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Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin
This riveting graphic novel biography chronicles Vladimir Putin's rise from a mid-level KGB officer to the autocratic leader of Russia and reveals the truth behind the strongman persona he has spent his career cultivating.
In the West’s collective imagination, Vladimir Putin is a devious cartoon villain, constantly plotting and scheming to destroy his enemies around the globe. But how did an undistinguished mid-level KGB officer become one of the most powerful leaders in Russian history? And how much of Putin’s tough-guy persona is a calculated performance?
In Accidental Czar, Andrew S. Weiss, a former White House Russia expert, and Brian “Box” Brown show how Putin has successfully cast himself as a cunning, larger-than-life political mastermind—and how the rest of the world has played into the Kremlin’s hands by treating him as one. They shatter all of these myths and expose the man behind the façade.
In the West’s collective imagination, Vladimir Putin is a devious cartoon villain, constantly plotting and scheming to destroy his enemies around the globe. But how did an undistinguished mid-level KGB officer become one of the most powerful leaders in Russian history? And how much of Putin’s tough-guy persona is a calculated performance?
In Accidental Czar, Andrew S. Weiss, a former White House Russia expert, and Brian “Box” Brown show how Putin has successfully cast himself as a cunning, larger-than-life political mastermind—and how the rest of the world has played into the Kremlin’s hands by treating him as one. They shatter all of these myths and expose the man behind the façade.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published November 8, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 202 reviews
January 15, 2023
This is a swift account of Putin's rise to power and his subsequent efforts to destabilize the world, thus increasing his/Russia's influence. It isn't an artful survey, but rather a factual one with periodic tangents about the history of Russia or the popular uprisings of the last 25 years (Otpor!, Orange Revolution, Arab Spring) -- all of which are the dark matter within Putin's brain and his ongoing programmatic chaos.
This was a Christmas gift and likely one of the few graphic novels I'll read this year. I read such at a pub over a pint of porter and then at home listening to chamber music. It lacks any great revelation but does offer a chronology which places Putin in context.
This was a Christmas gift and likely one of the few graphic novels I'll read this year. I read such at a pub over a pint of porter and then at home listening to chamber music. It lacks any great revelation but does offer a chronology which places Putin in context.
July 18, 2022
An illustrated polemic, “Accidental Czar” takes pictorial potshots at the egregious President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. While the heavy lifting on Putin’s adventures and misadventures (mostly the latter) is done by Andrew S. Weiss, former director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council staff, and currently the James Family Chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the allegations against Putin are accompanied by exquisitely drawn pictures by noted cartoonist, Brian “Box” Brown.
If the book’s purpose is to serve as a primer in blowing the lid on the shenanigans of a purported megalomaniac, it succeeds beyond the wildest imaginations of its authors even! The quintessential motive of Weiss and Brown is to dispel the widely accepted ‘strong-man myth’ attached to Putin – and in whose reflected glory, he unashamedly basks – and to portray him as a fatally flawed character who is a bundle of contradictions and agglomeration of insecurities. Even if the authors do not identify an Achilles Heel, they sure lash out in the tenderest of spots exposed by an otherwise iron clad armour.
Tracing Putin’s early career the authors illustrate how Putin turned out to be an absolute failure in his quest to rise to the highest echelon of the Russian Secret Service, the KGB. Inspired from a young age by the staple diet of spy movies such as The Sword and The Shield and by the highly embellished and exaggerated exploits of two famous Russian secret service agents, Pavel Belov and Stierlitz, Putin had his eyes set on a glamorous James Bond like career in the world of espionage. To his credit after graduating with a Law Degree from the University of Leningrad, Putin enrolled himself with the Russian secret service. However hotheadedness and an intemperate brawl in a subway poured hot water on his dreams as Putin was forced to vacate an elite training programme offered by the famous Red Banner Institute deep in the jungles of Moscow.
A dull and drab sojourn at the insipid KGB office in Dresden, East Germany was the only available option for Putin. Following Glasnost and Perestroika, President Gorbachev’s last ditch efforts to bring a semblance of order to a crumbling empire, and an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin’s desperate gamble to protect himself and his family from a corrupt house of cards, Putin, who was looked at as a non-descript yet pliant individual, was made President of Russia, in return for guaranteeing Yeltsin and his cronies a clean chit.
With Putin began the reign of the oligarchs. People displaying fidelity towards him were richly rewarded and those opposing him either deprived of their fortunes – if lucky – or divested of their lives – if unlucky. Russia went back to the early 1800s where while stealing was not viewed as a crime, stealing beyond one’s ranks, surely was! But Putin early in his political tenure was not the brash, brazen and arrogant individual whom the world recognises today. In fact according to former Putin advisor, Gleb Pavlovsky, Putin needed to be asked to act more rudely and hence the photo ops and videos of the President riding in tanks, aircrafts and submarines.
As Weiss and Brown elucidate, Putin is an ideal Gosudarstvennik, a complicated Russian word which loosely translates to ‘a supporter of a strong state as an end in itself’. Orthodoxy, aristocracy and nationality, the trifecta adorning the philosophy behind every Czarist regime, came naturally to Putin. Paraphrasing the famed historian Edward L. Keenan, Weiss and Brown, write, it speaks volumes that even in the later 16th century, when the round trip to the capital could occupy the better part of the year, even simple real estate transactions conducted in tiny villages in the Arctic Circle, were registered and approved in Moscow.”
The book also describes Putin’s obsession in brining Ukraine back to its ‘rightful’ place. This obsession first manifested in an insidious cyber attack on Ukraine in 2014. This vicious virus named Notpetnya, crippled Ukrainian infrastructure, and brought the country to its knees, This was soon followed by the dastardly attack on the nation and the annexation of Crimea. But these moves served as mere appetizers for the primary horror fare to follow. In February 2021, Putin commenced a full fledged invasion of Ukraine, an inglorious assault that still continues unabated at the time of review.
However, the NATO countries that have jumped onto the sanctions bandwagon still continue to import natural gas from Russia by the barrels. Wonder what the seasoned Weiss would have to say about this charade.
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If the book’s purpose is to serve as a primer in blowing the lid on the shenanigans of a purported megalomaniac, it succeeds beyond the wildest imaginations of its authors even! The quintessential motive of Weiss and Brown is to dispel the widely accepted ‘strong-man myth’ attached to Putin – and in whose reflected glory, he unashamedly basks – and to portray him as a fatally flawed character who is a bundle of contradictions and agglomeration of insecurities. Even if the authors do not identify an Achilles Heel, they sure lash out in the tenderest of spots exposed by an otherwise iron clad armour.
Tracing Putin’s early career the authors illustrate how Putin turned out to be an absolute failure in his quest to rise to the highest echelon of the Russian Secret Service, the KGB. Inspired from a young age by the staple diet of spy movies such as The Sword and The Shield and by the highly embellished and exaggerated exploits of two famous Russian secret service agents, Pavel Belov and Stierlitz, Putin had his eyes set on a glamorous James Bond like career in the world of espionage. To his credit after graduating with a Law Degree from the University of Leningrad, Putin enrolled himself with the Russian secret service. However hotheadedness and an intemperate brawl in a subway poured hot water on his dreams as Putin was forced to vacate an elite training programme offered by the famous Red Banner Institute deep in the jungles of Moscow.
A dull and drab sojourn at the insipid KGB office in Dresden, East Germany was the only available option for Putin. Following Glasnost and Perestroika, President Gorbachev’s last ditch efforts to bring a semblance of order to a crumbling empire, and an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin’s desperate gamble to protect himself and his family from a corrupt house of cards, Putin, who was looked at as a non-descript yet pliant individual, was made President of Russia, in return for guaranteeing Yeltsin and his cronies a clean chit.
With Putin began the reign of the oligarchs. People displaying fidelity towards him were richly rewarded and those opposing him either deprived of their fortunes – if lucky – or divested of their lives – if unlucky. Russia went back to the early 1800s where while stealing was not viewed as a crime, stealing beyond one’s ranks, surely was! But Putin early in his political tenure was not the brash, brazen and arrogant individual whom the world recognises today. In fact according to former Putin advisor, Gleb Pavlovsky, Putin needed to be asked to act more rudely and hence the photo ops and videos of the President riding in tanks, aircrafts and submarines.
As Weiss and Brown elucidate, Putin is an ideal Gosudarstvennik, a complicated Russian word which loosely translates to ‘a supporter of a strong state as an end in itself’. Orthodoxy, aristocracy and nationality, the trifecta adorning the philosophy behind every Czarist regime, came naturally to Putin. Paraphrasing the famed historian Edward L. Keenan, Weiss and Brown, write, it speaks volumes that even in the later 16th century, when the round trip to the capital could occupy the better part of the year, even simple real estate transactions conducted in tiny villages in the Arctic Circle, were registered and approved in Moscow.”
