Interesting material and ideas but poorly written and disorganised. It took a lof of effort to wade through
despite being interesting material. ( )

Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy provide an in-depth analysis of who Putin actually is and what motivates him. This is particularly challenging since so little is actually known about him and because he has deliberately cultivated a number of different images. Although the book came out, in updated form, in 2014, it is an excellent path to understanding what led Putin to go to war with Ukraine in 2022. Much of what he is saying today is just an echo of what he has been saying for years. This book is strongly recommended to anyone trying to understand the current Ukraine war. ( )

A study of Putin’s various personae as he maintains power, less focused on biographical facts than on how Putin governs and the intellectual background of the kinds of things he says and does. Putin allows elections; they’re not free and fair but they are supposed to maintain the pretense of consent, though the authors suggest this won’t work forever. All the things done to destabilize Western democracies were first tested and refined in Russia, particularly heavy media manipulation and pollution of the information environment so that people wouldn’t trust anything and would become indifferent to politics. They argue that Putin is fundamentally a statist—someone who believes in the state as an entity to which the people owe loyalty, but which does not owe them protection. Instead, the state protects Russia as a whole, not Russians—and in particular, Putin wants a multiethnic Russian state, though he’s been willing to coopt ethnic nationalists to serve his interests.

Private companies, too, need to be enough under the control of the state that they can be used to serve state interests, and not allowed to plunder without restraint. Plunder with restraint is fine, and is in fact extremely useful because it means that Putin has evidence that can be used to bring down any oligarch who goes against him; Putin’s version of capitalism is about having the right connections in government, not about competing to provide the best/cheapest things to customers. Putin invested heavily in getting good information about private companies, which meant that they could be made to pay their taxes—an innovation in post-Soviet Russia—but also that they were vulnerable to government pressure. He got into power, the authors argue, in part because he presented himself to the then-battling oligarchs as someone who could be an honest broker among them, who would not dispossess them as long as they played ball.

The oil boom let Putin hand out enough goodies for this to work well, though the authors doubt whether it is sustainable in the long term, especially since younger Russians tend not to have as much of a survivalist orientation as Putin and others like him who were much closer to the horrors (and ultimate triumphs through suffering) of WWII. The structural problem with Putin’s rule of consolidated power held together by the risk of blackmail is that it just can’t work on a scale as large as the Russian state over time. The system is too large, and he can’t oversee everything but no one else has the authority to act definitively even if they appear to do so based on the formal law. Everyone distrusts almost everyone else; Putin only trusts people he’s known for a very long time who’ve proven their ability to get results. But that’s a recipe for stagnation. There’s no new generation learning the ropes as they come up, no institutionalized system for transferring power even at the mid-level. And the system is also based on putting everyone powerful at risk of losing everything if they misbehave—“everyone’s wealth is deliberately tainted. Rumors or stories in the press about corruption can be used to bring people to heel, to curb their political or personal ambitions, and to remind everyone else of how much they have to lose. Everyone in the system is depicted as dirty.” We shouldn’t be surprised, the authors note, that people in the inner circle try very hard to get their money and their families out of Russia, where it’s harder to hurt them. ( )