Putin

by Philip Short

'A perfect mirror to its subject... should be compulsory reading' Observer

Vladimir Putin is a pariah to the West.

He has the power to reduce the West to nuclear ashes. He invades his neighbours, meddles in western elections and orders assassinations. His regime is autocratic and corrupt. Yet many Russians continue to support him. Under Putin's leadership, Russia has once again become a force to be reckoned with.

Philip Short's magisterial biography explores in unprecedented depth the personality of Russia's leader and demolishes many of our preconceptions about Putin's Russia.

To explain is not to justify. Putin's regime is dark. But on closer examination, much of what we think we know about him turns out to rest on half-truths. This book is as close as we will come to understanding Russia's ruler.

'Short's pushback against lazy, convenient myth-making is refreshing' The Times

'Elegantly written and pacy' Financial Times

'Extensively covers the dark moments of Putin's career.... The Putin of Short's book is not someone you would invite to dinner' New York Times

Genres: Biography, History, Russia, Politics, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Russian History

848 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 30, 2022

About the author

Philip Short is a British journalist and author specializing in biographies of historical dictators, he studied at Cambridge University, he worked as a journalist for the BBC for 25 years as a foreign correspondent(1972-97), a job that allowed him to travel widely and experience wildly different cultures, it would prove a great learning experience that still benefits him as an author.

After his work for the BBC, he taught journalism in the University of Iowa, in the US. He now resides in Provence, USA, with his wife and son.

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philip Short demonstrates his integrity by starting with the demolition of a conspiracy theory about Putin. He then gives us a sensitive and intelligent account of the personality of Russia's leader based on in-depth research of his early years and his time in St. Petersburg.

A good chunk of the rest of the book is a little less impressive because, once Putin enters the Presidency, it becomes quite clear that the author does not have, perhaps cannot have, the access to close sources that he needs.

Still, with caveats about his later sources (which often are, as he notes, witnesses for the prosecution), the account of Putin's Presidency, if somewhat too close to the standard Western narrative, is still valuable and (as far as the sources allow) factual.

It may not be the last word on Putin but it largely displaces all previous words on the man and his times. It should be the first point of call for someone coming to the subject for the first time. The notes are also excellent and revealing.

So where does the book take us? Short has already upset a lot of people by bothering to understand where Putin is coming from and the role of the West in driving him to decisions that may be good or bad but are logical and almost inevitable.

In fact, what comes out of the book are the unsurprising conclusions that the current crisis is very much the creation of confused, narcissistic and often inept policy-making in the West and that Putin has an analytical mind often much superior to that of his opponents.

What may surprise people more is the evidence that Putin was very much a pro-Western politician for much of his career although always placing Russia first (he saw no necessary incompatibility between those two positions until quite recently).

Russians I know have told me that he was often regarded as both excessively pragmatic and rather weak in defending Russia's interests for many years. In some respects we might see Putin as a man who feels badly let down by the West and who is now hitting back hard in frustration.

The warts of Putin are demonstrated (as one would expect in a largely Western narrative by an honest journalist) although perhaps there is a lack of full explanation and understanding of the political economy that he is trying to manage.

Russia is dysfunctional but it is dysfunctional because Western management of the fall of the Soviet Union was destructive and negative. It was always going to be a slow process getting a busted nation back to a creditable status as a workable economy and society.

Almost every action taken by the regime (albeit frequently crossing Western 'red lines') is only a reflection of behaviours undertaken by the West itself. What the West cannot forgive is the inability to revolutionise the State into a non-corrupt, legalistic liberal democracy.

Russia is more interested in recovery and survival where economic recovery and survival competes with concerns about national security. Russian fears about the latter are often justifiable even if we find it tragic that smaller Ukraine has become the pawn in a greater game.

To Western politicians, severe provocation is no justification but there is an air of the small boy picking on a smaller boy under the protection of the playground bully. Severe provocation is what it was and the Western bully, merely throwing a cosh to the smaller lad, must take some of the blame.

Putin himself is a very interesting man. If he has had an analytical fault, it has probably been one of ignorance of Western arrogance and of American ignorance of Russia and so a rather naive belief in the possibility of Russia being treated as an equal by the hegemon.

The analytical skills are those of an intelligent boy from the wrong side of the tracks, an outsider, who is trained under the old regime and learns life by doing, avoiding mistakes and learning from the mistakes when he cannot avoid them.

Do we like Putin? Well, oddly, one finds oneself in some sympathy for him despite his faults. He learns fast and seems to have an inner ethical core often overwhelmed by the balance of interest involved in surviving what he rules.

What we do see is consummate political skill in holding together the potential for chaos that was post-Soviet Russia and building sufficient prosperity and national security to feel able to claim once again something like great power status.

This delusion may be a delusion shared by two other nations on the winning side of the Second World War - France and Britain - to the effect that the hegemon would ever truly treat them as equals. They would all be favoured 'free' satrapies with pre-set 'values' or nothing.

Russian pride and exceptionalism, the sacrifices of industrialisation and war, the realisation that the old regime they once believed in was an inept, corrupt lie have conspired to create the noble but existentially dangerous view that it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

It is all a matter of timing. Russia has got trapped. Whereas China can afford to wait and let the hegemon slowly decline, Russia has had either to live on its knees like Britain or find that its nemesis would drive it to die on its feet. That is why the current war is existential.

Although Washington back-tracked from regime change as a proxy war aim, there is little doubt that it wants a Russia run from the centre by liberal Muscovites prepared to impose Western values on the smaller towns and rural areas in a modernisation that would unravel a culture.

Putin evidently believed both in the efficacy of the market and in the cultural importance of Russia. At a certain point a Russian leader was going to have to choose between the two. Putin's gamble is a low key version of the German gamble in the 1930s - can a targeted culture, good or evil, survive?

At the time of writing, it is hard to see who will win in Ukraine. The West has the money and is sending substantial military support to Ukraine but it is also finding it difficult to cope with the consequences of its economic war on Russia. Ukraine is technically bust already.

Russia has achieved a temporary victory for the ideology of national self-determination in taking the bulk of the Donbas and Kherson (as well as holding Crimea) but at considerable cost. If it dies on its feet, it will also have opened up space for a resentful global anti-colonialist ideology.

The US is not going to lose entirely because it is too rich to lose and, for China and for the US, techniques and ideas are being tested for a very different end-game - will the Chinese elite bend the knee to the world order or structure itself to be resilient for a new existential struggle?

The posturing and sabre-rattling over Taiwan are really about trying to work out which path China will choose - the early Putin strategy of accommodation and de facto submission or the late Putin strategy of defiance and potential isolation from the core of the global economy.

Europe, meanwhile, has been turned into even more of an unstable satrapy, its energy dependence on Russia merely exchanged for one on the US and its Gulf allies and dodgy African states. Europe is being forced into global imperialism despite itself and to spend billions on guns to boot.

The next few months (August 2022) are going to be very interesting. Although the cards are stacked against Russia, its recent resilience is part of that story as well as the fact that it still sits on vast natural resources and last resort nuclear weaponry.

Vladimir Putin, a frustrated and angry if pragmatic man in his late sixties, backed largely by his own people, is key to what happens next and what happens next could be a global disaster if the West continues to push and prod as it has done since the 1990s.

But there is another factor in all this. The US President has an approval rating around 38%, the hawkish British Prime Minister has been ousted, the Italian Government is in disarray and the German Government is talking about energy rationing.

The economic war unleashed by the West may present serious medium to long term issues for Russia requiring it to be more authoritarian to survive as a culture but that same economic war has delivered high inflation, disruption and possible recession in sensitive democracies.

Personally, I think both Russia and the West will survive this but both will be much weakened in the long run to the benefit of the growing network of non-Western nations prepared neither to be re-colonised not dragged into a new Cold War.

That is a worse result for the West than Russia since the latter can turn in on itself but the raison d'etre of the West is expansion and hegemony. There is a real possibility of a period of implosive politics within the West starting with the US Mid-Terms in November.

The key question left by this book is that of succession. Russian liberals have been knocked sideways. They are as secondary to the big picture as more rational populists like Orban are to the big picture in the West. Lone voices with an alternative vision have been shunted aside by history.

There is almost certainly no leading candidate for the Presidency after Putin who is not going to be approved by Putin and share the view that existential survival of Russian political culture is prior even to participation in the global system. Medvedev speaks like a Russian hawk nowadays.

Wise counsel in the West would have long since negotiated with Putin on sphere of influence lines but there is no wise counsel left. Raw emotion on both sides has taken over. Men, money and material are going to be poured into Ukraine until one side or the other breaks.

Whatever the outcome, this book is a highly recommended account of at least part of how we got into the mess we are in and why no one deep in the hole is going to stop digging - in Washington, London, Berlin, Ky'iv/Kiev, Donetsk, Warsaw or Moscow.

Whatever the slight faults of taking some sources at face value, relying too much on Western sources after 2000 and perhaps failing to explain some of the less contentious aspects of Kremlin administration, Short provides a sad but fair account which should be more widely circulated.

It should certainly make Westerners stop and think about their own moral compass, about their geo-political narcissism and their arrogance before throwing so many (often rightly thrown) stones at Putin's glass house.

His regime is partly dysfunctional, still too inefficient, undoubtedly corrupt and increasingly authoritarian but it is also hard done by, bullied and trying to save some things worth saving. Neither side comes out of this book smelling of roses.

As to poor battered Ukraine, it has become both target of an attack by an older brother on a younger and the battle ground of a far more serious (potentially) proxy war between competing system. It is hitting back hard but it is just a pawn in a bigger game.

Much resides on the outcome of this war and, having been defeated in Afghanistan, having left the Middle East in a two decade mess and desperate to deter its real enemy China, the US is playing this to win over the bones of Ukrainians and bank accounts of Europeans alike.

Putin too is not going to give way - based on this book, he will do what it takes to hold 'Novorossiya' at the least and has got used to long brutal wars of attrition which he mostly wins simply by pragmatically accepting least worst outcomes.

So, read this book, despair at humanity, watch the horror unfold and ask why we should place our trust in the people who got us to this point. As to Russians, they must make up their own mind about Putin and it seems the bulk of them have.

[Hadrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short, a British journalist and former foreign correspondent for the BBC, is one of the many authors who wrote biographies of Putin, to chronicle or decipher his life. To list only three examples, Karen Dawisha, who asserts that Putin's entire tenure since the 2000s was directed to form a regime where he and his closest associates could maintain personal power and profit - emphasis on the profit. Or, in Steven Lee Myers's account, historical grievances and a sense of indignation at Russia's weakness in the 1990s motivated Putin, projecting strength and fearing chaos. Or, in Masha Gessen's account, Putin is not immoral but amoral - he is a figure who believes in power, the violence of the world, and nothing else.

Short, having written one book on Russia before, had turned to biographies: Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Francois Mitterrand. This most recent book, the result of eight years of research and dozens of interviews, starts with the authorial motives - attempts to understands Putin's reasoning and motivations. In the beginning, there is curious editorial decision to focus on a negative history - that Putin was not responsible for the bombings in Moscow in 1999, where rumors continued to circulate about their role in his consolidation of power. Then the early stages in life, the hardscrabble existence in post-war Leningrad. "Putin was already Putin before he joined the KGB," Short says, as if time spent in that intelligence agency left no impact on him.

There is a consistent thread of playing down or casting doubt on the worst stories - that Putin was not directly responsible for the assassinations of Boris Nemtsov, that he was not responsible for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal - but that he was responsible for the deaths of Alexander Litvinenko and the attempted poisoning of Alexei Navalny.

In terms of foreign policy, Short is in the business of repeating deflections or self-justifications, or second-guessing without citing all the sources. There are some inline citations but nearly enough - out of a need to not be "too academic" not everything is cited. He repeats the previous assertion that Russian foreign policy was predicated as a response to NATO expansion - never mind Putin's own statements denouncing Lenin for daring to permit the Ukrainians to have their own Soviet Socialist Republic. It is a listing of the "what-about-this", and finding an excuse for every action or transgression. There is nothing on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, guaranteeing Ukrainian territorial integrity.

And for Putin's own personal wealth and corruption? The Panama Papers only discussed in a few short pages, which revealed the vast fortunes of Putin's inner circle, but not Putin himself. And where did all this largesse come from? As if we are supposed to believe he lives like a monk. He is asking us to give the benefit of the doubt, at a time where a reading audience is probably least likely to do so.

The book closes with a few short pages about the current stage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and on the future - "[Putin] believes America and Russia will eventually settle into a less contentious relationship." Maybe so, if authoritarian hacks or other useful idiots worm their way into office.