The book also describes Putin’s obsession in brining Ukraine back to its ‘rightful’ place. This obsession first manifested in an insidious cyber attack on Ukraine in 2014. This vicious virus named Notpetnya, crippled Ukrainian infrastructure, and brought the country to its knees, This was soon followed by the dastardly attack on the nation and the annexation of Crimea. But these moves served as mere appetizers for the primary horror fare to follow. In February 2021, Putin commenced a full fledged invasion of Ukraine, an inglorious assault that still continues unabated at the time of review.
However, the NATO countries that have jumped onto the sanctions bandwagon still continue to import natural gas from Russia by the barrels. Wonder what the seasoned Weiss would have to say about this charade.
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February 4, 2023I was worried that I would be bored by too much overlap with Darryl Cunningham's graphic biography, Putin's Russia: The Rise of a Dictator, that I read just a month ago, but there was surprisingly little as this one has a much different -- and much more boring -- take on Putin's rise to power. Whereas Cunningham gives the story a Sopranos vibe with all the murders and scams allegedly tied to Putin, Andrew S. Weiss is content to settle into monotone History Channel documentary autopilot, reaching back through centuries of Russian history to find context for Putin's current actions. Being a long-time Washington insider and acknowledged expert on Russia, he has some worthy insights, but the presentation is flat and sometimes confusing with all the time jumps thanks to my decreasing ability to concentrate due to the droning nature of it.
Box Brown tries to spice the whole thing up with his art, but too often is left with nothing but talking heads to depict. I did find it amusing that on page 126 he went with the censored Soviet depiction of Lenin speaking in Moscow in May 1920 that airbrushes out Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev. And I was a bit confused during the section on Russia's 2022 invasion when he showed Barack Obama and Angela Merkel in leadership roles when they were both out of office at the time, though I suppose it was a thematic callback more than a slight against Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz.
Bottom line, the book is good for you, but in the same way that eating vegetables is. More a chore than a pleasure.
Box Brown tries to spice the whole thing up with his art, but too often is left with nothing but talking heads to depict. I did find it amusing that on page 126 he went with the censored Soviet depiction of Lenin speaking in Moscow in May 1920 that airbrushes out Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev. And I was a bit confused during the section on Russia's 2022 invasion when he showed Barack Obama and Angela Merkel in leadership roles when they were both out of office at the time, though I suppose it was a thematic callback more than a slight against Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz.
Bottom line, the book is good for you, but in the same way that eating vegetables is. More a chore than a pleasure.
January 22, 2024
Accidental Czar is a fairly gripping biography of Vladimir Putin that also includes quite a bit of modern Russian history. If you're at all interested in Putin's worldview, Accidental Czar is a good overview. Box Brown's simple art keeps the plot moving and Weiss brings a nice quantity of real-world experience to the narrative.
My only complaint is that the text feels jumbled. We jump between time periods randomly, making it hard to actually trace Putin's rise to power. There's also a fair amount of duplicate material as Weiss attempts to drive home his point. Still, it's all engaging and informative (with a notable anti-Trump lean).
My only complaint is that the text feels jumbled. We jump between time periods randomly, making it hard to actually trace Putin's rise to power. There's also a fair amount of duplicate material as Weiss attempts to drive home his point. Still, it's all engaging and informative (with a notable anti-Trump lean).
January 17, 2023
Hotheaded guy from family of modest means decides he wants to be a spy. He achieves that dream but he doesn't have any connections, plus he does hotheaded things like beating up a stranger, so he serves in a relatively unimportant post doing work that doesn't matter. He witnesses the fall of East Germany firsthand, so he knows that democratic revolutions are messy but possible. Gradually he moves up through the ranks through hard work. He's a tough guy who loves horseback riding and judo. Eventually Boris Yeltsin's family plucks him from obscurity and puts him in charge of the country, not because he's a genius or visionary but because the Yeltsins trust him to take care of them and keep them safe. He inherits political and economic systems that are shaky at best. Oil money helps shore up the country but then causes huge problems when the price of oil goes down. Still, he consolidates and solidifies his power. Hotheaded guy continues to do hotheaded things like scream at President Obama, and he commits the country to ruinous wars. We don't know the moral of the story yet because it's still happening.
Written by a guy who grew up wealthy (on Rodeo Drive!), learned Russian, and worked for Democratic administrations. So when Putin yelled at Obama on the phone, the author witnessed it firsthand. The main focus of this book is Putin's life and times, but the author tries to put things in a bigger context for those of us who don't know much about this part of the world. For example, he explains that power in Russia is and has always been based on personal connections rather than the rule of law. (I think that's why Donald Trump admires Putin so much—because Trump dreams of that kind of power structure, with himself at the pinnacle.)
Art helps move the story along, but I think it's hard to have compelling art for material like this, which is nonfiction and mostly about politics and secrets. Lots of guys in suits. Anyway, the spot color is particularly effective.
Written by a guy who grew up wealthy (on Rodeo Drive!), learned Russian, and worked for Democratic administrations. So when Putin yelled at Obama on the phone, the author witnessed it firsthand. The main focus of this book is Putin's life and times, but the author tries to put things in a bigger context for those of us who don't know much about this part of the world. For example, he explains that power in Russia is and has always been based on personal connections rather than the rule of law. (I think that's why Donald Trump admires Putin so much—because Trump dreams of that kind of power structure, with himself at the pinnacle.)
Art helps move the story along, but I think it's hard to have compelling art for material like this, which is nonfiction and mostly about politics and secrets. Lots of guys in suits. Anyway, the spot color is particularly effective.
May 30, 2022
Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this book!
This book reads like American propaganda. You don't need to like or support Putin in any way, shape, or form, to find this uncomfortable to read. There's absolutely no nuance to this book at all. The author takes random things from Russian history and fits them in to try to make his point. It's also super disjointed in how it does that.
This book reads like American propaganda. You don't need to like or support Putin in any way, shape, or form, to find this uncomfortable to read. There's absolutely no nuance to this book at all. The author takes random things from Russian history and fits them in to try to make his point. It's also super disjointed in how it does that.
April 16, 2022
(Note: I received an advanced reader copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley)
Along with the expected details of Putin’s rise from low-level KGB employee to the linchpin of modern Russia, “Accidental Czar” also had a great deal of other information as well. Since Putin and the state have become so deeply intertwined together, it’s impossible to not give any kind of decent biography of the man without giving any insight into Russia itself as well. So there was quite an array of contexts and influences to read about here, ranging from the various color revolutions that have swept nearby Russian neighbors in the near-past, to the conceptions of Moscow as a “Third Rome'' and the Russian nation as this bastion of orthdox Christian values. These various backgrounds were finely spiced with bits of insight from various experts, and from Weiss’s own relevant personal experiences working in government.
The only issue I would bring up is that Accidental Czar unfortunately already finds itself a bit dated in time. The book was only able to mention the very beginnings of the ongoing Russian invasion in Ukraine before wrapping up. Now it awaits a November 2022 publication, while what is arguably the culmination of Putin’s plans and policies for the past several years still rages on for who only knows how long. However, with that being said, it’s unfair to blame Weiss and his artist Brian Box for timing when these are matters that are far, far, far out of theirs and anyone else’s control.
So, even though this book will already have some catching up to do once available to the greater reading public, it’s still definitely quite a helpful and easy overview that goes a sizable way in making some sort of sense of these current times!
Along with the expected details of Putin’s rise from low-level KGB employee to the linchpin of modern Russia, “Accidental Czar” also had a great deal of other information as well. Since Putin and the state have become so deeply intertwined together, it’s impossible to not give any kind of decent biography of the man without giving any insight into Russia itself as well. So there was quite an array of contexts and influences to read about here, ranging from the various color revolutions that have swept nearby Russian neighbors in the near-past, to the conceptions of Moscow as a “Third Rome'' and the Russian nation as this bastion of orthdox Christian values. These various backgrounds were finely spiced with bits of insight from various experts, and from Weiss’s own relevant personal experiences working in government.
The only issue I would bring up is that Accidental Czar unfortunately already finds itself a bit dated in time. The book was only able to mention the very beginnings of the ongoing Russian invasion in Ukraine before wrapping up. Now it awaits a November 2022 publication, while what is arguably the culmination of Putin’s plans and policies for the past several years still rages on for who only knows how long. However, with that being said, it’s unfair to blame Weiss and his artist Brian Box for timing when these are matters that are far, far, far out of theirs and anyone else’s control.
