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

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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? 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.

You see, I don’t even have relatives to mourn or worry about in Ukraine anymore because all my family was killed by the last genocidal dictator. Instead, I worry about every Ukrainian. Sometimes, just walking down the street, I begin to weep. I cannot get my head around the fact that this is all happening again. 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? Her lover was so unrecognisable that Alyona could not find him in the morgue until the supervisor pointed out his name tag to her. This was in 2003. The poisonings and the shootings had only just begun. Investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya? Poisoned, later shot. Human rights activist Natasha Estemirova? Shot. Politician Boris Nemtsov? Shot. Opposition leader Alexey Navalny? Poisoned, now in jail.

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Here is the paradox: Putin is no philosopher-king, yet he overtly and repeatedly evokes a series of Russian thinkers and writers and expects his people to know them. In this thought-provoking book, Michel Eltchaninoff explores Putin’s philosophical pantheon and the ways he appropriates and sometimes simply misunderstands them, in pursuit of his political and ideological programme for Russia.’ — Mark Galeotti, author of The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia Our programs and centers deliver in-depth, highly relevant issue briefs and reports that break new ground, shift opinions, and set agendas on public policy, with a focus on advancing debates by integrating foundational research and analysis with concrete policy solutions. Michel Eltchaninoff is Editor-in-Chief of Philosophie magazine and a former lecturer in philosophy at the University of Burgundy and Pantheon-Sorbonne University. His Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin won the Prix de La Revue des Deux Mondes in its original French edition.

The raging question in the world today is who is the real Vladimir Putin and what are his intentions. Karen Dawisha’s brilliant Putin’s Kleptocracy provides an answer, describing how Putin got to power, the cabal he brought with him, the billions they have looted, and his plan to restore the Greater Russia. Film-maker Angus Macqueen has helped create a platform of award-winning documentaries, Russia On Film

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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.

A] slender but sizzling book . . . essential reading for anyone who wants to know where the regime in the Kremlin is heading – and what it means for the rest of the world.’ — The Times The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin (Hardcover) Where do Vladimir Putin's ideas come from? How does he look at the outside world? What does he want, and how far is he willing to go?From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West OK, let’s move on to Etkind now, who is a Cambridge academic. Can you tell us more about the thesis of this book? Before we get to the books you’re recommending, we’re talking about Putin’s Russia – a subject on which you’ve also written your own book. There are three short answers. For the elite – both money people and power people (the private capitalists have by no means gone away) – the rising price of oil which continued right up to 2008 has been an enormous asset, and provided resources that could have been used to modernise the economy and take the next economic step. There were a lot of conversations about that but not a lot of progress. Then there was the economic crisis of 2008, which was not of Russia’s making, but the opportunity was lost.