This biography does have its strengths, particularly on Putin's early life and time in Dresden - those interviews and memoirs could not have been easy to come by. But it retains wide gaps; and that its publication only comes not long after the start of the great crime. Writing biographies of the living is a risky business: they can always betray your expectations. Can a serious biography can only be written after the obituary?

[Brett C · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Asked many years later what had influenced him most and what he would most like to be able to undo, he replied: 'The Soviet Union's collapse.'" pg 409

This was an exceptionally well-researched and well-written account on the 2007 Time Life Magazine Man of the Year Vladimir Putin. Philip Short wrote a very dense and detailed account of Putin's family, his unruly childhood, martial artist, his time as counterintelligence KGB turned politician, and the eventual historical figure he is today. His early years of martial arts and desire to become a KGB operative played a large role in his making.

From judo he learnt how to use others' strengths against them and was to exploit their vulnerabilities. At the [KGB] Dzerzhinsky School he was taught that 'all else being equal, the side which goes onto the attack will achieve the best results', a principle the KGB called nastupatelnost, 'offensive posture'. That too, was familiar, both from judo and from his childhood fights.

Putin's character fitted the kind of the work the KGB did. He liked to stay in the background and observe others, rather than to be the center of attention himself. He was disciplined and pragmatic and able to concentrate his energies on the priority of the moment. He had been brought up not to show emotions, which was another quality the KGB valued. pg 94

For me the book really took off in 2000s-era after he took a country "groping around in the dark" to become a stable world power (pg 294). He became president, his second term re-election, and the power vertical that morphed into what is present-day Russia. Short explained lots of areas: the economy, reform and realignment, dealings with the Chechen conflict, bolstering Russian Orthodoxy to become a pillar of the regime, the Belsan school massacre, the war with Georgia and Ossetia, falling out with western European leadership and the Bush administration over Iraq & Afghanistan, Syria, and his gradual assumption of power as the ultimate decision-maker.

Short described Putin's actions and logic as he climbed to power. This included dealing with dissidents, protests, human rights, and solidifying his role on the world stage. Putin's dealings with dissidents included Aleksei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, and the one I clearly remember: Aleksandr Litvinenko, an FSB defector, who was poisoned with radioactive polonium in London, 2006.

This was a very informative and thorough read about Vladimir Putin. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in Russia and Russian history & politics. Thanks!

[Darya Silman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title PUTIN: HIS LIFE AND TIMES mimics William Taubman's famous book title 'Gorbachev: His Life and Times.' The two works stand in alliance as deeply penetrating stories with psychological twists, based on a wide range of sources and interviews. 600 pages of PUTIN (plus 200 pages of notes) renders every development of Putin's life starting from his parents' background and ending, though slightly in a rush, in the fall of 2022, after the first months of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine. Philip Short doesn't shy away from portraying Putin as a human being and, as such, a product of the Soviet system and its beliefs as well as a united whole of many contradictory personal traits.

With leniency, equal to Taubman's sympathy toward Mikhail Gorbachev, the author describes Putin's not well-off childhood where a wrong step - considering young Vladimir's stubbornness - could have led to a different outcome, not as a president but criminal. While picturing the subsequent years, Short tries to remain balanced: he doesn't use hindsight of the year 2023, with war with Ukraine raging and Russia being a pariah as a consequence, to present Putin as an unrepented villain, the West as a savior and beacon of democracy. In his opinion, the opposition between American exceptionalism and Russian exceptionalism is the cause of the current escalation, reminiscent of the Cold War years when both countries viewed their relations in zero-win terms. Concessions are made only in neutral spheres like space exploration, but on the whole (my ruminations here), the countries' negotiations look like (Russian saying) a dialogue between a deaf person and a mute one: neither side hears the other, and each side considers itself superior over another. Each side feels infallible in its pursuit of national interests, disregarding small players that are trying to navigate between the two giants and not get crushed in the process. Ukraine has a value as second Vietnam, a battlefield of American democracy vs. Russia's authoritarian regime, not as an independent country with its population, economics, and policy.

If you are a Russia hawk, Timothy Snyder alike, there is a huge possibility you would strongly disagree - or even be disgusted - by Short's position toward Putin's politics as a combination of calculated steps and the necessity to react to unpredictable events. Invasion of Georgia as a counterweight to Kosovo? No way! Cuban missile crisis vs. American missiles in Poland? It's not the same thing! Short does equate these events as does his object of research, Putin. This leads us to the interesting question of who is right and who is wrong in such debates. While admitting the shortcomings of the American democracy, you, as a Russia hawk, would vehemently advocate for it to be adopted worldwide and, in some cases, advise me to go live in Russia or North Korea without the freedoms of the abovementioned democracy. I'd point out once again the deficiencies of any state system, and the futile dialogue will go on and on, and on... But the strong side of democracy is a potentially wide variety of opinions.

Between these two extremes - those who loathed Putin and everything he stood for and the contrarians who tried to understand what made him act as he did - there was no middle ground. To propose a balanced account of Russia during the years that Trump was in power was like trying to argue that Hitler had redeeming features. (p.603)

PUTIN: HIS LIFE AND TIMES brilliantly, in-depth, answers the question of why. Your acceptance of the answer is another matter.

My reviews of books about previous Soviet/Russian leaders:
Nikita Khrushchev
Leonid Brezhnev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Boris Yeltsin by Tim Colton (still on my TBR list)

[Brit MacRae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: My mom’s side of my family is Ukrainian and there’s a lot of hatred (both on a familial level and obviously, on a global level towards Putin.) It felt slightly gross/wrong to read a biography from the protagonist's (his) POV, but it felt important, even for morbid curiosity, to see all sides.

Double Disclaimer: This should be required reading for anyone interested in global affairs.

This was an unflinching, hard hitting read by former BBC correspondent and author Philip Short. This biography forces us to look at Vladimir Putin’s choices from Russia’s POV. Putin is an expansive and shockingly up-to-date biography (seriously, the invasion of Ukraine begins on page 656 and the first 655 pages are eight years worth of Short’s research on Putin’s life up until this horrendous moment in time.) Short covers Putin’s life from childhood until present day and he’s not afraid to point out Putin’s frank lies and various contradictions over the years.

While Putin is still alive and his story incomplete, Philip Short provided a genuinely compelling account of Putin’s life so far. A long but worthwhile read.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Strong Leader

Since the 2014 invasion of Crimea and then the 2022 invasion of Ukraine Vladimir Putin has become a cartoon villain in the west. Although one cannot condone an invasion of a sovereign state, is Putin the monster that he is portrayed to be? Philip Short does an excellent job on trying to understand Putin and twenty first century Russia.

Like the opposite of Mikhail Gorbachev, Putin is generally loved in Russia and loathed abroad. Opinion polls there regular place him with an extremely high percentage. One may argue it is a corrupt system, there aren’t many alternatives and rivals are stuck in a bureaucracy so frustrating it makes Victorian chancery courses seem straight forward. However, what cannot be argued is that Putin has a grip power and is a strong almost monarchical leader.

Putin is not hard to understand in my opinion. A product of the Soviet Union, he had family members which felt the purge under Stalin. Putin always has ambition and so studied law, much to his peers dismay, to join the KGB. Unremarkable in features, cold and determined, he was perfect for the job. Eventually being placed in Germany, a well desired posting, due to the wages and opportunities there. Everything in his life has always been calculated, measured to his end goal, whether to get that said posting or to climb the greasy pole as Benjamin Disraeli would say. Putin has steered Russia into stability and confidence following the disastrous Boris Yeltsin years, however the question now asks ‘where does he take Russia now?’ And ‘what will happen after Putin?’ His third term will of course end in 2024 and he knows he cannot go on forever.

The road to Ukraine is one steeped in 1200 years of Russian history, from the inheritance of the Kievan Rus. A medieval principality in an area that straddles, modern Poland, Ukraine and Russia. The stories of both Ukraine and Russia have been intricately tied for a millennium. However, the modern journey begins with in the 1960s when Nikita Khrushchev transferred the Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, in the USSR. Following the breakup of the Union, the new state of the Russian Federation has always feared growing influence and power of NATO, which Putin says is essentially military arm of the United Nations.

When Putin came to power, the relationship with the West and US president George W Bush was positive, the future looked bright. However, as Putin has learnt realpolitik over 22 years in power, being friendly with the USA will only suit one country: the USA. The relationship has not been two sided and Putin has felt this wraith. Allowing America to use his country for airbases in the war on terror to supporting their Middle Eastern causes, Putin has found this is only a one way street. The recognition of Kosovo (to Russia’s ally Serbia’s dismay) to almost building nuclear missile bases in Eastern Europe, to canvassing former Soviet countries for NATO agreements, the relationship has turned sour. But with this Putin’s confidence has grown. He has rejected the western lead and travelled down his own path, doing what he sees is best for Russia.

Russia needs a strong rule, it always has. With this the values do not fully align with Western politics or ideals. But is this because we just report on them in outrage? Western countries have invaded over sovereign states over recent years, so why different for Putin? All of these wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine) will turn out to be long and costly for the invader. Assassinating journalists and rivals has also hit the news in recent years, but Western Governments have also been caught with their pants down in the great game of espionage.

What Short does it put this into perspective from the man in control of the ‘wild east’. A hard man who has shown vulnerabilities, has made mistakes but isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo. This is not a condoning of the actions, but a study. Done excellently. I really enjoyed this study of the modern Russia and Europe.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

What do we learn about Vladimir Putin from the news media in the West? He’s a kleptocrat, with a fortune variously estimated at $40 billion or $100 billion. A thug, with a brutal history as a KGB officer. He came to power in 2000 on the strength of a series of FSB operations that cost the lives of hundreds of Russian citizens. And in invading Ukraine in 2022, he has set out on a course to restore the expansive borders of the old Soviet Empire. Yet none of these things are true, as biographer Philip Short makes clear in his nuanced, in-depth account of the Russian President’s life. This newest biography of Vladimir Putin is nothing if not well balanced.

A CLOUDY PICTURE
As Short explains, “Normally a biographer’s task is to expound the ‘why’ and ‘how” of his subject’s life: the underlying facts are rarely in dispute. With Putin, that is often not the case. . . [W]idely accepted assumptions turn out on closer scrutiny to be partial, misleading, or downright wrong.” And the biographer’s obsessive research into the hidden facts does a great service in making this clear again and again in the course of his story.

THE CONSUMMATE POLITICIAN WHO RULES RUSSIA TODAY
Make no mistake. Short is no fan of Vladimir Putin. In the course of nearly 900 pages, he details the sometimes shocking and often deplorable steps the man has taken to secure and increase his power. However, at the same time, he leads us to understand that the man now presiding over the world’s largest expanse of territory is brilliant as well as unscrupulous. He leads a nation of 146 million people, deftly balancing the contrary forces that surround him. The siloviki, the past and present members of the security services who dominate his government. A gaggle of billionaire oligarchs. The organized criminal gangs of the Russian Mafia. And the occasional bothersome dissidents.

Meanwhile, despite the draft and recent reverses in Ukraine, Putin remains highly popular with the Russian public. Perhaps in part because there seems to be no one else who could possibly hold the country together. As Short describes it, “It was a world in which all the barriers were fluid, where yesterday’s criminal was tomorrow’s business magnate and a politician today was a criminal tomorrow.” Image trying to preside over all this!

THE CENTRAL ROLE OF THE WEST IN PUTIN’S EVOLUTION
For anyone who has followed developments in Russia since the turn of the century, it’s abundantly clear that Vladimir Putin was not always a bitter foe of the West. In fact, during his first term in office as president (2000-2004) he actively sought to partner with his western neighbors and the United States. But, as Short sees it, Western actions steadily drove him into opposition and, later, enmity.

The seminal event at the root of the problem was the expansion of NATO. As Short observes, “many of the old Russian hands [in the United States]—George Kennan, Richard Pipes, Jack Matlock and Strobe Talbott—. . . warned that any short-term gains from admitting the Eastern and Central Europeans to NATO would be outweighed by the long-term damage it would do to the relationship with Russia. The same message was conveyed to the [Clinton] White House by the CIA.” A few years later, the Bush Administration’s ill-considered and ultimately tragic invasion of Iraq worsened the problem.

There were consequences. “The term, ‘payback,’ can be applied to much of what Putin did during his third term [2012-18]. Russia’s annexation of Crimea was payback for Kosovo, ‘the place where it all started.’ . . . Russia’s intervention in Syria was payback for Libya and Iraq. . . [And] Russia’s interference in the US election was payback for America’s efforts to spread—or ‘impose,’ as Putin preferred to say—its own, supposedly universal, system of values to other nations.” In other words, in a sense—from Putin’s perspective—we asked for all this.

PUTIN’S THREE GUIDING FOREIGN POLICY PRINCIPLES
When he first came to power, “Putin’s interest in a better relationship with America was genuine and not just presentational,” Short asserts. But In March 2000, he made his position unmistakably clear in an interview with the BBC’s David Frost, which he used “to convey a message.