So, even though this book will already have some catching up to do once available to the greater reading public, it’s still definitely quite a helpful and easy overview that goes a sizable way in making some sort of sense of these current times!
January 20, 2023
What can I say, except that probably I wasn't in the right mood for this?
You probably need to be far more interested in Putin and Russia politics than I really am, to find this more than just an interesting collection of facts, though a bit repetitive at times. Such are the nuances of History...
The graphic novel form doesn't really add much to the mix here, with some art that you can easily ignore while you read along the myths and facts of Russia and Putin's history.
Come to this point, I think we are all very much aware of how dangerous buffoons can be, but I'd probably give this tale some additional value if it was a little bit less US-centric...
You probably need to be far more interested in Putin and Russia politics than I really am, to find this more than just an interesting collection of facts, though a bit repetitive at times. Such are the nuances of History...
The graphic novel form doesn't really add much to the mix here, with some art that you can easily ignore while you read along the myths and facts of Russia and Putin's history.
Come to this point, I think we are all very much aware of how dangerous buffoons can be, but I'd probably give this tale some additional value if it was a little bit less US-centric...
September 7, 2022
Accidental Czar seems promising but ultimately falls flat.
The blurb entails this would be solely about Russia's current leader, Vladimir Putin, and his seemingly meteoric and startling rise to power. What it's actually about is, well, yes, Poot but also a brief history of his predecessors, rocky relations with other countries, particularly the U.S., corruption and scandal at the hands of Russian operatives, etc. basically everything but the kitchen sink. While all of that contextually makes sense, it was just too much and it didn't work that well as a graphic novel.
Weiss is certainly an expert in his field and within the confines of a graphic novel, he did alright with explaining as much as he could, but this would've fared much better as an actual novel. It's both informative and vague. There's too much information crammed onto the page and it didn't flow well - timelines jump back and forth so much it's a little disorienting - nor was it really attention-grabbing. I really struggled to keep my focus on this. It's so damn dry, like reading a textbook or a dossier, and it got to a point where I couldn't comprehend the clump of words I was staring at, I just had to step away and do something else.
The book ends unintentionally on a cliffhanger - the final draft was submitted just months shy of the Ukraine invasion. Though Weiss discusses Russia's years of bullying Ukraine, readers wanting to read about the current situation with Ukraine will be largely disappointed.
I don't know, I just expected a different book. I learned a little bit, like how prior to his major promotion, Putin was basically super boring and forgettable - on page 65, he was described by former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott as "[having] the manner of a disciplined, efficient, self-effacing executive assistant" - and no one expected he'd be in this position of ultimate power for long, nor that he'd accidentally set the world on fire through paranoia and impulsivity.
Despite my qualms, I think Weiss's final words in the Afterword are perfect food-for-thought and an excellent way to end the book: "The world is waking up to the reality that Putin was never the master strategist he made himself out to be. He is an improviser who has stumbled into a trap he built all by himself."
Thank you to NetGalley and First Second Books for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
Pub date: November 8, 2022
The blurb entails this would be solely about Russia's current leader, Vladimir Putin, and his seemingly meteoric and startling rise to power. What it's actually about is, well, yes, Poot but also a brief history of his predecessors, rocky relations with other countries, particularly the U.S., corruption and scandal at the hands of Russian operatives, etc. basically everything but the kitchen sink. While all of that contextually makes sense, it was just too much and it didn't work that well as a graphic novel.
Weiss is certainly an expert in his field and within the confines of a graphic novel, he did alright with explaining as much as he could, but this would've fared much better as an actual novel. It's both informative and vague. There's too much information crammed onto the page and it didn't flow well - timelines jump back and forth so much it's a little disorienting - nor was it really attention-grabbing. I really struggled to keep my focus on this. It's so damn dry, like reading a textbook or a dossier, and it got to a point where I couldn't comprehend the clump of words I was staring at, I just had to step away and do something else.
The book ends unintentionally on a cliffhanger - the final draft was submitted just months shy of the Ukraine invasion. Though Weiss discusses Russia's years of bullying Ukraine, readers wanting to read about the current situation with Ukraine will be largely disappointed.
I don't know, I just expected a different book. I learned a little bit, like how prior to his major promotion, Putin was basically super boring and forgettable - on page 65, he was described by former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott as "[having] the manner of a disciplined, efficient, self-effacing executive assistant" - and no one expected he'd be in this position of ultimate power for long, nor that he'd accidentally set the world on fire through paranoia and impulsivity.
Despite my qualms, I think Weiss's final words in the Afterword are perfect food-for-thought and an excellent way to end the book: "The world is waking up to the reality that Putin was never the master strategist he made himself out to be. He is an improviser who has stumbled into a trap he built all by himself."
Thank you to NetGalley and First Second Books for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
Pub date: November 8, 2022
January 9, 2023
Huge Box Brown fan, have read all of his work and didn't want to pass on this one despite him not being the sole creator/author. However, I wish I had.
This book starts off strong, giving historical context to the early life of Putin and some brief relevant history that shaped his supposed worldview. Super straightforward and interesting stuff. If this book continued down that path it'd be an easy 4 stars for me. Unfortunately, once that's out of the way, as some other reviewers have noted, it's full gas on the American propaganda machine.
I am not in anyway pro-Russia and especially not pro-Putin, but the way the author chooses to frame American involvement in Russian/global affairs and vice versa is like holding up a mirror to the claims made about Putin's supposed paranoia. You lose credibility as a biographer or historian when you start to cherry pick historical events and leave out context to fit your political tilt, in this case, a HEAVILY pro-Western imperialist perspective with a explicit Democratic party bias.
I understand this is a graphic novel so some details will be cut to create a more clear linear narrative (which I would argue, this book fails to do, as it gets scattered and disjointed in the second half)- but in incredibly complex political situations, that simply doesn't make the cut. If your intent is to paint an honest assessment of Putin and his dealings with America, and how he will attempt to take advantage of our shortcomings, you need to be honest about what those are. This book is not, and for that reason alone, I can not recommend it to anyone of any knowledge or curiosity level.
This book starts off strong, giving historical context to the early life of Putin and some brief relevant history that shaped his supposed worldview. Super straightforward and interesting stuff. If this book continued down that path it'd be an easy 4 stars for me. Unfortunately, once that's out of the way, as some other reviewers have noted, it's full gas on the American propaganda machine.
I am not in anyway pro-Russia and especially not pro-Putin, but the way the author chooses to frame American involvement in Russian/global affairs and vice versa is like holding up a mirror to the claims made about Putin's supposed paranoia. You lose credibility as a biographer or historian when you start to cherry pick historical events and leave out context to fit your political tilt, in this case, a HEAVILY pro-Western imperialist perspective with a explicit Democratic party bias.
I understand this is a graphic novel so some details will be cut to create a more clear linear narrative (which I would argue, this book fails to do, as it gets scattered and disjointed in the second half)- but in incredibly complex political situations, that simply doesn't make the cut. If your intent is to paint an honest assessment of Putin and his dealings with America, and how he will attempt to take advantage of our shortcomings, you need to be honest about what those are. This book is not, and for that reason alone, I can not recommend it to anyone of any knowledge or curiosity level.
July 22, 2023
Can you call something a graphic novel if it's not fiction? I'm not sure. So, this is a graphic book (?) written by a Russia expert who previously worked for the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Undersecretary of Defense in both Democratic and Republican administrations. It was an interesting look into Putin's and Russia's history that helped me to better understand him and his invasion of Ukraine. Being graphic, it was pretty simplified and was a quick read--which was just the amount of effort and time I was willing to invest in Putin.
Some of the chronology was out of order, which made it confusing. The simplification also meant there were lots of things left out and conclusions made rapidly, but I guess that's what I get for not wanting to read a dense biography.
Some of the chronology was out of order, which made it confusing. The simplification also meant there were lots of things left out and conclusions made rapidly, but I guess that's what I get for not wanting to read a dense biography.
May 29, 2023
Extremely interesting read about Putin's life and how he stumbled into becoming the leader of Russia -- and why he's unlikely to leave willingly. You'll learn more about how Putin (and many Russians) view the world and how that influences their actions. It's in the graphic form, which makes for an entertaining read on a heady subject.
June 8, 2022
I´m not sure what is the purpose of this comic book. As you all know all graphic novels have two equally important levels - the plot AND the visual part. Here is the visual part that I find disappointing. The drawing seems to be oversimplified as it´s supposed to mock the serious topic and its main character. And as much as I appreciate the irony, cynism, and sarcasm, here, however, it felt just silly and childish.
