epic novel about the 1812 war against Napoleonic France was among the works of literature that has influenced him the most.

Read more: 25 books Leo Tolstoy would recommend reading

2. The Russian fairy tale Kolobok

This is a story about a piece of dough that comes to life. It trusted everyone it met and in the end was eaten by a cunning fox. This is yet another work of literature whose main idea left an impression on the president. Putin strongly advises anyone who holds a high office to reread the story. "As soon as you, esteemed colleagues, decide to take flattering speeches at face value and succumb to the appropriate conditioning under the influence of what you are told, you run the risk of being eaten," he said in the 2021 "Direct Line". 

3. Mikhail Lermontov

In 2016, at a meeting with Teacher of the Year award laureates, Putin confessed that he often had to read things he didn't like. But, he always keeps a volume of Mikhail Lermontov's poetry on his desk in order "to have something to think about, to take my mind off things and, generally speaking, to find myself in a different world - a worthwhile, beautiful and interesting one".

During one TV phone-in, Putin even analyzed Lermontov's poem Farewell, Unwashed Russia , reciting several lines from it. According to the president, Lermontov, an officer on active army service, was an extremely brave man who was "prepared to give his life for the interests of his country and Motherland".

Vladimir Putin and Anna Gromova, Chairwoman of the Supervisory Board at the Yelisaveta and Sergiy Enlightenment Society, pictured at the Moscow Kremlin, 2017

4. Samuil Marshak, The Twelve Months

At a news conference in December 2020 Putin spoke about the books he reads to his grandchildren. He mentioned many Russian and Soviet classics, saying that The Twelve Months by Samuil Marshak was one of his favourites. It is a rather instructive tale about a capricious young queen who offers a reward to anyone who brings her a basket of snowdrops on New Year's Eve.

5. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Putin greatly enjoyed reading the story about the enigmatic boy, and in one interview he even confessed that he had learned it by heart. In his public speeches the president has mentioned The Little Prince on more than one occasion. He has also attended many theater performances based on the novella. In his opinion, the tale teaches us that "we are responsible for those who need our help".

Talking about environmental issues at the Valdai Discussion Club in 2020, Putin urged people to follow the example of the Little Prince. "It's a question of discipline. When you've finished washing and dressing each morning you must tend your planet. <...> It's very tedious work, but very easy," the president said, quoting a passage from the book.

6. Alexandre Dumas

The author of The Three Musketeers is another of Putin's favorite writers. In an interview with the French weekly Paris Match in 2000, he admitted to once being completely wrapped up in Dumas. "When I had finished reading all his novels I felt a kind of void, I felt drained. I was at a loss to know what to take up next because nothing seemed interesting to me after reading those books," Putin said.

The interviewer mentioned that Dumas had visited Russia several times and that he had said the following about the country: "There is a president or a tsar sitting in the Kremlin. What does he see from his window? Nothing." And Putin retorted that Dumas was absolutely right. He added: "The biggest scourge - personally and professionally - of holding high government office is the high degree of isolation."

Read more: Top 10 WESTERN authors most beloved by Russians

7. Ernest Hemingway

In 2011, Putin gave a long interview to the American magazine Outdoor Life about hunting and fishing, in which he said that in his youth he had enjoyed reading the novels of Jack London, Jules Verne and Ernest Hemingway. "The characters depicted in their books, who are brave and resourceful people embarking on exciting adventures, definitely shaped my inner self and nourished my love for the outdoors."

Putin also named A Farewell to Arms , For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea among his favorite Hemingway novels.

Vladimir Putin pictured during a meeting with Natalya Solzhenitsyna, president of Alexander Solzhenitsyn foundation, member of the board of trustees of Read Russia prize, 2012

8. Ivan Turgenev

In his interview with Outdoor Life Putin recommended that everyone should read Ivan Turgenev, "one of the best Russian classic writers". In particular, he recommended A Sportsman’s Sketches, the favorite book of all Russian hunting fans, which "reflects in general the philosophy of hunting in Russia, where the mere process, the fact that you are close to nature and communicate with people, matters - not the outcome". 

Read more: 5 reasons Turgenev is just as cool as Tolstoy

9. Omar Khayyam

At a news conference in 2007, Vladimir Putin spoke about how he coped with bad moods. At the time, his dog Koni and the poetry of Omar Khayyam helped him to endure. The president said that his wife had given him a book by the Persian poet as a present and that "there are many interesting things there that can help in such cases".

10. Sergei Yesenin

Vladimir Putin says he respects this Russian "peasant poet" for his genuine love of his motherland. Talking to journalists in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Putin recited Yesenin's poem Hail, my native Russian land : "If the heavenly hosts do say ["cry out" in the original - Russia Beyond ]: / "Give up Russia and live in paradise!" / I will reply: "I don't want paradise / Give me my homeland instead."

If using any of Russia Beyond's content, partly or in full, always provide an active hyperlink to the original material.

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Putin: The explosive and extraordinary new biography of Russia's leader Paperback – 5 July 2022

• Print length 848 pages
• Language English
• Publisher JONATHAN CAPE & BH - TRADE
• Publication date 5 July 2022
• Dimensions 15.3 x 4.8 x 23.4 cm
• ISBN-10 1847923380
• ISBN-13 978-1847923387
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