** “First, that, under his leadership, Russia would insist on equal treatment.

** “Second, that it expected ‘full-fledged participation in decision-making, or, as Tony Blair would say later, to have a seat at the top table.

** “Third, that the legacy of the Cold War would not go away on its own: real efforts would be needed on both sides if it were to be surmounted.”

For the next twenty years or more, these would be the key principles driving Russian policy towards the West and, above all, toward the former ‘main adversary,’ the United States.” And now we see where those principles—consistently disregarded by the West—have gotten us.

IS RUSSIA TOTALITARIAN?
“Putin’s Russia had become more authoritarian, less pluralistic, than Yeltsin’s,” Short insists. “But there was no comparison with Soviet practice in the 1970s and early 80s, let alone to a genuinely totalitarian state like China, where the media must follow to the letter the guidelines of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department about what must as well as what cannot be said.” Yet after just “12 years in power, Putin had come to see himself as the incarnation of the state . . . not a president but a priest-king.” And, given the deteriorating situation in Ukraine as I write, there’s no telling where this self-regarding mindset might take Russia—and the world—in the years ahead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philip Short was born in Bristol, England, in 1945 and studied at Queen’s College, Cambridge. After six years as a freelance foreign correspondent, he joined the BBC, where he worked for 25 years. He is the author of six nonfiction books, including biographies of Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Francois Mitterand. His biography of Vladimir Putin extends the streak. Can we expect him to take on an American President next?

[John Devlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A smart analytical book that knows where the facts are and how far to reach into the realm of supposition.

My first thought is that it’s the mistake of the victors playing out again.

After WWI, the allies piled on a defeated Germany and thus engendered the very forces that led to the Second World War.

It seems that the US winning the Cold War is determined to make the same mistakes over a beaten Soviet Union.

To be clear: my position is nothing happening in Ukraine is worth an increase in the chance of nuclear war.

Putin was a young hooligan, uninterested in school, devoted more to a kind of judo than anything else. Through timely academic applications and real success in that sport, Putin found himself in law school and then the KGB.

A competent administrator, Putin became the right hand of a Leningrad politician, Sobchak, as Gorbachev began liberalization.

Like Stalin before him, who actually ran things, while the Lenin and the Trotskys speechified, Putin demonstrated a managerial flair for running Leningrad.

Later, Putin would help his boss flee charges. That loyalty was noticed by Moscow and Yeltsin.

Putin became the indispensable man in Moscow and then it’s president successor to Yeltsin.

That said, here’s some book quotes and what I think people should garner from them

“In this one Russian city, more people died than all the Americans who have died in every foreign war the United States has ever fought.”
—750,000 Russians died in Leningrad. The great patriotic war is still central to Russian self identity.

“Russia lost 27 million people, 15 per cent of the population, during the war, a gargantuan blood-letting from which the country has still not recovered. For Russians, it was the defining event of the twentieth century, overshadowing the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War, the horrors of Stalin’s purges and the collapse of communism.”


“In the Soviet Union, that was what most people did. There was no point saving money because there was so little to spend it on”

“No honest man survived Stalin” and more down to earth, during Brezhnev’s era, “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”


“Private ownership, Putin concluded, was key. If people were to be motivated, they had to be allowed to accumulate property and to pass it on to their children. If the economy was to develop, there had to be competition.”
—even Putin understands socialism can’t work.



“known as blat, had always been part of the Soviet system. But there was a difference between voluntarily giving preference to a friend; feeling obliged to give preference”
Drunkenness was such a problem that in some parts of the Soviet Union, one child in six was born mentally retarded from an alcoholic mother.”
—several aspects of how broken Russia was when Putin took over.




‘free-market system, an endeavour which the American Ambassador, Jack Matlock, described as ‘like trying to convert a submarine into an airplane while keeping it functioning with the same crew throughout’.
—more evidence of the impossible struggle Putin was dealt, and more evidence of how tyranny was inevitable.


“At one high school, one in six of the girls in the senior classes said they wished to work as prostitutes after graduation. Half of the rest thought that was a legitimate choice but were deterred by the risk of AIDS or parental opposition.”
—more broken Russia


“Clinton put pressure on the IMF to disburse aid which had been delayed. The French President, Jacques Chirac, provided a secret loan of 1.5 billion US dollars, and Germany 3.5 billion, to be used to pay pension arrears and finance other social needs. The businessmen, meeting in February at the World Economic Forum in Davos, agreed to provide Yeltsin with all the media and financial resources they could muster.”
—the US gave Yeltsin billions so he could win his election.
The US tampered in Russia’s election far more than some facebooks memes



“To ensure that there would be no return to communist rule, the United States and other Western governments aided Yeltsin’s reelection campaign. Nonetheless, a precedent had been created which, 20 years later, would come back to haunt Americans–or should have done, had anyone remembered it.”
—The US is a giant hypocrite in this


“Crimea territory, a peninsula almost the size of Belgium, jutting out into the Black Sea, had been part of Russia since 1783. It was transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954”
—Crimea is part of Russia

Baker had told Gorbachev in February 1990, in the context of German reunification, that ‘not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction’. 70 When Gorbachev doubled down and insisted that there should not be ‘any extension of the zone of NATO’…

…Although nothing was put in writing, from then on the State Department worked on the basis that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO and so did America’s allies. 72 Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and Margaret..

…Thatcher’s successor, John Major, about possible NATO enlargement, the British Prime Minister assured him that ‘nothing of the sort will happen’”
— so what is Russia to think when NATO continues to expand? The USSR has been dead for 30 years.


“short-term gains from admitting the Eastern and Central Europeans to NATO would be outweighed by the long-term damage it would do to the relationship with Russia. The same message was conveyed to the White House by the CIA”
— warnings a decade ago

“There was no way that American security would be enhanced by taking on a commitment to defend the European states abutting Russia’s borders. Francis Richards, who was at that time Under Secretary at the British Foreign Office, remembered: ‘No one was going to pause and consider the wisdom of giving them an unconditional military guarantee, which seemed to me lunacy.’ It was a blank cheque that could never be honoured, and ‘dishing out cheques that can’t be honoured is … destroying the credibility of NATO as a defensive organisation.”


It would be wrong to focus on NATO enlargement and the Kosovo affair as the origin of all America’s subsequent problems with Russia. But the combination was devastating. As Moscow saw it, less than three weeks after NATO had admitted its first Eastern European members, it had begun bombarding Serbia, a traditional Russian ally. It was the first sustained combat operation the alliance had conducted since its founding, 50 years before, and it had been undertaken without UN authorisation and in disregard of Yeltsin’s entreaties to find a diplomatic solution. Without the bombing raids, Milošević would no doubt have bludgeoned the Kosovars into submission. But under international law, Kosovo was part of Serbia. To Russia, NATO’s intervention was a crude attempt to modify a post-war European border by armed force.”
— a valid point


“ 335 hostages died, including 186 children, killed either by the hostage-takers or when the building was stormed.”
- a terrorist attack in Chechnya, and I bet you never heard of it. I hadn’t. More evidence that we have no business interfering in places where we know less than nothing.

Ingushetia
— that’s a province in Russia, yeah, thought it was a made up word too


“Ambassador Burns had written to Condoleezza Rice earlier that month:Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In my more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russia’s interests. At this stage a MAP offer would be seen not as a technical step … but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond.”


In speech after speech, Putin listed the obstacles to economic growth: high taxes, capital flight, the ‘offshorisation’ of profits, the arbitrariness of the bureaucracy, corruption in the state monopolies, rampant crime, uncompetitive industry, inadequate guarantees for property rights, restrictions on the buying and selling of land, a still primitive banking system, the burden of foreign debt, the failings of the judicial system and demographic decline.”
— more impossible challenges for a president to overcome without abdication of civil rights

“The notion that land could be bought and sold, like any other commodity, was so alien that when it was debated in the Duma, in 2001, the Communists swarmed the tribune and a fist fight broke out.“
— more evidence of how backward Russia was even 20 years ago

“When Putin took office, the Russian bureaucracy, consisting of public servants, members of the security forces and employees of state-owned enterprises, numbered 25 million people, more than a third of the total workforce. In March 2004, he launched an ambitious programme…
Far from declining, public-sector employment during Putin’s first two terms increased by three million to reach 40 per cent of the workforce, almost twice the level in developed market economies.”
—America’s deep state would be envious

“For the Americans, there were no good options. Military intervention was ruled out. ‘Are we prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia?’, Bush’s National Security Adviser, Steve Hadley, asked. Short of that, Washington’s leverage was negligible.”
Is won’t fight in Georgia or Crimea but will on Ukraine proper? Why?


When folks think Putin if pushed wouldn’t put nuclear weapons in play bc that would be illogical..
“After 12 years in power, Putin had come to see himself as the incarnation of the state. He felt ‘one with the Russian soil,’ he said. ‘Russia is my life … Not for a second can I imagine myself without her … It’s not just love that I feel … I feel part of our people.’ It was not a president
but a priest-king speaking…
…It brought to mind Angela Merkel’s comment, years earlier, that he was living on a different planet…

…The staging of the Security Council meeting at which he had publicly cross-examined his subordinates had overtones of megalomania…

…Nixon’s ‘madman’ theory, intended to make him appear so irrational and unpredictable that adversaries would hesitate before testing his resolve.

And then there’s Ukraine and it’s sordid history..
“Putin’s grievances against Ukraine went back to the 1990s. The country’s role in the break-up of the Soviet Union; the status of Crimea; squabbles over the lease of port facilities at Sevastopol for Russia’s Black Sea fleet, arguments over the demarcation of the two countries’ borders; disputes over culture, language, history and even between rival branches of the Orthodox Church–all ensured that Ukraine would be Russia’s prickliest partner,
Putin starting to regard the EU as a stalking horse for NATO. He told Angela Merkel: ‘When I look at the membership of the EU and I look at the membership of NATO, I see basically the same thing. So when I hear about an Association Agreement for Ukraine, I know that NATO will follow….But, above all, Merkel was concerned that no one seemed to have thought through the implications of Ukrainian partnership. In public, Putin insisted that Russia would respect whatever decision Ukraine made. In private he offered Yanukovych a choice. If he signed with the EU, Russia would retaliate; if he did not, Moscow would provide substantial aid, including preferential prices for gas and a 15 billion US dollar credit. All through the summer of 2013, the Ukrainian leader dithered. Even with hindsight, it is hard to understand why no one in the European Commission realised that they were playing with fire. Ronald McIntosh, who had held a succession of posts at the top of the British civil service, wrote in disbelief: Did the European policy-makers in Brussels (the capital of a country whose ethnic, linguistic and religious differences are uncannily similar to those
of Ukraine) not know that any Russian government [would] resist with the utmost vigour any attempt to bring the strategically located state of Ukraine, through which all Russia’s invaders in the last century have passed, into the orbit of the European Union and therefore, by extension, of NATO? For anyone with a knowledge of history, this was not difficult to foresee…Putin had made clear at Bucharest that any move towards Ukrainian membership of NATO would have grave consequences….The only certainty was that neither the United States nor any other Western government was contemplating a military response. Putin’s instincts had been correct. There would be symbolic protests against the takeover of Crimea and, no doubt, economic sanctions. But no one would actually try to stop it…independence from Serbia, of which it had been part, did not violate international law. If the Kosovars had the right to secede, it was hard to argue that the people of Crimea did not.

Ukraine is no Virgin…
“Likewise the EU. The level of corruption was, as one expert put it, ‘insane’. There was no functioning government and the country was culturally and linguistically divided. Ukraine, like Iraq, began to look like a poisoned chalice which the West would have done better to leave alone”



More evidence Putin might not be that powerful and thus not really in control of how Russia would respond to defeat in Ukraine..
Putin did express reservations over the increasing use of sharia law in Chechnya, under which polygamy and honour killings–illegal in Russia–were encouraged, women were expected to wear headscarves and men to grow beards…The Kremlin had nothing to gain from his death and relations with the West, already dire, would get even worse if Russia were shown to be involved. Afterwards, however, he covered up for those responsible. The men the British accused of being GRU operatives…in this country’, wrote Moskovsky komsomolets. ‘Now the “fools” are showing that they, not the President, are in charge.’ That was certainly what it looked like. Putin’s criticisms had been very publicly ignored. Like his failure to punish Kadyrov, it raised questions about who held the real power in Russia…
mode in which he had been running Russia since the middle of his third term, the final decision had been taken by siloviki in his inner circle who assumed that he would be only too glad to see his long-time adversary removed.

Biden making up stories, and if true, shouldn’t Biden be worried that a soulless Putin might decide a few tactical nukes would give him a victory in Ukraine?