As for the plot... I think the author, who was personally involved in some parts of foreign politics and has been to Russia many times, wants to warn people against Putin and wants us all to take him seriously. Well if you have been following the geopolitics for some time you would know that yourself by now. So I´m sorry, but I am under the strong impression that this book should have been published at least a year ago because now it´s too late for the warning and it does feel that the whole purpose of this book is to make money while the topic is popular. I would have given it two stars, but I decided to give it one extra only because there are two facts in this book, that I didn´t know about.
As for the plot... I think the author, who was personally involved in some parts of foreign politics and has been to Russia many times, wants to warn people against Putin and wants us all to take him seriously. Well if you have been following the geopolitics for some time you would know that yourself by now. So I´m sorry, but I am under the strong impression that this book should have been published at least a year ago because now it´s too late for the warning and it does feel that the whole purpose of this book is to make money while the topic is popular. I would have given it two stars, but I decided to give it one extra only because there are two facts in this book, that I didn´t know about.
November 21, 2022
Andrew Weiss has written an amazing biography of Vladimir Putin. Starting from his childhood, to collapse of the Soviet Union and finally to the beginning of 2022. Throughout the story not only do we get a better grasp of Putin but also of Russian history and how it affected Putin. Weiss has distilled so much information and story about Putin within a graphic novel which is pretty wild. Oh and Box Brown's art is perfect as always I love the combo of his art with Weiss writing. Highly recommend this especially if you want to know a bit more about Russia's tyrannical leader.
July 31, 2022
Thank you to NetGalley and First Second Publishing for an eARC of Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin by Andrew S. Weiss, illustrated by Brian Brown in exchange for an honest review.
CW: war, fascism, communism, Naziism, Trump, watch for growing list on StoryGraph.
The title says it all, I won't provide an in-depth summary here. This is a graphic novel depicting the rise and rule of Vladimir Putin, up to and including the early months of 2022 when Putin invaded Ukraine.
I've said this a couple of times over the last few months, but I am finding that graphic novels are one of the best ways for me personally to consume history and politics. There's something about graphic novels that is easy and assuages some of my guilt about being relatively uninformed about recent global events. Their language is generally very accessible and the pictures help me to connect the events to my own memories, particularly as I endeavor to learn more about the history that I personally have lived through but not been informed about.
For a book that was about Putin, there was not as much Putin content as I was expecting. A vast majority of this book comprised of a political history of Russia as a state, which of course contextualized Putin's current presidency. The biggest takeaway that I got from this book was learning how specifically Russia was involved in manipulating American politics during the 2016 presidential election. I never felt that I had a solid understanding of Russia's involvement, as much of the American news outlets were beyond sensational in their coverage throughout the election cycle. Furthermore, I see so many parallels between Putin's mediocrity and paranoia and Trump's. The following panel from the book made everything click for me: "'A senior western diplomat once gave [the author] the best explanation about what it's like to deal with Putin.' The panel depicts a human brain divided into three sections. 'Putin's brain:' (Section 1: Upper half of the brain encompassing the frontal and parietal lobes, the cortices of the brain largely responsible for conscious thought and experience) 'Things that he knows firsthand from working on so many issues over the years at the highest levels and the grievances he's built up', (Section 2, frontal lower section of brain, where the temporal lobe is responsible for language processing and visual-spatial orientation). 'His knowledge of the real world, the one that we all live in', and (Section 3 located in the hindbrain, sometimes called the 'lizard brain' because it houses the earliest evolutionary structures of the brain, including the amygdala, whereby we register threat), 'Conspiracy-mongering and total nonsense supplied by the intelligence services and carrier bureaucracy. The problem when you're talking to [Putin] is you never know which part of his brain he's operating in. He constantly toggles back and forth.'" The visual of Putin's brain and personal epistemology shown in this way helped me to understand the functionality of the relationship between Putin and Trump. The two megalomaniacs act as one another's' puppets in their desire to advance their own power at the expense of anyone who gets in their way.
Unfortunately, this book is already out of date before its publication. The graphic novel proper includes some limited information about Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the author provided a brief afterward that he wrote in March of 2022, which spoke briefly about the continuing war crisis unfolding in Ukraine. However, as we all know, that story is far from over, and the author cannot possibly do this moment in time the justice it deserves until we can say with minor certainty that it is over. I doubt the author will be able to go back to update the book before its slated publication date, and who's to say whether the war in Ukraine will even have passed by November. Much like the title of the final chapter of this book, this is "A Deeply Unsatisfying Ending." Though I can also see the argument that because of the current events in Ukraine, this is precisely the time TO move forward with publishing this book. It may ensure that this book finds a wider audience than it would have if Russia were not already top of mind.
My other primary critique is that the author is a self proclaimed "Russia Geek" and personally served at the Pentagon within the department of defense. He has been able to sit it on important conversations with presidents and other higher ups as events in Russia have transpired over the past 20+ years, all of which he explains in the introduction of the book. Because of his personal experiences with some of the events depicted in the book, Weiss would infrequently insert first-person assertions without an accompanying pictorial representation of himself, which I found obtrusive and jarring within the cohesive narrative. Whenever I saw that pesky word "I", I had to pause and remind myself of the author's personal role. This is clearly not a memoir, but had I skipped reading the introduction (as many readers do), I would have been utterly confused by the presence of the occasional person language. Pair this with the fact that the book was not told in strictly chronological order, and you have a recipe for a bit of a disjointed book.
I will go ahead and say that I do recommend this book, particularly if you're like me and have found the last six years utterly baffling and would like a slowed-down explanation of WTF has been happening. But do proceed with caution, as the story of Putin and Russia are still be written as we speak. And like all forms of media, this graphic novel is not completely free of bias. The author's final pages of this book did leave me with the taste of some American patriotic propaganda in my mouth, which left me questioning as I have so often over the past six years, are we really any better than any other country that severely sensors its media? We seem to be just as extreme in many ways, but we laud ourselves as the greatest country in the world. I have never been sure that that is true, and as time goes on, I am convinced that our utter, blind pride will be our downfall.
CW: war, fascism, communism, Naziism, Trump, watch for growing list on StoryGraph.
The title says it all, I won't provide an in-depth summary here. This is a graphic novel depicting the rise and rule of Vladimir Putin, up to and including the early months of 2022 when Putin invaded Ukraine.
I've said this a couple of times over the last few months, but I am finding that graphic novels are one of the best ways for me personally to consume history and politics. There's something about graphic novels that is easy and assuages some of my guilt about being relatively uninformed about recent global events. Their language is generally very accessible and the pictures help me to connect the events to my own memories, particularly as I endeavor to learn more about the history that I personally have lived through but not been informed about.
For a book that was about Putin, there was not as much Putin content as I was expecting. A vast majority of this book comprised of a political history of Russia as a state, which of course contextualized Putin's current presidency. The biggest takeaway that I got from this book was learning how specifically Russia was involved in manipulating American politics during the 2016 presidential election. I never felt that I had a solid understanding of Russia's involvement, as much of the American news outlets were beyond sensational in their coverage throughout the election cycle. Furthermore, I see so many parallels between Putin's mediocrity and paranoia and Trump's. The following panel from the book made everything click for me: "'A senior western diplomat once gave [the author] the best explanation about what it's like to deal with Putin.' The panel depicts a human brain divided into three sections. 'Putin's brain:' (Section 1: Upper half of the brain encompassing the frontal and parietal lobes, the cortices of the brain largely responsible for conscious thought and experience) 'Things that he knows firsthand from working on so many issues over the years at the highest levels and the grievances he's built up', (Section 2, frontal lower section of brain, where the temporal lobe is responsible for language processing and visual-spatial orientation). 'His knowledge of the real world, the one that we all live in', and (Section 3 located in the hindbrain, sometimes called the 'lizard brain' because it houses the earliest evolutionary structures of the brain, including the amygdala, whereby we register threat), 'Conspiracy-mongering and total nonsense supplied by the intelligence services and carrier bureaucracy. The problem when you're talking to [Putin] is you never know which part of his brain he's operating in. He constantly toggles back and forth.'" The visual of Putin's brain and personal epistemology shown in this way helped me to understand the functionality of the relationship between Putin and Trump. The two megalomaniacs act as one another's' puppets in their desire to advance their own power at the expense of anyone who gets in their way.