“Biden went on to recall that, when he had met Putin as Vice President, ten years earlier, he had referred to George W. Bush’s much maligned into Putin’s eyes and ‘got a sense of his soul’. Biden said he had told him: ‘When I look into your eyes, I don’t think you have a soul.’ Putin, he said, had responded: ‘We understand each other.’

Biden was for the nordstream pipeline..before he blew it up
“Biden announced that the United States would waive threatened countermeasures against companies
involved in the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany, a project which had been fiercely opposed by both the Obama and Trump administrations. It was made clear that the United States had not abandoned its reservations but that it would no longer try to enforce them.”

US weakness..
Then, in the second half of August, came the debacle of America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. To the Kremlin, it signalled chronic weakness. In Kabul, as in Saigon 50 years earlier, faced with fierce resistance, the Americans had cut and run, leaving their one-time allies to their fate. Georgia had had a similar experience when it

Ukraine and Russia are ridiculously intertwined…
Zelensky was a Russian-speaking…The close ties between the two peoples–more than 40 per cent of Ukrainians have relatives in Russia…The conflict was fratricidal–not quite a civil war

And a great quote on how this author never strays too far into the intellectual navel gazing and news to real politique

“Counterfactuals, as they are now called, a term conferring a veneer of academic respectability on idle speculation, are inherently beguiling”

[Randall Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1917, “a few thousand Bolsheviks had overthrown the Kerensky government, installing a dictatorship which lasted for 70 years.” The Leningrad blockade alone had 35x the death toll of the London Blitz and a higher death toll than all Americans who died in a foreign war since US independence. As famed historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote in Harpers, the American tendency is to view any enemy as “a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman – sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel.” Today, both the US and Russia view themselves as exceptional – a recipe for “mutual incomprehension, if not animosity.” As a child, Putin once cornered a rat which fought back and he learned the lesson, “no one should be cornered. No one should be put in a situation where they have no way out.” Telephones were rarities in 60’s Russia.

During the Khrushchev Thaw, criticism became allowed as long as “it did not call into question the existing political order”. Putin learned that he needed to be physically fit to develop the kind of leadership he wished. He started with Sambo and moved on to Judo. In the USSR at this time, meat was considered a luxury and one lived on bread, potatoes, cabbage and dairy. A rule in the KGB was “one cable, one topic” – if a cable was intercepted and deciphered you then only compromised one topic. Trainees lived under constant surveillance.

Putin had a trait the KGB highly valued, he didn’t show his emotions. The Berlin Wall (near where Putin was stationed) fell when border guards were vastly outnumbered and unwilling to use their weapons. Gorbachev’s career was over when he could neither placate both sides, neither left nor right. Under Yeltsin, “between 50 and 80 per cent of the population was living below the poverty line.” And everything was for sale. All businessmen who became big, without exception, had started out by trading illegally. Protection rackets took off. In St. Peterburg, all businesses paid for protection. The Chechen mafia was especially feared.

The Russian per capita murder rate in 1995 was 2>4 times higher than in the US. 80% said it was dangerous to walk in the streets. This was a time of US induced neoliberal privatization. “Americans were the largest investors in St. Peterburg.” This led to asset stripping, surging inequality and emerging billionaires. At this time Putin said, “I don’t want to be a puppet.” Russia’s move from “democratic norms” happened first under Yeltsin. Some of the big names who thought NATO expansion would be a short-sighted provocation was George Kennan, Richard Pipes, Jack Matlock, William Perry, Strobe Talbott, the CIA, and the US commander in Europe. Strobe Talbott confirmed that James Baker had made an unconditional pledge to Russia and Clinton had gone back on it. To do so, Clinton outflanked the Republican Party from the Right.

Putin was first deputy head of a Presidential Administration and already an influential name, when he is asked by Yeltsin to become FSB chief. Yeltsin had him fire a lot of people in a purge. Putin refuses the rank of general preferring to be FSB’s first civilian director. Russia was on the verge of a financial meltdown. Yeltsin thought since Putin had basically been running St. Petersburg, he could be President, and so it happened. US machinations in Kosovo added US/Russia tensions as Russia (and Greece and Spain) sympathized with the Serbs. Strobe wrote “the US was acting as though it had the right to impose its view on the world.” With Chechnya Putin has to either play a tough hand or let Chechnya secede as a nasty radical Islamic Caliphate. Putin’s choice to fight tough endears him to the Russian people. Putin said, “Russia has the right to defend itself.” Putin would say what Russians wanted to hear, they were tired of incompetent ill Yeltsin and loved vigorous athletic Putin.

Putin called communism a blind alley. He wanted to orient towards Europe and be a partner of the US and not a lackey where Russia was excluded from decision making. Putin is elected President and gets 53.4% of the vote with a 70% turnout. Putin then tells leading business magnates their game is over; they can keep their privatization gains but must stay out of politics.

The Kursk Submarine incident paints Putin in a bad light but he didn’t cause the sailors death and the military had lied to him. The incident marks the end of Boris Berezovsky. Totalitarian regimes totally control what you say, that is not Putin’s Russia. A leading editor said Putin could close him down with his little finger, and experts believed Putin recognizes the importance of safety valves showing some democratic tendencies. Putin said on TV, “Russia cannot be brought to its knees.” Then 96% of Chechnya votes to stay with Russia. The Chechnyan conflict dies after the Beslan massacre of children where the rebels lose parental hearts and minds. At this time Khodorkovsky the workaholic was the richest man in Russia with $15 billion.

Clinton and Blair thought well of Putin. Putin is understandably upset when the US withdrawals from the ABM treaty and tell China’s Jiang Zemin, the reasons of the US were groundless and done because the US was “striving for unilateral superiority in the military field.” “The US never produced a single credible reason for abrogating the ABM Treaty.” Russia could not believe Americans sat quietly during their own Judicial Coup D’Etat of 2020 watching Al Gore bend over in the shower for Bush after the illegal decision. “The American system was a fraud.” Putin said, if NATO “was a political organization, then why did it bomb Yugoslavia?” Back then, Biden said, “I don’t trust Mr. Putin, this is a man trained to lie.” Putin wears a cross and was baptized by his mother.

Putin called Bush II immediately on 9/11 which was appreciated. Putin had been warning the US for two years before 9/11 that US funded Jihad manufacturing facilities in Pakistan also funded by Saudi Arabia would cause major blowback for the US. Putin felt the US wanted Russia to never forget that it lost the Cold War. Putin had better intel on Iraq than the CIA had; he knew Iraq had no way to get nuclear weapons. In 2003, the U.S Congress renamed French fries sold in their cafeterias to “freedom fries” after France expressed opposition to the US led invasion of Iraq. Putin asks why, if the US were serious in fighting terrorism, did it not support Russia in its fight in Chechnya? Russia provided intel and overflight rights to the US after 9/11 yet felt its efforts were unappreciated. Turkmenistan is all about the huge gas and oil deposits. The Ukraine Orange Revolution “had developed into a trial of strength by proxy, political rather than military between Russia and the United States.”

Putin knew that the US played a “prominent role” with NGO’s financing the Georgian Rose Revolution. “That money has a bad smell. We do not want (our NGO’s) to be run by puppet masters from abroad.” In Georgia, Shevardnadze was a US puppet and now Saakashvili was an even bigger puppet. “The Kremlin was much more concerned about the United States democracy promotion initiatives and support for human rights groups through congressionally funded organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy.” The US wanted independence for Kosovo yet ignored Latvia when it clearly denied human rights to half a million Russian residents. Ukraine turning against Russia meant it was willing to lose gas at $50 per thousand cubic meters and would have to pay the EU rate of more than $200. There was no reason not to pay the $200 going rate if Ukraine insisted on walking but Western Media needed to vilify Russia so gas price coverage was all negative.

Russia had paid off its foreign debts so foreigners had little leverage, and Putin’s approval rating rose to 70%. Putin noticed that the US had invaded Russia’s “economy, politics and humanitarian affairs.” Putin pointed out that the US desire for a unipolar order itself was undemocratic and anyone could see that soon China & India together would have a larger economy than the US and “a multipolar system would develop.” Putin said that “there will always be some pretext for attacking Russia.” He added, “America does not need friends. It needs vassals it can command.”

Things Western media don’t want you to know: Ukraine is 1/3 Russian, and Crimea is 90% Russian. Nor will it tell you that the US decided to “base American missile defense units in Eastern Europe and install NATO forward bases in Bulgaria and Romania.” Nor will it tell you that the US/Russia tension is basically two snotty exceptionalist nations squaring off each other. Vanity on BOTH sides. Or, that the US thinks ONLY it deserves to be revoltingly exceptionalist. Russia looks towards Europe, it doesn’t send its best students to China or India for education, but instead looks to the West. Or that Ambassador Burns said he couldn’t find anyone “who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct attack on Ukraine’s interests.” The author intelligently believes Russian forces, not US forces, won WWII. Unsurprisingly, Russia doesn’t enjoy being forced to defer to Washington all the time, and would prefer to deal with an independent EU instead.

Putin then brings the murder rate in Russia from scary to below that of most American cities. However bad officials still ended up moving sideways rather than being removed. Russia was thus between Cambodia and Egypt on TI’s Corruption Index. Putin exercised 1 ½ to 2 hours daily, and loved swimming. He arrived at the Kremlin after 9AM and left at 10 or 11PM and sometimes at 1AM. Compare that to Biden’s and Trump’s work hours. His favorite composers are Liszt and Tchaikovsky. Yeltsin despised disagreement or pushback. Putin welcomed and respected it. In 2004, Putin is re-elected with 72% of the vote. The same year, Bush II gets 286 electoral votes to Kerry’s 251. Putin was more popular than either with his voters. The author doubts Putin has great wealth because it would risk him losing control. Fancy homes attributed to Putin (the Putin Palace) are owned by others.

Madeleine Albright pompously stated Siberia was too big for Russia and should be placed under US management. Putin noted that the US had a history of supporting proxy wars to destabilize its adversaries. At the end of his second term, Putin had an approval rating of 80%. Imagine ANY US politician with an 80% approval rating. The West pretended Kosovo was a special case but Cyprus, Greece and Spain (all facing separatist movements) disagreed. By 2008, Russia really only had 50,000 trained soldiers. The Kremlin prefers Republicans to Democrats because Democrats are afraid of looking soft to Republican voters. Centrist tool and Russia hawk Hillary Clinton went to Russia with a box for Lavrov with a red button that was supposed to say “Reset” but instead translated as “overload.”

Putin was Prime Minister then when Medvedev was President (tandemocracy). The Constitution is amended to make Russian Presidential terms six years instead of four. To piss off Putin, the US Ambassador is changed to known Russia hater McFaul. The West loved its proxy war with the Arab Spring and Libya, but Putin thought it would destabilize Europe and increase extremism. The US said their mission in Libya was restore peace and protect Libyan civilians but it soon became clear it was just a NATO operation to overthrow Gaddafi’s regime with UN cover. Putin was pissed that Medvedev didn’t use Russia’s veto at the UN. Medvedev was seen by US ambassador John Beyrle, as “Robin to Putin’s Batman.” Garry Kasparov the ex-chess player ran against Putin and lost big time.

In 2011, Russia had more internet users (51,000,000) than any other European country. China had an internet firewall but Russia didn’t get one per Putin’s conscious decision for internet freedom. Putin gets 63% of the vote in his next election. But Putin stops unauthorized demonstrations with a community service punishment for offenders. Orthodox believers then had trouble with Pussy Riot getting up in front of the high altar in one of their churches shouting “shit, shit, holy shit, shit, shit, holy shit.” Could either Byron or Shelley have ever hoped to achieve such wordsmithery? Anyway, church pressure made Putin arrest this poetic tour de force while many western liberal rock stars were aghast. But, “The jailing of Pussy Riot had gained him support among orthodox believers.”

Russia is conservative: 75% of the people think homosexuality is wrong and 40% think homosexuals need “treatment”. After Libya, Putin makes sure Medvedev vetoes on Syria. Russia had invested $20 billion in Syria and had a support base at Tartus. Putin thought it was short-sighted for the US to finance extreme Islam when the US financed mujahidin morphed into the Taliban. In this book, Philip Short is reluctant to say anything negative about the CIA on these topics as F. William Engdahl and others do. “The US AID was accused of giving grants to NGO’s to try and influence Russia’s domestic politics and ordered to cease operations” (BBC 2012). Under Putin, the US tried to give Russia verbal reassurances, but Putin knew from the old shameful broken NATO verbal promise by Baker that all future US verbal promises were just lies.