Unfortunately, this book is already out of date before its publication. The graphic novel proper includes some limited information about Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the author provided a brief afterward that he wrote in March of 2022, which spoke briefly about the continuing war crisis unfolding in Ukraine. However, as we all know, that story is far from over, and the author cannot possibly do this moment in time the justice it deserves until we can say with minor certainty that it is over. I doubt the author will be able to go back to update the book before its slated publication date, and who's to say whether the war in Ukraine will even have passed by November. Much like the title of the final chapter of this book, this is "A Deeply Unsatisfying Ending." Though I can also see the argument that because of the current events in Ukraine, this is precisely the time TO move forward with publishing this book. It may ensure that this book finds a wider audience than it would have if Russia were not already top of mind.
My other primary critique is that the author is a self proclaimed "Russia Geek" and personally served at the Pentagon within the department of defense. He has been able to sit it on important conversations with presidents and other higher ups as events in Russia have transpired over the past 20+ years, all of which he explains in the introduction of the book. Because of his personal experiences with some of the events depicted in the book, Weiss would infrequently insert first-person assertions without an accompanying pictorial representation of himself, which I found obtrusive and jarring within the cohesive narrative. Whenever I saw that pesky word "I", I had to pause and remind myself of the author's personal role. This is clearly not a memoir, but had I skipped reading the introduction (as many readers do), I would have been utterly confused by the presence of the occasional person language. Pair this with the fact that the book was not told in strictly chronological order, and you have a recipe for a bit of a disjointed book.
I will go ahead and say that I do recommend this book, particularly if you're like me and have found the last six years utterly baffling and would like a slowed-down explanation of WTF has been happening. But do proceed with caution, as the story of Putin and Russia are still be written as we speak. And like all forms of media, this graphic novel is not completely free of bias. The author's final pages of this book did leave me with the taste of some American patriotic propaganda in my mouth, which left me questioning as I have so often over the past six years, are we really any better than any other country that severely sensors its media? We seem to be just as extreme in many ways, but we laud ourselves as the greatest country in the world. I have never been sure that that is true, and as time goes on, I am convinced that our utter, blind pride will be our downfall.
January 23, 2023
I enjoyed this book SO MUCH. Fascinating, concise, understandable. It's written by a Russia expert who was there for much of the story, and illustrated by "Box" Brown, so if you have EVER wondered over the past year just what is Putin's deal with Ukraine anyway, BY ALL MEANS pick this book up right away and learn the history of that beef.
This book is an excellent summary of the last 20 years of Russia's relationship to Europe and the West at large. These few words do not even come close to articulating how much I enjoyed this book, and how enlightening I found it.
This book is an excellent summary of the last 20 years of Russia's relationship to Europe and the West at large. These few words do not even come close to articulating how much I enjoyed this book, and how enlightening I found it.
December 26, 2022
It took me a bit to finish this book. Despite the fact that it’s a graphic novel, it’s not really a quick read. It’s full of information that made me want to pause and think before reading more. Will be adding this to my classroom library. Already have a few students in mind that will probably find this book interesting. I definitely need more history/ current event graphic novels in my bookcase.
February 20, 2023
This is definitely one of the most uniquely told nonfiction books I've encountered. Using the form of a graphic novel, Andrew Weiss explores the life and career of Vladimir Putin within the context of Russian history. I don't typically read many graphic novels, and I was skeptical of how a nonfiction biography would work, but I finished this book impressed. Weiss includes some anecdotes and information about Putin I haven't heard elsewhere and I finished the book quickly - the graphic form makes for fast reading. This book can serve both as a good introduction to its topic as well as insightful for those already familiar with Putin.
February 26, 2023
3.5 stars. This covered a number of things I was somewhat familiar with (for example, the Pussy Riot arrests, the poisoning of Yushchenko, the Chechen school siege at Beslan, and the downing of the Malaysia Airlines flight over Ukraine), but it put all of that -- and many other events -- into context, providing a better understanding of Putin and Russia. A lot of helpful background information about the country's history and Putin's rise to power. I read somewhere that it was supposed to be funny or witty, at least to some extent, but I saw almost no humor in this (which is probably not really surprising, considering the subject matter).
April 23, 2023
Great text immediately helpful in understanding Putin in context. Very current and timely. Consider it an essential read to understand Putin's motivations and long-game in Ukraine. There are factors here that need to be understood and appreciated to formulate an effective response and broader European foreign policy of Russian containment.
June 27, 2023
This is a very informative book from a unique source, definitely worth reading and a page-turner. I had to savor it and pace myself. The author made a decision to present it in the form of a graphic novel to make it appealing to larger audience.
You will be surprised, and surprised again, even with the history you though you were well familiar with. Read it!
You will be surprised, and surprised again, even with the history you though you were well familiar with. Read it!
Read
February 4, 2024Informative, if not particularly strong on narrative. I felt like I could see the artist’s furrowed brow, trying to take the pretty standard political science wonk content and make it visually compelling. But I did learn stuff, and it did feel relevant. Yikes, what a situation we have in Russia.
January 10, 2023
A quick read, well structured and detailed with some interesting insights in Russian history and politics that will seem strange to many from the west.
January 13, 2023
Who the fuck is Vladimir Putin? Weiss uses his expertise of Russia to delve into the life and mind of Russia's latest dictator. Oliver Stone portrayed Putin as an intelligent, complex and almost admirable man. Weiss adds a bit more conniving, paranoia and a giant helping of fear.
January 26, 2025
Very informative and visually interesting.
March 7, 2024
Interesting and chilling. I’d read it again.
May 20, 2024
1.
Accidental Czar is a good overview of the U.S. state department’s interpretation of Vladimir Putin, with fun illustrations by Brian “Box” Brown. The book’s author, Andrew S. Weiss, is the kind of guy who worked as an executive director for the RAND corporation. He went to an Ivy League university (Columbia) and then served on the National Security Council, at the State Department, and at the Defense Department. He was a policy advisor for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, which should tell you something—the guys who worked for both Clinton and W. were usually 100% down with the policy continuities between those administrations, the continuities that led straight to the Iraq War, woot woot. These were also the guys who pushed hard for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
Weiss previously led the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center, a think-tank for Russian liberals and their allies to encourage and implement liberal reforms in Russia (the Moscow Center was shut down, but Weiss still works for the Carnegie Endowment). His articles have appeared in the New York Times and Foreign Policy. He has appeared on NPR. He has written papers for the Brookings Institute. He goes to the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Is any of that intrinsically bad? No…but when all those meritocratic checkmarks start to accumulate on a single CV, I get suspicious.
Weiss admits that, despite his vast education in Russian and Soviet affairs, there was a lot he didn’t understand about Russia before Putin’s villainous turn. I blame part of that ignorance on Weiss’s ideological commitments: you’ll only get so far in your analysis of Russia if you have centrist-liberal (neoliberal?) priors. Such analysis becomes especially messy when you believe in the benign efficacy of global capital to solve the world’s problems. And according to his biography on the RAND website, “Weiss was a vice president and investment strategist at American International Group, Inc. subsidiary companies, where he worked primarily on global commodities, energy, and foreign exchange markets.”
So yeah, he’s that kind of guy.
2.
Let’s start with the good: Accidental Czar is a lot of fun to read. The accounts of Putin’s upbringing and the myths of Putin’s personal history are entertaining. The histories of Russia that Weiss includes are good overviews of the nation’s origins, development, and ambitions.
Above all, Weiss offers one of the best accounts of “Putin’s brain” that I’ve encountered. An American diplomat once told Weiss that Putin’s entire worldview could be divided into three distinct sources of knowledge: first, there’s the real-world stuff Putin knows that everybody knows (e.g., the American dollar is the global reserve currency; China and the U.S. are locked in a proto-Cold War; the E.U. is facing a reemergence of far-right political parties; the Nazis lost WWII; Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia; etc).
Second, there’s the secret (and real) stuff Putin knows from his firsthand experiences in intelligence and as head of state (stuff you and I aren’t privy to, at least not without Wikileaks).
Third and finally, there’s all the crazy stuff: conspiracy theories about Western homosexuals in Ukraine literally crucifying toddlers on actual crosses, or Obama single-handedly launching the Maidan revolution because Michelle is LGBTQ+, or whatever.
Putin’s brain synthesizes these three types of knowledge through such an extraordinary process of osmosis that, when you’re talking to him, it’s impossible to disentangle the three. You just wind up getting frustrated (like Obama) or played (like Tucker Carlson).
Weiss’s account of Putin’s life and rise to power is mostly accurate, but it has its limits, especially when Putin’s biography begins to intersect with world politics. Weiss portrays American leaders and diplomats as well-intentioned fools and goofs who continually underestimated Putin. These Americans appear naïve and harmless, not political tigers in their own right with their own agendas and their own strategies for global hegemony.
This portrayal is not very plausible.
3.
Alongside Weiss’s naïve American leaders, there are a number of American villains. Take the case of Edward Snowden. Weiss describes the Snowden saga as if the main story was not the wild and flagrant violations of privacy committed by the U.S. government or the terrifying extent of the NSA’s surveillance powers over the entire planet. Weiss brushes over these details and jumps right to Snowden’s flight to Russia—a flight he didn’t exactly choose to make (he was on his way to Latin America and wound up stuck in Russia, which isn’t exactly destination #1 for dissidents).
Snowden has behaved like a weakling and a coward since he wound up in Russia (although I’d challenge you to tell Putin to his face that his domestic surveillance is as pernicious and widespread as America’s). For Weiss, Wikileaks and Snowden are just pawns in Putin’s plan for domination over Eurasia and his scheme to *gasp* deny the presidency to Hillary Clinton (the liberal resentment over Russia’s miniscule role in the 2016 election is pretty thick in Accidental Czar).
You’d never know, reading this book, the extent to which the U.S. lords its surveillance, intelligence, and military agencies over enemies and allies alike…and how little we’d know about America’s covert foreign policy without Snowden’s revelations. For Weiss, Snowden is just another pitstop on the road to the November 2016 U.S. election and the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
4.
Things get a little silly as Weiss moves toward the 2016 election. At the beginning of Chapter Six, Weiss recounts the history of KGB propaganda in the U.S., from spreading lies about the secret origin of HIV in a U.S. lab to spreading obvious non-lies about the fact that Ronald Reagan was taking a militaristic stance against the U.S.S.R., or the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was *gasp* a homosexual. These are the mighty columns of disinformation on which, according to Weiss, Putin built the edifice of the Donald Trump presidency.
Weiss recounts how Putin successfully used asymmetrical warfare in Ukraine in the years between 2014 and 2022. He also recounts how Putin’s allies in London encouraged Brexit; how his media hosted Nigel Farage, Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, and Iowa’s crypto-Nazi former congressman, Steve King; and how his lackeys tried to sow divisions among and within Western nations.
I remember seeing some of this firsthand as a tourist in Berlin in 2014, when far-right demonstrators outside the Bundestag waved Russian flags and placards with slogans like “EU ist nicht Europa” and “BRD ist nicht Deutschland” (one wonders what is Germany, precisely, if not the BRD? Is this some kind of backwards appeal to the deutsches Volk who unsuccessfully invaded the Soviet Union?).
None of this seemed to be working in Germany, where the rise of the far-right had more to do with Syrian refugees than with Putin’s machinations. And if Putin’s machinations succeeded in Ukraine before 2022, it was only insofar as the Kremlin could hack the nation’s physical and digital infrastructure and wreak havoc all over the country’s grid. So sure, Putin was successful in shutting down the power in Kyiv. But he certainly wasn’t successful in winning the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people.
But Weiss argues that far less powerful tactics were somehow successful in the United States, where Putin’s goons created fake Facebook accounts to rile up American voters (who were already pretty riled up) and leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks (emails that confirmed what most people already knew and/or thought about Hillary Clinton). Weiss complains that Trump used Russian propaganda “to paint Clinton as sleazy and unethical,” which…c’mon, you don’t exactly need Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to make that argument.
Weiss also complains that the American far-right (Donald Trump and his supporters) and the much smaller American far-left (Jill Stein and the weirdos who vote for her) had connections to Russia. Consequently, conservative complaints about American elites after the 2008 financial crisis and leftist complaints about American foreign policy after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are, for Weiss, at least partially Russian in origin.
To be fair, Weiss occasionally points out that the divisions that led to Donald Trump’s victory were homegrown American divisions, and that you didn’t need to be a one-time KGB agent to see with your own eyes that 50% of Americans view the other 50% of Americans as mortal enemies, and vice versa.
But in one of the book’s images, we see a meme (based on a real Russian meme) showing Satan arm-wrestling Jesus. Satan says (in English), “If Clinton wins, I win!” Jesus responds (in English), “Not if I can help it!”
The meme prompts the viewer to hit “like” to help Jesus win.
As an Orthodox Christian with an Evangelical background, I can tell you that this is pure grade-A ‘Murican-bred religious nationalism, even if it was authored by a cash-hungry teenager in St. Petersburg. This is where policy analysts like Weiss lose track of the plot—they spend lifetimes at elite institutions learning about non-American societies while missing much of American culture and its discontents. (I remember hearing the “Pod Save America” guys talking about how, during the Obama administration, they didn’t understand Evangelicals’ commitment to Israel because they didn’t grow up around Evangelicals. Which, if you live in America and you didn’t know any Evangelicals growing up, you lived a fairly charmed-but-isolated American life.)
All that to say: you don’t need to be a Russian spy to understand the braindead logic of American Christians and deploy that logic in Trump’s favor. You also don’t need RT in order to platform Alex Jones and Richard Spencer, or to smear George Soros. America’s homegrown conservative media is happy to do that without any help from the Kremlin. Steve King didn’t become a Nazi-loving congressman because of Russian hackers in St. Petersburg. He was elected by like-minded racists from Iowa.
Jones and Spencer and King (and Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage) are not, as Weiss claims, “useful idiots” for Moscow. They’re just idiots.
5.
I’m not trying to minimize the effects of Russian propaganda, especially regarding Ukraine. The accusation that Ukraine is overrun with neo-Nazis is, for me, quite serious. But it’s just not true—there are more flesh-and-blood neo-Nazis in the German Bundestag today than in the Ukrainian Rada (where, if I’ve heard correctly, there are precisely zero extreme-right representatives). Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian left supports their country’s war against Russia.
Some propagandists point to historical precedent, the fact that many anti-Stalinist Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. But we conveniently ignore the fact that, for every single Ukrainian collaborator with the S.S., there were hundreds (thousands?) of Ukrainians fighting the Nazis in the Red Army.
You hear these talking points about Ukrainian neo-Nazis, the Azov battalion (who is for Putin what Hamas is for Netanyahu: a scapegoat to justify ethnic cleansing), and Ukrainian collaboration with Nazis repeated in the U.S. all the time…especially (I’m ashamed to say) on the anti-war left, for whom no American military intervention is ever justified. Well, that is, no American intervention except for WWII, but the American left is awfully quick to point out that the Soviets won that war on the West’s behalf. They’re quick to forget that Ukraine was a huge chunk of the Soviet Union, or else they just don’t care because something something collaboration.
As for Putin's propaganda in the West: honestly, if Putin is fighting a propaganda war against the United States, so what? As Julia Ioffe said in an interview after the 2022 invasion, we should be very honest about what’s happening in Ukraine. This war is first and foremost the result of a criminal invasion of Ukraine by Russia, but it’s also an authentic shooting war between Russia and the West. And the shooting war started in 2014 at the earliest.
So why all the hand-wringing about Russian propaganda and cyberattacks? Is it because Putin targeted NPR darlings like Hillary Clinton and wrapped his arms around liberal bêtes noires like Julian Assange, Steve Bannon, Jill Stein, and (above all) Donald Trump? Is liberal rage against Putin about Ukraine or the 2016 election? Are they angry because Putin is a murderous autocrat or because “orange man bad”?
Probably the latter.
In any event, Putin is clearly failing at whatever he’s trying to achieve through these manipulations of Western media. Weiss quotes Putin’s old KGB boss, General Kalugin, who says that the KGB’s prime directive “was not intelligence collection, but subversion—active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO.”
Whelp, mission not accomplished, whether we’re talking about 1989 or 2024.
6.
In Accidental Czar, Weiss includes several entertaining sections (wonderfully illustrated by Brown) on the history of Russia. But these sections rely too much on an interpretation of Russian history that has become popular in Western academic circles, especially since Putin became such a baddie. According to this interpretation, the whole Russian “thing”—the Russian character, the Russian soul, Russian autocracy, Russian bureaucracy, Russian corruption, Russian military resilience—is the consequence of Russia’s unique geographic location: an expanse of difficult-to-defend territory stretching for thousands of kilometers in every direction around Moscow, the center.
Want to understand Russian history and Russian policy? Well, you’ve gotta understand its geography…just as understanding British or American or French or Chinese history and policy requires you to understand their geography.
There’s a lot of truth and power in this kind of analysis, what we call “Great Power politics,” but it’s became especially popular after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. In the two years since the full-scale invasion, such geopolitical analysis has been positively unavoidable. Ideology is out; realism is in. Nineteenth-century politics is back—turns out, it never went away!