Putin asks, can you imagine if Russia (and not the US) did the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? “They would have eaten us alive.” “They are up to their ears in shitty stuff, they are drowning in it, and they still insist on criticizing us.” Everyone higher up at Abu Ghraib kept their job or got promoted. No one who approved the torture memos were held responsible. Putin saw that after killing off the native population and instituting racial capitalism (slavery) the US happily supported Latin American dictators that disappeared its own citizens. When the US repeatedly points its finger at Russia, the danger is Russia seeing first not a finger but seeing first hypocrisy.

Here’s a cute joke: Snowden in Russia could not be extradited to the US because the US alone wouldn’t sign the Treaty Russia proposed for that subject. Putin said, “the foundation of the American identity is individualist. The basis of the Russian identity is collective.” Putin thought America couldn’t treat other countries as equals because that would denote weakness. Washington’s goal with Ukraine in 2014 was not helping the people but was to pluck the “biggest prize” from “Russia’s grasp.” “It (helping the US led coup of 2014) was not the EU’s finest hour.” Among the Maidan protestors were “nationalists, anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and Russophobes.” After the coup, 22,000 Ukrainian troops in Crimea didn’t resist and Crimea (90% Russian already) then went to Russia. In a referendum, 96% of Crimeans vote to go with Russia. Crimea had done exactly what Kosovo did in separating and yet the US chose to ignore the legal analogy. Putin’s ratings then shot up to above 80%. If it was legal for Kosovo, then it was legal for Crimea.

“Geography condemns Ukraine and Russia to be neighbors” and neighbors must learn to co-exist. How much condemnation did Turkey get for occupying northern Cyprus since 1974? A Putin mistake rightfully condemned by the West, seems to be his cover-up of what happened to Malaysian flight MH17, apparently shot down by Russians.

Implementing the Minsk II agreement of 2015 (signed by Russia, Ukraine and the separatists) would have kept Putin from invading Ukraine in 2022, however Ukraine alone wouldn’t allow it. Imagine shortsightedly preferring war and invasion to a negotiated peace. On page 588, Short says the US did nothing to help jihadist groups from fighting Assad, which totally contradicts F. William Engdahl’s reporting. Putin said that the US and its allies had no problem with destroying the governments of Iraq and Libya yet no thought towards what to put in their place. He said, “Instead of (the US) bringing democracy and progress, there is violence, poverty, social disasters and total disregard for human rights.” Putin noted that Israel never gets criticized by the US with its never backing down from illegal fights.

ISIS at the time got most of its revenue from “smuggling oil across the Turkish border.” Russia saw Turkey’s leader as “a corrupt autocrat (Erdogan) with dreams of restoring the glory of the Ottoman Empire.” Putin noticed that US ally Pakistan also provided refuge for Bin Laden while supporting the Taliban. Putin believed that although Assad’s regime was cruel and violent like Saddam Hussein, “if Assad had been removed, Syria would have become a seeding ground for terrorism.” In 2018, Putin got 77% of the vote. Putin accused the Bolsheviks of having practiced “total deception” giving Russians not a brave new world, but “mass graves.”

Russian Presidents got immunity from prosecution from even after they were in office. Moscow alone by then had 200,000 video cameras and facial recognition software and even single picket protests were banned. Still, “Russia was a far cry from the Soviet Union, let alone China” where “the penalty for political protest was life imprisonment.” But, “the non-system opposition had virtually ceased to exist.” Biden calls Putin “a killer” while Trump in a rare moment of lucidity says, “There are a lot of killers… You think our country is so innocent?” “Short writes, “In Kabul, as in Saigon 50 years earlier, the Americans had cut and run, leaving their one-time allies to their fate.” What looked like “overtones of megalomania” by Putin at a Security Council meeting, ended up being an exercise in Putin personally trying Nixon’s Madman theory to counter the US mantra of “must weaken and isolate Russia”.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine started with “miles-long Russian armored columns halted at traffic lights to let Ukrainian motorists pass” but soon, due to lack of rations, devolved into pillaging and looting (not winning hearts and minds). Still, Short says “the atrocities that marked the opening months of the war were not on the same scale as in Yugoslavia, where, thirty years earlier, 150,000 people had been killed, many of them dying in spasms of ethnic cleansing that bore the hallmarks of genocide.” The US was the only country of the world’s ten largest, that rushed to support Ukraine. The world saw the lack of sympathy shown to Ukrainian refugees who weren’t blond and blue eyed. “If you were white and Christian, you were welcomed with open arms. If not, the West’s borders were closed.” Sanctions on Russia sadly meant the Russian rich now went to Dubai instead of the Cote d’Azur while Russia’s poor had their “income protected by state subsidies.”

Review continues in comment section below:

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of all of the books I have read thus far on Russia and Putin – either directly about him or his leadership within the context of Russia (including but not limited to: Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, Politics in Russia and Developments in Russian and Post-Soviet Politics – the last two being academic textbooks) I truly felt that Short’s book gave the most unbiased reporting of Vladmir Putin’s leadership.

Rather than simply paint Putin as a one-dimensional villain acting purely out of corrupt self-interest (as the West continues to do) or as the altruistic hero who single-handedly saved Russia in the interest of restoring national pride (as Russian media outlets would have you believe), Short’s “Putin” weaves a much more complex narrative – as is often the case with leaders who have come to power in the midst of chaos. I would not however, in any way, consider him a “Putin apologist” as I believe some people may think.

Short narrates how historical events and events in Putin’s own life helped to shape him into the man he was, the man he is today, and the man he will likely become after stepping down from power. Most importantly, it allows the reader to gain a better understanding of how differently politics work in Russia vs. the US and other western European countries. To understand why Putin has taken the actions he has at various points during his leadership, it is imperative that one understands Russian politics from a Russian citizen’s perspective – and not in the context of American political history (because, quite simply, our brand of politics does not work there).

One of the most important facts that the West always tends to forget is that Russian citizens have often grown up with unstable or tyrannical governments. Therefore, they are often more than willing to exchange what we consider here to be “imperative human rights” for better economic conditions, job security, structure. To most Russians, especially in the rural areas, where Putin has the majority of his support (the majority of dissent is in more urban areas such as Moscow or St. Petersburg) Putin is either a consistent hero at best, or the only man capable of doing the job at worst. It seems as though it is hard for non-Russians to grasp that Putin could not maintain his grip on power without having the majority of the Russian electorate backing him.

Even now, his approval rating is still around 76%, possibly a little higher or lower. What we are never told in the West, really, is that the majority of Russians have supported the annexation of Ukraine. It has been a part of Russia FAR, FAR, longer than it has ever been a sovereign state. Even Navalny, whom much of the West sees as Putin’s most ardent critic, had to walk back a statement he had made in support of the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas (I believe this statement was made right before he became such a popular opposition figure, and he had to walk it back).

It’s important to know that even some of his most vocal critics (exiled, rich, and out of harm’s way – so no need to mince words) have backed his actions in Ukraine, as well as praised attributes of his during his time in government in St. Petersburg – attributes such as not overly greedy or materialistic, not corrupt, loyal, and viewing his place in politics as one more of “duty” than one that could bring him power and advance his own interests. It was precisely for this reason that Yeltsin announced Putin to be his successor – much to the surprise not only of many of Yeltsin’s closest allies, but even to Putin himself.

It was said by many of his now critics that when Putin first started the job, he was very different than other Russian presidents that career politicians had been used to dealing with. They found themselves quite taken aback by the fact that he would actually listen to new ideas and hire the most competent individuals for needed government jobs, rather than simply barking orders and promoting politicians based only on their connections and bribes.

I think is actually very fair to say that when Putin first took Russia’s oath as president in 2000, he was fairly optimistic about turning around relations with the U.S., as well as the rest of the western world. He wasn’t opposed to NATO, so long as they weren’t showing any signs of expanding into Russia’s territory and causing alarm among the electorate that their security might be at risk. He even pondered joining the EU, perhaps even NATO, in his first ten years as Russia’s leader. When asked by the BBC’s David Frost how he envisaged future relations with NATO, his response was unexpected, to say the least:

"Russia is a part of European culture. I cannot imagine my country in isolation from Europe and from the so-called, as we often say, civilized world. So I find it difficult to imagine NATO as an enemy. It seems to me that…even posing the question this way can be damaging…”

When asked about joining NATO and the possibility:
“Why not? Why not? I would not rule it out…But only if Russia’s interests are taken into account and if Russia is treated as a partner with equal rights. I want especially to emphasize this…When we speak out against NATO’s expansion to the east,…we are thinking first and foremost about our country’s place in the world…If there are attempts to exclude us from the process of decision-making, this naturally causes us concern and irritation.”

Instead however, no matter how hard it seemed Putin tried to cooperate with the U.S., giving the Bush administration helpful Intel and advice from their own firsthand experience (such as staying out of Afghanistan! – something the Soviet Union definitely realized was a grave mistake and warned the U.S. repeatedly as much!) the relationship was very one-sided. Russia was continuously treated as the “loser” of the Cold War and as such, often felt that the U.S. and its western allies were being hypocritical and patronizing toward a country that had, only a decade before, shared equal “great power” status with the U.S.

From all of the academic journal articles I’ve read on the subject assigned to me by my International Relations professors, professors of Russian politics, etc., it truly does seem as though the West failed Russia spectacularly when it had the chance to truly establish a lasting partnership. John Mearsheimer, considered one of today’s most influential political theorists in realism, published articles on NATO expansion by the West, and how the West was to ultimately to blame for the war in Ukraine. Controversial? Of course. True? Well, that’s up to the reader to decide. But to say that the West played no part or shoulders absolutely no blame for what is happening in Ukraine today would be a complete lie as well. It’s more of a question of just how much blame lay at the feet of the U.S. and its allies.

Before Putin, there was Yeltsin, who created complete economic chaos and allowed the oligarchs free reign over corporations and politics alike. Yeltsin was known for being a pretty bad alcoholic and was impeached – I believe – no less than 3 or 4 times? (Lol, somehow I have never managed to get the exact number on that correct, no matter how much it’s come up in my studies).

Before Yeltsin, you had Gorbachev, who was clearly a much more benevolent leader than those who came before him. However, benevolence did not translate into good policies for Russian citizens. It would seem that both Gorbachev and Yeltsin perhaps had some truly genuine hopes for reform – only they didn’t have the slightest clue as to how to properly turn these hopes into good legislation. Often they acted too hastily and while allowing much more criticism and personal freedoms to Russians, this resulted in a disastrous economy and no security for Russia.

So it’s quite easy to see why Russians (especially older Russians) view Putin the way they do. They remember the difficult times after the dissolution of the USSR, the hunger, the hours-long bread lines, the economic instability, the lack of jobs. In their eyes, Putin gave much of this security back to them (as mentioned earlier). It’s easy to understand why they’d continue to support him, given that he is either the only Russian leader they know, or, in the case of older citizens, the only Russian leader who actually made Russia a better place. Considering that Russia’s population is mostly older and their birth rate has remained stagnant at best (but usually declining) – it is no wonder that Putin still amasses great support from Russian citizens.

There are important mentions about his upbringing and just how much more he was already primed to join the KGB at a young age, rather than the usual rhetoric of "how much the KGB shaped Putin" (not much at all, really). Some people have complained about Short somehow "excusing" Putin for certain acts such as not having Boris Nemtsov gunned down right outside the Kremlin, not stealing what was equivalent to $28 million USD during his time in the mayoral department in St. Petersburg, nor the alleged KGB involvement in domestic terrorism and apartment building bombings and fires that the West was all too happy to blame on Putin. Short offered far too much proof to the contrary, so I don't exactly see how he is "making excuses", but rather reporting based on the most likely scenario after cross-checking a large number of accounts at that time.

He doesn't shy away from holding him responsible, however, for the poisoning of Alexander Litvichenko, or Alexei Navalny. It's just great to finally read a book that is more matter-of-fact, does its research, and leads the reader to draw their own conclusions on why Russia became the country it did under 23 years of Putin's rule.

I'm hoping to link to a few really fantastic positive reviews that give even better, more well-written details on this fantastic biography. I will try to do so later tonight, but if not, at least I did eventually get this one done on my own! Will try to do the last three books I read after this one as well between tonight and tomorrow.

[Scott Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Audiobook) I always felt that Putin was a man in the same vein as Andropov, given their KGB backgrounds, how they were paranoid about the West and how they could outmaneuver their rivals. Yet, in reading this work, Putin has a bit of Stalin in him, given their rough childhoods and how they were versed in being street fighters and crass as needed. Short brings that aspect out, and will offer insight about Putin that many Westerners would not know.

The strength of this work is how it looks at the rise of Putin and how his younger years did much to define the man of today. He was and is a powerful politician, but was not always the Bond villain he is portrayed. The author tries to keep a neutral view of the man, which is hard in the current environment, but it helps to see how he leads and makes decisions.

The audiobook is solid, but the rating is the same regardless of version. Worth a read.

[Mihai Zodian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book four years after the wide scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia.  Unfortunately, Philip Short lacks analytical skills and the result is an apology for Vladimir Putin and his rule. Published in 2022, the book traces Russia's president's life from his childhood up to the ongoing war. The only thing that I've learned from it is that the number of excuses is approaching infinity and I'm not recommending it to anyone.

As a political scientist, I'm trained to acknowledge my values and ideology. I see Vladimir's Putin government as a proto fascist regime, in Roger Griffin's terms. This means it relies on a myth of national rebirth, authoritarianism and xenophobia that justified the aggressions against Ukraine, while it simulates participation. Therefore, to show how the biography is skewed, I will focus on how Philip Short handles other topics than foreign policy and will approach his views of dissidents.

First, the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. She was an investigative journalist, killed on Putin's birthday in 2006. Among other things, she wrote a prescient essay in which she compared him with Akaky Akakievich, the famous mediocre and delusional bureaucrat from Gogol. Philip Short tried to minimalize her influence and absolved the Russian president of the blame, by stating that it was the initiative of the Kadyrov clan, not his order.

Second, the persecution of Alexei Navalny. Philip Short portrayed him as a popular leader, who led an anticorruption movement against the regime, and he compared him with Nelson Mandela. Then, he argued that he was insignificant. The author did admit that Putin ordered his torment, but he reframed the impact.

The whole book is like that. Russian ultra nationalism, Putin read some books. The aggressions against Ukraine, Putin took a gamble and so on. For Philip Short, everything that the Russian leader did was a banal power play, even when the actions were reckless and criminal. My guess is that the author was too infatuated with the Russian sources that he used in his eight years of research, and I'm being generous.

Additional sources
Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, Routledge, Abingdon, 1993.

[Dmitry · Rating 2 out of 5]

(The English review is placed beneath the Russian one)

Книга, конечно, очень большая. Вот только размер получен не благодаря ценной информации, а как часто я это вижу в книгах о современной России и/или о Путине, благодаря пересказу новостных событий. Хотя начиналась книга довольно интересно.

Так как перед нами биография Путина, то и начинается книга с детства главного героя. Обычно я не люблю читать о детстве и юности известных людей, но в данном случаи это было интересно и поэтому можно сказать, что эта книга стала тем исключением, когда о детстве и юности главного героя было читать интересно. Далее автор так же пишет интересно, благодаря чему размер книги уже перестаёт иметь значение. Но! Вот если посмотреть на то, кем является автор этой книги, то всё станет ясно по поводу автора этой работы и того насколько автор в теме. Автор этой книги написал много других биографических книг что означает, что либо перед нами уникум, которой является профессионалом не только в области современной России, но и, к примеру, Китая либо перед нами просто биографическая работа без попытки подлинного понимания темы.

Я книгу не дочитал и бросил читать, не дойдя до конца где-то четверть, при этом мой интерес к книге пропал уже на середине. И причина проста - пересказ новостного материала. Но не это главное, а главным является использование общеизвестной информации о Путине, т.е. автор не задаётся вопросом об истинных мотивах Путина в том или ином случаи, а он использует официальную или общепринятую информацию. К примеру, Путин заявил, что Россия рассматривает расширения НАТО на восток в качестве угрозы и автор принимает это высказывание за истинное, т.е. что Путин действительно так думает. Во-первых, как тогда объяснить скупку недвижимости на Западе всей российской элитой, включая пропагандистов? Как следствие, с моей точки зрения, мы ничего не знаем, что на самом деле думает Путин, и мы сможем понять Путина, только когда он перестанет быть президентом России и когда заговорят самые близкие к нему люди. Вообще автор очень любит приписывать Путину мысли, взгляды, мнения о которых он никак не может быть осведомлён. Мы не знаем истинных мыслей Путина ни о СССР, ни о Западе, ни о демократии. В 90-ые Путин был образцовым либералом, а как пришёл во власть, стал отъявленным диктатором и я сейчас говорю не про нынешнее время, а про первый срок Путина - начало 2000 года.

Другая большая проблема автора состоит в том, что он наделяет Путина слишком большой значимостью, в том смысле, что если бы не Путин, то в России была бы свобода и демократия. Мой интерес к книге очень сильно упал, когда где-то в середине книги автор пишет, что Путин, конечно, авторитарный лидер, в отличие от Ельцина, который был более демократическим лидером (хотя авторитаризм проскальзывал и у Ельцина). Вот в этом-то и главная проблема этой книги. Автор принял общую идею о диктаторе Путине и о Ельцине как главном либерале и демократе, что означает, что автор так и не понял, что не Путин создал нынешнюю Россию в её милитаристском, мракобесном виде, а Ельцин. Не Путин начал строить диктаторскую власть в России, а Ельцин. И если бы не было Путина, был бы другой Путин, но приход авторитарного лидера был предопределён теми действиями что были предприняты Ельциным с 1993 по 1996. И вот этого автор и не понял. Он думает, что всё упирается в личность Путина, что это и есть главная проблема России. Автор как будто не видит единение российских элит по отношению к Путину. Автор не понимает, что Путин является лишь проводником интересов российских элит, а не «новым Сталиным». Путин ничего нового не создал в России, он лишь доделал то, чего по состоянию здоровья и экономической ситуации не успевал сделать Ельцин. Вот когда я понял, что автор раздул фигуру Путина до невероятных размеров, что он наделил Путина некими чертами, которые ему вовсе и не свойственны, то вот тогда я понял, что автор не слишком-то сильно понял современную Россию и как в ней устроены дела. Проблема не в плохом царе Путине, которого как хочет часть оппозиции, поменять на хорошего царя Михаила. Проблема в самой системе, что означает, что не имеет особого значения, кто на троне - Владимир или Михаил. Автор описывает демократизацию Медведева, как бы намекая, что если бы Дмитрий Медведев был бы более смелым и предприимчивым, то Россия бы повернула бы на демократические рельсы. Беда только в том, что российские элиты, которые ещё в 1996 году сошлись во мнение, что российский народ к выборам главы государства допускать нельзя, были иного мнения и вот им никакая демократизация не нужна. Поэтому и не мог Дмитрий Медведев произвести демократизацию по типу Перестройки. И дело тут не в Путине, а в отказе элит менять что-либо и в их желании и дальше управлять, так как они это делали, начиная с начала 50-ых годов XX века.

И последнее. Автор, где-то начиная с середины, начинает просто пересказывать историю современной России, включая период правления Медведева, попытку администрации Обамы выстроить новые отношения с Россией, Российско-Грузинская война, внедрение патриотической повестки в РФ и так далее. Несмотря на то, что автор хорошо рассказывает, всё это множество раз писалось и обсуждалось. В итоге, половина книги представляет из себя пересказ новостных событий. Поэтому опять же, написать биографию лидера авторитарного государства, в которой ещё с советских времён не принято, ни народом, ни элитой, говорить то, что ты искренне думаешь и где всё было заполнено пропагандой, довольно тяжело.

The book is, of course, very large. Except that the size is not due to valuable information but, as I often see in books about modern Russia and/or Putin, due to the retelling of news events. Although the book started quite interesting.

Since we have a biography of Putin, the book starts with the main character's childhood. Usually, I don't like to read about the childhood and youth of famous people, but in this case, it was interesting, and that's why I can say that this book was the exception when it was interesting to read about the childhood and youth of the main character. Then the author also writes interestingly, which makes the size of the book no longer matter. But! If you look at who the author of this book is, everything becomes clear about the author of this work and how much the author is in the subject. The author of this book has written many other biographical books, which means that either we have before us a unicum who is a professional not only in the field of modern Russia but also, for example, China, or we have before us just a biographical work without any attempt to truly understand the subject.

I didn't finish the book and gave up reading it after about a quarter of the book, and my interest in the book disappeared in the middle. And the reason is simple - the retelling of news material. But this is not the main thing. The main thing is the use of well-known information about Putin, i.e., the author does not ask about Putin's true motives in this or that case, but he uses official or generally accepted information. For example, Putin stated that Russia views NATO's eastward expansion as a threat, and the author takes this statement as true, i.e., that Putin really thinks so. First, how then can one explain the buying up of real estate in the West by the entire Russian elite, including propagandists? As a consequence, from my point of view, we know nothing about what Putin really thinks, and we will only be able to understand Putin when he is no longer president of Russia and when the people closest to him are talking. In general, the author is very fond of attributing to Putin's thoughts, views, and opinions about which he can in no way be aware. We know Putin's true thoughts neither about the USSR, nor about the West, nor about democracy. In the 90s Putin was an exemplary liberal, but when he came to power, he became a dictator, and I am not talking about the present time, but about Putin's first term - the beginning of 2000.

The author's other big problem is that he gives Putin too much importance in the sense that if it weren't for Putin, there would be freedom and democracy in Russia. My interest in the book dropped a lot when, somewhere in the middle of the book, the author writes that Putin is certainly an authoritarian leader, unlike Yeltsin, who was a more democratic leader (although authoritarianism slipped in with Yeltsin as well). That is the main problem with this book. The author accepted the common idea of dictator Putin vs Yeltsin as the chief liberal and democrat, which means that the author never realized that it was not Putin who created the current Russia in its militaristic and obscurantist form, but Yeltsin. It was not Putin who started building dictatorial power in Russia, but Yeltsin. If there was no Putin, there would have been another Putin, but the arrival of an authoritarian leader was predetermined by the actions that were taken by Yeltsin from 1993 to 1996. And that's what the author doesn't understand. He thinks that everything rests on Putin's personality and that this is the main problem of Russia. It is as if the author does not see the unity of Russian elites towards Putin. The author doesn't realize that Putin is only a conduit for the interests of Russian elites, not a “new Stalin”. Putin did not create anything new in Russia; he only finished what Yeltsin was not able to do due to his health and economic situation. When I realized that the author has inflated Putin's figure to incredible proportions, that he has endowed Putin with certain traits that are not peculiar to him at all, then I realized that the author has not understood modern Russia and how things work in it. The problem is not the bad Tsar Putin, whom some of the opposition wants to replace with the good Tsar Mikhail. The problem is the system itself, which means that it doesn't really matter who is on the throne - Vladimir or Mikhail. The author describes Medvedev's democratization as if to imply that if Dmitry Medvedev had been more courageous and enterprising, Russia would have turned to democracy. The only trouble is that the Russian elites, who agreed back in 1996 that the Russian people should not be allowed to elect the head of state, were of a different opinion, and they did not need any democratization. That is why Dmitry Medvedev could not produce a Perestroika-type democratization. And the matter here is not in Putin but in the refusal of the elites to change anything and in their desire to continue to rule as they have done since the early 50s of the XX century.

One last thing. The author, somewhere starting in the middle, begins to simply recount the history of modern Russia, including the Medvedev administration, the Obama administration's attempt to build new relations with Russia, the Russian-Georgian war, the introduction of a patriotic agenda in the Russian Federation, and so on. Although the author tells it well, all of this has been written and discussed many times. As a result, half of the book is a retelling of news events. So again, writing a biography of the leader of an authoritarian state, where since Soviet times it has not been customary, either by the people or by the elite, to say what you sincerely think and where everything was filled with propaganda, is quite difficult.

[Chumlee · Rating 3 out of 5]

If possible, I’d give the first half of the Book a 4.5/5 in how it explains the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union and resulting anarchy of the 1990s. Then…it begins to go down hill to a 3/5. Why? Because Mr. Short, in his quest for “neutrality” ends up coming across as too pro-Putin by excusing his actions by playing to Putin by saying what about the West? IE, because of Kosovo in 1999, that justified Putin’s actions in Ukraine. Corruption? No, not Putin no, it’s everyone else robbing the people. Moreover, as is the problem with current event books, the war in Ukraine is only a couple pages at the very end. And as others are pointing out, Mr. Short is getting basic information wrong that other Russian Scholars are using/can be proven wrong with a google search. IE, that James Baker made a promise to Gorbachev and that means NATO had to stay out of Eastern Europe while ignoring all the treaties Russia and Ukraine had post independence in the 1990s. And, perhaps it’s the problem of British Journalists, the Americans are to blame for everything and everything that happened with Trump, 2016, and Trump’s groveling to Putin is poo pooed as hysterical media jibberish. Let alone, acting like all those enemies poisoned by Putin is excusable because no one can directly say Putin did it.
There are probably better books on all this, but I haven’t read them yet.

[Thomas Stevenson]

It took me a few months to finish this book. I found it to be a pretty difficult and boring read. It’s easy to get lost in the details. I forced myself to finish this because, even though a lot of the book went in one ear and out the other, I wanted to have a better understanding of one of the world’s most dangerous men.