And everybody is doing it, on all sides of the Ukraine issue, from John Mearsheimer (realpolitik scholar and opponent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine) to Stephen Kotkin (centrist scholar who advocates for a partition of Ukraine) to innumerable lesser-known foreign policy experts throughout the world (including in China) and even, at times, Alexandr Dugin (the Russian crypto-fascist philosopher), Timothy Snyder (pro-Ukrainian historian who personally purchased drones for the Ukrainian army), and Antony Blinken (our internationalist Secretary of State who has never met a Muslim-majority nation he wouldn’t like to invade).
Great Power analysis of global politics can be an incredibly powerful tool for understanding why certain nations prefer certain policies. But it can also serve as voodoo cultural studies, especially when you start ascribing “national personalities,” “historical patterns,” and “cultural characteristics” to the locations of rivers and mountains.
And I worry about the extent to which we’re all overcorrecting toward Great Power theories of history after the (bogus) “end of history” euphoria of the 1990s and the (failed) multi-trillion-dollar construction of American military hegemony in the early 2000s. Now America is just one of three global superpowers playing chess with a bunch of marginal nations full of newly un-colonized brown people whom we don’t exactly trust. Some of those nations, like Brazil and India, are moving up in the world, and for America, now is the time to win them for the West, for liberalism, for international institutions, and for global capital. This is America’s foreign policy project for the twenty-first century, and Putin is making that project a little…complicated.
That, more than anything, is why we're fighting in Ukraine.
One last thing...
When Madeline Albright is blurbing your book, you know that either you’ve written a book that Madeline Albright really happens to like or you’ve written state department propaganda. Accidental Czar is the latter. A lot of the material is completely true, but it’s still anti-Russian propaganda. I enjoyed the book, but I don’t trust it. The basic facts are accurately represented, but the reason they have been compiled in this way, in this graphic novel, is to construct a narrative about American naivete and the need for robust action against America’s enemies.
As with most stories we tell about Russia, we’re talking about us, not the Russian people or the Ukrainian people. Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine's diverse and oft-conflicting stories about themselves get lost amid our constant storytelling.
Accidental Czar is a good overview of the U.S. state department’s interpretation of Vladimir Putin, with fun illustrations by Brian “Box” Brown. The book’s author, Andrew S. Weiss, is the kind of guy who worked as an executive director for the RAND corporation. He went to an Ivy League university (Columbia) and then served on the National Security Council, at the State Department, and at the Defense Department. He was a policy advisor for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, which should tell you something—the guys who worked for both Clinton and W. were usually 100% down with the policy continuities between those administrations, the continuities that led straight to the Iraq War, woot woot. These were also the guys who pushed hard for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
Weiss previously led the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center, a think-tank for Russian liberals and their allies to encourage and implement liberal reforms in Russia (the Moscow Center was shut down, but Weiss still works for the Carnegie Endowment). His articles have appeared in the New York Times and Foreign Policy. He has appeared on NPR. He has written papers for the Brookings Institute. He goes to the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Is any of that intrinsically bad? No…but when all those meritocratic checkmarks start to accumulate on a single CV, I get suspicious.
Weiss admits that, despite his vast education in Russian and Soviet affairs, there was a lot he didn’t understand about Russia before Putin’s villainous turn. I blame part of that ignorance on Weiss’s ideological commitments: you’ll only get so far in your analysis of Russia if you have centrist-liberal (neoliberal?) priors. Such analysis becomes especially messy when you believe in the benign efficacy of global capital to solve the world’s problems. And according to his biography on the RAND website, “Weiss was a vice president and investment strategist at American International Group, Inc. subsidiary companies, where he worked primarily on global commodities, energy, and foreign exchange markets.”
So yeah, he’s that kind of guy.
2.
Let’s start with the good: Accidental Czar is a lot of fun to read. The accounts of Putin’s upbringing and the myths of Putin’s personal history are entertaining. The histories of Russia that Weiss includes are good overviews of the nation’s origins, development, and ambitions.
Above all, Weiss offers one of the best accounts of “Putin’s brain” that I’ve encountered. An American diplomat once told Weiss that Putin’s entire worldview could be divided into three distinct sources of knowledge: first, there’s the real-world stuff Putin knows that everybody knows (e.g., the American dollar is the global reserve currency; China and the U.S. are locked in a proto-Cold War; the E.U. is facing a reemergence of far-right political parties; the Nazis lost WWII; Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia; etc).
Second, there’s the secret (and real) stuff Putin knows from his firsthand experiences in intelligence and as head of state (stuff you and I aren’t privy to, at least not without Wikileaks).
Third and finally, there’s all the crazy stuff: conspiracy theories about Western homosexuals in Ukraine literally crucifying toddlers on actual crosses, or Obama single-handedly launching the Maidan revolution because Michelle is LGBTQ+, or whatever.
Putin’s brain synthesizes these three types of knowledge through such an extraordinary process of osmosis that, when you’re talking to him, it’s impossible to disentangle the three. You just wind up getting frustrated (like Obama) or played (like Tucker Carlson).
Weiss’s account of Putin’s life and rise to power is mostly accurate, but it has its limits, especially when Putin’s biography begins to intersect with world politics. Weiss portrays American leaders and diplomats as well-intentioned fools and goofs who continually underestimated Putin. These Americans appear naïve and harmless, not political tigers in their own right with their own agendas and their own strategies for global hegemony.
This portrayal is not very plausible.
3.
Alongside Weiss’s naïve American leaders, there are a number of American villains. Take the case of Edward Snowden. Weiss describes the Snowden saga as if the main story was not the wild and flagrant violations of privacy committed by the U.S. government or the terrifying extent of the NSA’s surveillance powers over the entire planet. Weiss brushes over these details and jumps right to Snowden’s flight to Russia—a flight he didn’t exactly choose to make (he was on his way to Latin America and wound up stuck in Russia, which isn’t exactly destination #1 for dissidents).
Snowden has behaved like a weakling and a coward since he wound up in Russia (although I’d challenge you to tell Putin to his face that his domestic surveillance is as pernicious and widespread as America’s). For Weiss, Wikileaks and Snowden are just pawns in Putin’s plan for domination over Eurasia and his scheme to *gasp* deny the presidency to Hillary Clinton (the liberal resentment over Russia’s miniscule role in the 2016 election is pretty thick in Accidental Czar).
You’d never know, reading this book, the extent to which the U.S. lords its surveillance, intelligence, and military agencies over enemies and allies alike…and how little we’d know about America’s covert foreign policy without Snowden’s revelations. For Weiss, Snowden is just another pitstop on the road to the November 2016 U.S. election and the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
4.
Things get a little silly as Weiss moves toward the 2016 election. At the beginning of Chapter Six, Weiss recounts the history of KGB propaganda in the U.S., from spreading lies about the secret origin of HIV in a U.S. lab to spreading obvious non-lies about the fact that Ronald Reagan was taking a militaristic stance against the U.S.S.R., or the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was *gasp* a homosexual. These are the mighty columns of disinformation on which, according to Weiss, Putin built the edifice of the Donald Trump presidency.
Weiss recounts how Putin successfully used asymmetrical warfare in Ukraine in the years between 2014 and 2022. He also recounts how Putin’s allies in London encouraged Brexit; how his media hosted Nigel Farage, Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, and Iowa’s crypto-Nazi former congressman, Steve King; and how his lackeys tried to sow divisions among and within Western nations.
I remember seeing some of this firsthand as a tourist in Berlin in 2014, when far-right demonstrators outside the Bundestag waved Russian flags and placards with slogans like “EU ist nicht Europa” and “BRD ist nicht Deutschland” (one wonders what is Germany, precisely, if not the BRD? Is this some kind of backwards appeal to the deutsches Volk who unsuccessfully invaded the Soviet Union?).
None of this seemed to be working in Germany, where the rise of the far-right had more to do with Syrian refugees than with Putin’s machinations. And if Putin’s machinations succeeded in Ukraine before 2022, it was only insofar as the Kremlin could hack the nation’s physical and digital infrastructure and wreak havoc all over the country’s grid. So sure, Putin was successful in shutting down the power in Kyiv. But he certainly wasn’t successful in winning the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people.
But Weiss argues that far less powerful tactics were somehow successful in the United States, where Putin’s goons created fake Facebook accounts to rile up American voters (who were already pretty riled up) and leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks (emails that confirmed what most people already knew and/or thought about Hillary Clinton). Weiss complains that Trump used Russian propaganda “to paint Clinton as sleazy and unethical,” which…c’mon, you don’t exactly need Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to make that argument.
Weiss also complains that the American far-right (Donald Trump and his supporters) and the much smaller American far-left (Jill Stein and the weirdos who vote for her) had connections to Russia. Consequently, conservative complaints about American elites after the 2008 financial crisis and leftist complaints about American foreign policy after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are, for Weiss, at least partially Russian in origin.
To be fair, Weiss occasionally points out that the divisions that led to Donald Trump’s victory were homegrown American divisions, and that you didn’t need to be a one-time KGB agent to see with your own eyes that 50% of Americans view the other 50% of Americans as mortal enemies, and vice versa.
But in one of the book’s images, we see a meme (based on a real Russian meme) showing Satan arm-wrestling Jesus. Satan says (in English), “If Clinton wins, I win!” Jesus responds (in English), “Not if I can help it!”
The meme prompts the viewer to hit “like” to help Jesus win.
As an Orthodox Christian with an Evangelical background, I can tell you that this is pure grade-A ‘Murican-bred religious nationalism, even if it was authored by a cash-hungry teenager in St. Petersburg. This is where policy analysts like Weiss lose track of the plot—they spend lifetimes at elite institutions learning about non-American societies while missing much of American culture and its discontents. (I remember hearing the “Pod Save America” guys talking about how, during the Obama administration, they didn’t understand Evangelicals’ commitment to Israel because they didn’t grow up around Evangelicals. Which, if you live in America and you didn’t know any Evangelicals growing up, you lived a fairly charmed-but-isolated American life.)
All that to say: you don’t need to be a Russian spy to understand the braindead logic of American Christians and deploy that logic in Trump’s favor. You also don’t need RT in order to platform Alex Jones and Richard Spencer, or to smear George Soros. America’s homegrown conservative media is happy to do that without any help from the Kremlin. Steve King didn’t become a Nazi-loving congressman because of Russian hackers in St. Petersburg. He was elected by like-minded racists from Iowa.
Jones and Spencer and King (and Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage) are not, as Weiss claims, “useful idiots” for Moscow. They’re just idiots.
5.
I’m not trying to minimize the effects of Russian propaganda, especially regarding Ukraine. The accusation that Ukraine is overrun with neo-Nazis is, for me, quite serious. But it’s just not true—there are more flesh-and-blood neo-Nazis in the German Bundestag today than in the Ukrainian Rada (where, if I’ve heard correctly, there are precisely zero extreme-right representatives). Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian left supports their country’s war against Russia.
Some propagandists point to historical precedent, the fact that many anti-Stalinist Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. But we conveniently ignore the fact that, for every single Ukrainian collaborator with the S.S., there were hundreds (thousands?) of Ukrainians fighting the Nazis in the Red Army.
You hear these talking points about Ukrainian neo-Nazis, the Azov battalion (who is for Putin what Hamas is for Netanyahu: a scapegoat to justify ethnic cleansing), and Ukrainian collaboration with Nazis repeated in the U.S. all the time…especially (I’m ashamed to say) on the anti-war left, for whom no American military intervention is ever justified. Well, that is, no American intervention except for WWII, but the American left is awfully quick to point out that the Soviets won that war on the West’s behalf. They’re quick to forget that Ukraine was a huge chunk of the Soviet Union, or else they just don’t care because something something collaboration.
As for Putin's propaganda in the West: honestly, if Putin is fighting a propaganda war against the United States, so what? As Julia Ioffe said in an interview after the 2022 invasion, we should be very honest about what’s happening in Ukraine. This war is first and foremost the result of a criminal invasion of Ukraine by Russia, but it’s also an authentic shooting war between Russia and the West. And the shooting war started in 2014 at the earliest.
So why all the hand-wringing about Russian propaganda and cyberattacks? Is it because Putin targeted NPR darlings like Hillary Clinton and wrapped his arms around liberal bêtes noires like Julian Assange, Steve Bannon, Jill Stein, and (above all) Donald Trump? Is liberal rage against Putin about Ukraine or the 2016 election? Are they angry because Putin is a murderous autocrat or because “orange man bad”?
Probably the latter.
In any event, Putin is clearly failing at whatever he’s trying to achieve through these manipulations of Western media. Weiss quotes Putin’s old KGB boss, General Kalugin, who says that the KGB’s prime directive “was not intelligence collection, but subversion—active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO.”
Whelp, mission not accomplished, whether we’re talking about 1989 or 2024.
6.
In Accidental Czar, Weiss includes several entertaining sections (wonderfully illustrated by Brown) on the history of Russia. But these sections rely too much on an interpretation of Russian history that has become popular in Western academic circles, especially since Putin became such a baddie. According to this interpretation, the whole Russian “thing”—the Russian character, the Russian soul, Russian autocracy, Russian bureaucracy, Russian corruption, Russian military resilience—is the consequence of Russia’s unique geographic location: an expanse of difficult-to-defend territory stretching for thousands of kilometers in every direction around Moscow, the center.
Want to understand Russian history and Russian policy? Well, you’ve gotta understand its geography…just as understanding British or American or French or Chinese history and policy requires you to understand their geography.
There’s a lot of truth and power in this kind of analysis, what we call “Great Power politics,” but it’s became especially popular after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. In the two years since the full-scale invasion, such geopolitical analysis has been positively unavoidable. Ideology is out; realism is in. Nineteenth-century politics is back—turns out, it never went away!
And everybody is doing it, on all sides of the Ukraine issue, from John Mearsheimer (realpolitik scholar and opponent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine) to Stephen Kotkin (centrist scholar who advocates for a partition of Ukraine) to innumerable lesser-known foreign policy experts throughout the world (including in China) and even, at times, Alexandr Dugin (the Russian crypto-fascist philosopher), Timothy Snyder (pro-Ukrainian historian who personally purchased drones for the Ukrainian army), and Antony Blinken (our internationalist Secretary of State who has never met a Muslim-majority nation he wouldn’t like to invade).
Great Power analysis of global politics can be an incredibly powerful tool for understanding why certain nations prefer certain policies. But it can also serve as voodoo cultural studies, especially when you start ascribing “national personalities,” “historical patterns,” and “cultural characteristics” to the locations of rivers and mountains.
And I worry about the extent to which we’re all overcorrecting toward Great Power theories of history after the (bogus) “end of history” euphoria of the 1990s and the (failed) multi-trillion-dollar construction of American military hegemony in the early 2000s. Now America is just one of three global superpowers playing chess with a bunch of marginal nations full of newly un-colonized brown people whom we don’t exactly trust. Some of those nations, like Brazil and India, are moving up in the world, and for America, now is the time to win them for the West, for liberalism, for international institutions, and for global capital. This is America’s foreign policy project for the twenty-first century, and Putin is making that project a little…complicated.
That, more than anything, is why we're fighting in Ukraine.
One last thing...
When Madeline Albright is blurbing your book, you know that either you’ve written a book that Madeline Albright really happens to like or you’ve written state department propaganda. Accidental Czar is the latter. A lot of the material is completely true, but it’s still anti-Russian propaganda. I enjoyed the book, but I don’t trust it. The basic facts are accurately represented, but the reason they have been compiled in this way, in this graphic novel, is to construct a narrative about American naivete and the need for robust action against America’s enemies.
As with most stories we tell about Russia, we’re talking about us, not the Russian people or the Ukrainian people. Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine's diverse and oft-conflicting stories about themselves get lost amid our constant storytelling.
March 1, 2023
As Madeleine Albright says on the cover, you have to open up this extraordinary book. I had heard about this book but was pleasantly excited to learn it is a graphic novel. Story is well organized, clearly footnoted and flows through the story of Putin’s life and the politics of Russia easily. I loved reading this and will read again and share. This novel gives understanding of Russia’s history and how Putin rose up through the ranks to leadership. It draws parallels to Russia’s history. Having recently finished a book on Catherine the Great, these parallels made sense. I hope many Americans ( and others) will read this wonderful book.
May 7, 2023
3.5 stars
A pretty decent broad strokes overview of what's been happening in Russian politics and history for the last x number of years, how Putin became involved, how Europe/North American affected these things, with a no nonsense, easy to follow graphic style.
A pretty decent broad strokes overview of what's been happening in Russian politics and history for the last x number of years, how Putin became involved, how Europe/North American affected these things, with a no nonsense, easy to follow graphic style.
January 23, 2023
A thorough documentation of Putin's rise and long incumbency as Russia's dictator. There isn't really much elegance to Weiss' script - he basically just hammers out accounts of Putin's life before and during his presidency, with some occassional sidebars to include Weiss' own experience working as the White House Russia expert. Box Brown supplies some effective cartooning to get the story going and shifts the color palette with successive chapters. It makes for a bit of a break in the tedium, which this book sort was due to the austere prose choice. This book probably didn't appeal to me as much since my interest in Putin is quite limited, but it was a decently engaging read nonetheless.
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