I’m not leaving a rating on this book because, even though I found it to be exhausting, I think it accomplishes what the author intended. It is an extremely thorough analysis of Putin’s life. Readers with a better foundational understanding of Russia’s history or a deeper appreciation for historical literature in general may enjoy this more than I did.

[Lillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clearly insightful and knowledgeable regarding international political affairs, the author paints a more balanced, less judgemental portrait of Putin in relation to the rest of the world and to Russia. The only drawback to this meticulously researched account is that it may be a bit premature in light of current events.

[elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

truly an excellent biography, it’s the size of a doorstop but never felt like a slog and was very insightful - worthy of a 4.5 star rating

i know it couldn’t be helped necessarily given that the book was published in july 2022 but the russian invasion of ukraine is only mentioned in the final pages and the book feels a little incomplete as a result.

[Steven Z. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The preparation and writing of biography are truly an art form which Philip Short the author of works on Pol Pot and Mao Zedong has mastered. In his latest effort, PUTIN he has written another important biography of his subject based on intensive research drawing on almost two hundred interviews conducted over eight years in Russia, the United States and Europe and on source material in over a dozen languages. The publication of PUTIN comes at a propitious moment in history with the events that are transpiring in Ukraine as the Russian autocrat has placed the world on edge with his illegal invasion that has played havoc with the world price of energy and supply of grain and other foodstuffs, in addition to the destruction and casualties inflicted on Ukraine. At the present moment this war of attrition does not appear to be anywhere near a conclusion as Putin is adamant that Ukraine is not a country and is part of what he hopes to be a reconstituted Russian Empire. Short has done a service for anyone trying to understand Putin’s actions as he delves deeply into his personal life, career, how he rose to power, why he pursues the policies that affect the Russian people in addition to those living outside of Russia and evaluating what the reign of this autocrat will be like in the future.

Short’s work builds on Steven Lee Myers THE NEW TSAR: THE RISE AND REIGN OF VLADIMIR PUTIN published in 2015 in addition to the works of Masha Gessen, Fiona Hill, Robert Service, Catherine Belton, among others. Short’s work is the most important biography of the Russian autocrat written to this point and presents a comprehensive picture of Russia during Putin’s life in addition to integrating the roles of prominent figures such as Boris Yeltsin, Anatoly Sobchak, Alexei Navalny, a host of Russian oligarchs, and Russian politicians and military personalities. As the narrative gains steam it is clear that Short believes that the United States is in large part responsible for what Russia has become and how Putin has evolved into an autocrat who controls all the levers of power in the Kremlin.

The biography begins with a discussion of the political situation in Russia in 1999. Boris Yeltsin who has survived two heart attacks and surgery was under attack for corruption and a myriad of other fraudulent actions. With the presidential election set for March 2000, Short speculates whether the FSB launched a series of false flag terrorist attacks in Russia which were blamed on Chechen terrorists to deflect criticism away from Yeltsin. After careful analysis, Short concludes it was Chechens and not the FSB. The prologue that Short sets forth has implications later as Putin is a candidate for the presidency and attacks continue with Putin’s opponents questioning a possible role for the FSB. In addition, once Putin is in office, the tactics used by the FSB will be questioned in Chechen terrorist attacks at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow that killed 125 Russians, and the Breslan School massacre that resulted in 335 dead hostages, 186 of which were children. These attacks and the FSB response received great media coverage which Putin disdained leading to a crackdown on the media and eventual state control of television and newspapers in Russia shortly thereafter.

What separates Short’s work from others is that he tackles many of the myths associated with Putin – as it is hard to discern myth from reality. He mentions alternatives, then what appears to be the truth. For example, the death of Putin’s brother during infancy in Leningrad during World War II, the role of possible FSB attacks in 1999 to create support for Boris Yeltsin, Putin’s enormous wealth, reasons behind Russian aggression against Ukraine etc.

Short’s presentation of Putin’s childhood is important as he does so without the psychobabble that a number of writer’s conjecture. Putin had attention issues in school and was a very aggressive child who would never back off from a fight. Putin was home schooled for his early education and had difficulty adapting to formal schooling once enrolled. It is important to remember that Putin was raised in Leningrad, a city that suffered over 750,000 deaths at the hands of the Nazis who starved the city resulting in extreme cannibalism as the city was blockaded for over two and a half years. You do not have to be a practitioner of psychology to understand the impact of growing up in an environment that was still in recovery in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This approach is part of Short’s attempt to place Putin’s life story in the context of Russian history. Putin’s early teen years witnessed the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the deposing of Nikita Khrushchev, replaced by Leonid Brezhnev and the impact on his life should not be discounted.

As a boy Putin always wanted to be different and when not behaving as a hooligan he seemed to be an introvert, keeping his distance and thoughts to himself. These traits come to the fore later when he assumes certain roles in Russian politics, governmental positions, head of the FSB, and then President of Russia. He would learn to be social when needed, but this was not his forte.
Putin was always enamored with the life of a spy as he was a risk taker by nature and would try to volunteer for the KGB as a teenager. His path was clear as KGB minders had their eye on him and he was offered a position in 1975 as a Junior Lieutenant. At the time Yuri Andropov was the head of the KGB and believed in “stamping out dissent,” who wanted to derail the west’s ability to weaken the Soviet Union – a mantra Putin would follow his entire career. Short’s description of how Putin was recruited, trained, and integrated into Russian counterintelligence was indicative of the author’s point of view and how he had unearthed essential details that contributed to his narrative. Short raises an important question – did the KGB create Putin or were his character traits already in place before he was recruited? His character fit the kind of work the KGB did. He liked to stay in the background and observe others, and not attract attention to himself. He was disciplined and pragmatic and was able to concentrate on whatever the priority was at the moment, and never let his emotions dictate his behavior or thought pattern.

The watershed moment for Putin as he has stated many times was his KGB posting in Dresden and watching helplessly as the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989 with no guidance from Moscow. This would create a formative memory that proved to Putin the overriding importance of maintaining a strong state and the dangers that an angry population could pose to a previously entrenched regime.

The most important figure in Putin’s rise to power was Anatoly Sobchak, a former law Professor at Leningrad State University, a liberal reformer in parliament, who became mayor of the second largest city in Russia. In 1990, Putin was assigned by the KGB assigned to surveil Sobchak as an assistant vice-rector at the university. As Putin gained Sobach’s trust he was placed in charge of trade negotiations which were highlighted by barter deals that allowed him to enrich his KGB colleagues and set a pattern as to how Putin would operate in the future. Most importantly, Putin’s relationship with the KGB and organized crime in the city was a training ground and a source of compatriots when he himself assumed power later on. During this time period the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev that saw Boris Yeltsin emerge as a hero, according to Short, saw Putin’s as playing a “none role” in these events. But Putin had learned how to make himself indispensable which is a major reason for his success.

A key chapter that Short offers is entitled, “The Gray Cardinal” which delineates the corruption and crime that was endemic in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. The borderline between the criminal world and legitimate business was tenuous at best. To conduct business bribery was a standard practice and it was a situation that benefited Putin greatly based on his position, though in an ode to objectivity Short argues that many anecdotes of Putin accepting bribes are fabricated. In this, among many other cases Short gives Putin the benefit of the doubt. Putin learned a great deal from Sobchak, and it provided him with an education for him to apply later.

The concept of “Near Abroad” was key for Putin’s foreign policy ideology developed while being in charge of foreign affairs under Sobchak. He began thinking about the former Soviet republics, particularly Ukraine, the key to “Near Abroad” which he felt precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union when it declared its independence. He could not accept that Crimea, the home of the Black Sea fleet, was gone, 1.8 million Russians lived in Crimea, in addition to the massive debt that Ukraine owed Moscow gnawed at him. These beliefs would stay with Putin, and we can see the results today with the current war of attrition. While serving in St. Petersburg Putin’s ideas about NATO, relations with the west, Russia as a bridge between Europe and Asia, the need for a strong centralized government which would unify the country were all reinforced. By the time he assumed the presidency in 2000 his mantra was set.

Putin’s assumption of the presidency is spelled out by luck, skill, and the ability to ingratiate himself after Sobchak’s political career ended with Boris Yeltsin. Short dives deeply into this process and in the end Putin provided a need that Yeltsin craved, loyalty to Yeltsin as well as his family. Putin would rise in importance in Yeltsin’s eyes over a five year period culminating in his appointment as the head of the FSB and shortly thereafter as Prime Minister. Once he was head of the FSB in 1998 he would purge the organization and bring in his cronies from St. Petersburg. When Yeltsin decided not to run for president in 2000 he chose Putin as the candidate to replace him. Yeltsin decided not to run because the war in Chechnya was not going well, charges of corruption abounded, and he knew Putin would protect him. What Short does not discuss was how the Yeltsin family was caught up in the corruption and how Putin’s perceived loyalty would protect them.

Once in power Putin had to deal with Chechnya which he did in a way we have come accustomed to as we watch events in Ukraine. He would botch the Kursk submarine disaster as well as terrorist attacks within Russia. He would learn that public information needed to be regulated leading to state seizure of media and television. Putin would learn from his errors to a point but his overriding beliefs that anything that made Russia look weak was a boon for the west.

In presenting Putin, Short tries in most cases to see events from Putin’s viewpoint. He is correct that the arrival of the Bush administration in Washington presented an excellent opportunity to improve post-Cold War relations with the United States. It is clear that Short believes that Bush blew an important opportunity particularly after 9/11 with the policies he chose.

Short is very careful to juxtapose Putin’s points of view on a myriad of topics relating to the Bush’s foreign policy between 2000-2004. At first Putin offered a number of fig leaves to the Bush administration and in return Bush made his “look into his soul” remark that many thought went overboard. After 9/11 Putin threw his support behind the United States by sharing intelligence, military over flights, and bases in Central Asia. Putin saw the US as an ally in the war on terror but felt his overtures were not being reciprocated as Bush canceled the ABM treaty which Putin abhorred; the US invaded Iraq when Russian intelligence which had a decades long relationship with Saddam knew better than the CIA that WMD no longer existed in Iraq. Issues of NATO expansion, anger that the US and the west did not see the war on terror extending to Chechnya, and hawks in Washington carrying on as if the Cold War was total victory. Further the US insisted on military bases in Poland and the Czech Republic and in 2008 the west recognized the independence of Kosovo.

By Bush’s second administration relations deteriorated even further as Gazeprom cut energy deliveries to Ukraine, the 2006 assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London, and the Bush Doctrine which states that America can treat all countries that support terrorists against the U.S. as enemies. It also asserted the right that the U.S. can take preemptive action against nations that it felt might pose terrorist threats. Russia’s response was clear in Putin’s message at the Munich Security Conference as he railed against American unilateralism and the pursuit of global domination. Russia’s position economically improved as oil prices had increased markedly allowing Moscow to pay off its foreign debt depriving the west of leverage resulting in Putin’s popularity rising to 70% - it is no wonder that from this point on Putin felt the US was his enemy and became increasingly aggressive leading to the 2008 invasion of Georgia.

Putin admitted Russia lost the Cold War and resented the Americans lording it over them. Events in Ukraine, particularly the Orange Revolution where Putin believed the west prevented Kremlin-backed candidate Viktor Yanukovych from stealing the Ukrainian presidency and made possible the election of his reformist rival, Viktor Yushchenko angered the Russian autocrat. Further, Putin was exorcised over American interference in Gazprom’s attempt to take over Yuganskneftegaz, the main production complex for the Yukos oil company which he believed showed how far American tentacles could reach. What was clear was that by 2008 the rift between Russia and the US was too deep to heal.

Short is clear that Putin’s mindset is fraught with errors and lies, but it is important for him to criticize Putin further and not blame the US and the west for many of the choices Putin made. Short does present the American viewpoint surrounding violations of human rights and support for anti-democratic regimes abroad as well as in Moscow, the clampdown on the Russian media, the failure to curb corruption, and atrocities in Chechnya, and the American defeat of the Taliban, a gain for Russian security. However, one gets the feeling that no matter what course of action Putin pursued it was the fault of the West for the deterioration of relations with Russia.

At times Short goes overboard in trying to attain objectivity. He argues that “Russia was no longer trying to export its ideology and value system. Instead, America was.” Perhaps, but Short should examine Russian actions toward Georgia, Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and Ukraine as a whole before he makes such statements. According to Short, the expansion of NATO by the west is responsible for Putin’s aggressive foreign policy in large part because of broken promises in the first Bush administration. However, it is clear from Putin’s own words that the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and his goal is to restore the Russian imperial system – this is Putin’s ideology and that has led to the invasions chronicled above.

Even in discussing the source and amount of Putin’s wealth, Short takes his objectivity a bit too far as he cannot accept any evidence like the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers that document the scale of multibillion dollar corruption that exists in Russia. Despite the fact that Putin oversees a system whereby Russian oligarchs hold large sums of money with strong connections to Putin, in addition to billions in offshore accounts reserved for the Russian autocrat, Short refuses to believe any evidence that is contrary to his own mindset.

Short commentary on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not as well developed as his narrative was completed as the war was beginning. I agree with Angela Stent’s comments in her Washington Post review that “Short correctly identifies two of Putin’s major mistakes when he invaded Ukraine. First was his failure to understand that Ukrainians and Russians are distinct Slavic nations, both with a powerful sense of national identity, and that people defending their homeland have an advantage over those seeking to conquer it. His second mistake was to overestimate the capabilities of the Russian military, which was unable to take Kyiv in the first days of the war. Perhaps because he concluded this book before the full scope of Russian atrocities was known, he implies that Russia is acting differently in Ukraine than it did in Chechnya or Syria, where it destroyed Grozny and Aleppo. So far Russia has leveled Mariupol, Severodonetsk and parts of other cities, turning them to rubble, and has indiscriminately targeted civilians.”*

Despite Short’s approach to historical objectivity which seems to lean against the West and the United States and accepting Putin’s rationale for certain actions he has authored an important book that should be read carefully and dissected by the reader. But we should remember what New York Times reporter Peter Baker states that Short absolves Putin of several crimes especially, his explanation for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.** I wonder whether he is watching the same war that plays out on the news each evening as I am.

*Angela Stent, “A Biography that Gives Vladimir Putin the Benefit of the Doubt,” Washington Post, July 22, 2022.
** Peter Baker, “Who is Vladimir Putin,” New York Times, August 1, 2022.

[Garrett Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Short’s massive Putin biography is the most thorough (and balanced) treatment of him you’ll currently find aside from direct interviews.

Central to Putin’s political life was experiencing the collapse of the Soviet Union; it was the formative event that shaped his political development. You cannot understand Putin, his motivations, or the popularity of his brand of Russian nationalism, without understanding what the destruction of the Soviet system meant to Russia. All subsequent geopolitical turmoil stems from that event. The Western-backed secessionist uprisings in the former Soviet territories, the conflicts in the Crimea, the Caucuses (Chechnya, Georgia) and Ukraine, Putin’s opposition to NATO expansion into the former Soviet sphere and his aspirations to re-integrate the post-Soviet territories.

Putin’s Political Development

Putin grew up under the Soviet system, experienced its hardships and harsh censorship, but never lost his patriotism for Russia before or after the Soviet Union collapsed. As a boy, when the portraits of Stalin which had been hung in the government/Party offices were removed and destroyed, he found one in a pile of refuse, cleaned it and brought it home. He later joined the Communist Youth League after becoming enamored with the idea of working in intelligence and realizing you had to be a member of the Komsomol to attend university. He attended law school after being advised by an officer that it was one of the fields that the KGB recruited from (“Every major Soviet university had a KGB ‘curator’ whose job it was to identify potential recruits”; they never accepted applicants).

Much has been made about Putin’s personality being a result of his KGB training, but that isn’t entirely true. Rather, he stood out to the KGB because of his personality. Together his personality and KGB training shaped his charisma and political style.

During Putin’s KGB work, his role was primarily ideological counter-intelligence, dealing with political dissidents, seeking information about the activities of Western intelligence services and suppressing subversive activity fomented by Western powers in the waning years of the Cold War. He was stationed in East Germany near Dresden ‘on the front line between Eastern Europe and the West’ and witnessed the political turmoil leading up to the fall of the GDR, which became a harbinger of NATO encroachment into Eastern Europe.

The root of Putin’s opposition to liberalism is an understanding of its corrosive influence on Soviet society. He saw glasnost and perestroika become immediately exploited as hostile centers of Western ideological subversion in Russia; the liberalization of the Soviet system became its downfall.

Years later, Putin’s national security doctrine reaffirmed his opposition to liberalism by articulating “the crisis of the Western liberal model.” It stated: “The freedom of the individual is being made absolute; permissiveness, immorality and selfishness are being actively propagated; the cult of violence, consumption and pleasure is being implanted…The imposition of alien ideas and values…leads to disunity and the polarization of national societies…Traditional Russian spiritual, moral, cultural and historical values are being actively attacked by the United States and its allies through information and psychological sabotage and ‘Westernization’...These values (being attacked)...have been formed over centuries of Russian history and constitute the basis of Russian society.”

“Russia will not become a second edition of the US or Britain, where liberal values have deep historic traditions…For Russians a strong state is not an anomaly to be got rid of. Quite the contrary, it is a source of order and the main driving force of any change…In Russia, a striving for corporative forms of activity has always prevailed over individualism.”

“The foundation of the American identity is individualism. The basis of Russian identity is collective.”

The Collapse of the Soviet Union

While Putin views the collapse and break-up of the Soviet Union as a tragedy (“the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”), he also believes the Bolshevik Revolution sowed the seeds of the country’s destruction by “dividing our homeland” into separate, autonomous regions and endowing them with governments, each of which, in theory, had the right to secede. This effectively undermined the Russian national idea and was the germ of secessionist movements in the post-Soviet territories, which “to Putin, all had their roots in the Bolsheviks’ mistaken nationalities policy back in the 1920s, which had led to the Soviet Union becoming a mosaic of ethnically defined republics and districts.”

It was not merely the collapse of the Soviet Union that he regretted, Putin said, but the passing of the Russian empire. By breaking up a centralized empire that had existed for hundreds of years, Lenin had made “an absolute, pivotal, fundamental error.”

Nevertheless, when asked what had influenced him most and what he would most like to be able to undo, Putin replied “The Soviet Union’s collapse.” This is what inspires one of Putin’s key priorities, the strategic objective to strengthen the integration of the post-Soviet republics and reabsorb them into Russia’s territory.

This is the fundamental political contradiction between Putin’s foreign policy objectives and NATO’s expansion, the purpose of which is “aimed against the sovereignty of Russia.”

NATO, Crimea and Ukraine

In 1997, NATO officially extended membership invitations to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, three former Warsaw Pact states. Less than three weeks after NATO had admitted its first Eastern European members, it began bombarding Serbia, a traditional Russian ally.

NATO enlargement continued apace throughout the Bush administration, with the US attempting to push through a commitment to grant Ukraine and Georgia NATO membership, which was a known red line for Russia. This ultimately failed, but it was provocative nonetheless and proved the full extent of NATO’s expansionist plan was to reach Russia’s borders. Any attempt to bring the strategically located region of Ukraine, through which all Russia’s invaders in the last centuries have passed, into the orbit of NATO, would obviously be resisted by Russia with the utmost vigor.
Ukraine is part of the historic Russian national identity. “The Russian state traced its origins to Kievan Rus, founded in the ninth century with its capital first in Novgorod, then in Kyiv.” For centuries Ukraine was part of Russia. It was only during Soviet times that Ukraine, in its current form, was created as an artificial national state with a large Russian diaspora in its eastern provinces. “A third of the population was Russian. In Crimea, 90 percent of the population was Russian…Ukraine isn’t even a real country. Part of its territory is in Eastern Europe, while the rest was a gift from Russia.” By gift he meant Crimea, which was transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954.

In 2014, when Crimea held a referendum to rejoin Russia, 96% voted in favor. Crimea had always been an inseparable part of Russia and the decision to return Crimea to be part of Russia was of “sacral importance.” The same is true of Ukraine. Putin stated repeatedly that Russians and Ukrainians were “fraternal nations…fundamentally a single people” and that “no matter what may happen…we will come together in the end.”

In 2004, George HW Bush, Kissinger, and John McCain went to Ukraine to demonstrate Washington’s interest in the outcome of their elections. Putin viewed this attempt to suborn the most important of Russia’s post-Soviet neighbors as a betrayal and an attempt to install a pro-Western government which would open the door for NATO membership.

During the Obama administration, the Ukrainian president was overthrown in a coup organized by the US and coordinated through its various NGOs on the ground. The NED (a US NGO heavily involved in fomenting the coup) called Ukraine “the biggest prize” for America to pluck from Russia.

Ukraine, Putin declared, had become “a willing hostage to someone else’s geopolitical will.” The US-sponsored coup had turned Ukraine into an aggressive state and a springboard against Russia whose armed forces were supervised and trained by Western advisers and whose territory was being used for the deployment of NATO infrastructure. What the US was doing in Ukraine, Putin said, was comparable to “using weapons of mass destruction against us.” Putin warned “we will never allow our historical territories to be used against us.”

It was revealed that Putin was right, the US and NATO had been training Ukrainian forces since 2015 after the coup was successful. When the majority-Russian eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk decided to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the US-backed government in Kiev sent in tanks to suppress them. This provoked Russia to send in forces to protect them.

While Short’s biography ends right as the war in Ukraine was beginning, the essential context of the conflict, Russia’s motivations, and Putin’s political doctrine are all there. The only criticism I have is that Short is sometimes too trusting of Western sources and also too quick to dismiss Russia’s claims. In most cases, however, this is mitigated by him presenting both positions to allow the reader to come to their own conclusions instead of biasing them with only blatant anti-Russia propaganda.

[Mirko Kriskovic · Rating 2 out of 5]

One start for writing another one for clarity. Is a delight to read someone who knows how to tell a tale, unfortunately this is not a novel, but a biography.
I was going to give it more starts, however, this is like the Game of Thrones TV series, the opening chapters are brilliant, a real effort to cut through our Western propaganda, the second half of the book, alas, uninspired garbage, full of sloppy references and reliance on conspiracy theories debunked by the time the author published this book. I’ll illustrate;
1. Obama’s reluctance in Syria has nothing to do with his weaknesses but to the FACT that the CIA could not reassure him that it was not an staged attack, alleging Obama asked “is this a slam-dunk?’
2. Russian agents hacked the DNC Server, we may NEVER known, the server in question was NEVER examined by the CIA, FBI, NSA, but a private companies that handed over its findings to the FBI, Wikileaks release of those hacked files showed that it was copied onto a thumb drive (or USB stick)
3. The three year exhaustive invest conducted by Muller showed NO EVIDENCE of anyone voting for Trump because of Russian interference.
4. The Skripal’s poisoning time line is very dubious:
March 4th 2018; the leave the house touching the door knob that is the source of the poison, they managed lunch and dinner before succumbing to the most lethal poison in the universe (paraphrasing British media)
March 6 2018; policeman that went through the Skripal p;ace get sick and he’s admitted into hospital, by March 12 the PM announced that this was a Russian Job,
The ONLY DEATH was in June 30, 2018 when the bottle that carried the poison was found by the deceased in a public park garbage bin THREE MONTHS AFTER THE FACT!
A real waste of time except for the 6 opening chapters, after that pick up a copy of the Guardian or watch Sky News.

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

While there is no denying that this is now the standard accounting of Vladimir Putin's life, up to his decision to launch a "final solution" to his Ukrainian problem, the reality is that the continuing war leaves this work in indeterminate place. I would say that Short's coverage of the man's early life, up to the fall of the Soviet Union, is probably a must read. However, Short's efforts to depict Putin as a rational statesman, playing for rational gains, are now unconvincing to me. Perhaps Moscow does sustain a stalemate in regards to the current lines of battle. Perhaps Moscow does thread the needle in regards to the economic situation they now face. Perhaps, and this is the point that Short ends on, Putin does achieve his ambition of breaking the "New World Order" that came to be in the 1990s; whether Moscow is a beneficiary is the live question.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Put Off With Put Out Putin

This book was an incredibly thorough and in-depth look into the life of Vladimir Putin. It was evident that the author had done extensive research, as the details about Putin's life were well-presented and informative.

While the book was a bit dry and lengthy, it still managed to hold my attention with its insightful commentary on Putin's character and actions. I appreciated the author's ability to present a nuanced perspective on a complex and controversial figure.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Russian politics or world affairs.

It offers a valuable insight into the life and career of one of the world's most powerful leaders - even if that power is forced.

I still think that this is an important book to learn about the situation that we are currently in.

3.7/5

[Andrew Goodman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Short interviewed a lot of prominent politicians and government officials for his book, but one has to wonder how many people he spoke with who actually knew Putin well. For example, Short's account of how Putin operated in St Petersburg, about which I have direct knowledge, is filled with errors of commission and omission. A lot of studies of Putin have been published in the last several years, including by Karen Dawisha, Catherine Belton, Fiona Hill, Masha Gessen and Steven Lee Meyers. Read one (or more) of those instead.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strikes me as a very even-handed account of Putln’s life and career. Far more empathetic than most western writing about him, but certainly doesn’t shy away from the very unflattering stuff. Some accounts of mid-90s and early-aughts oligarch intrigue were a little hard to follow. Short editorializes quite a bit throughout, and while his opinions are usually thoughtful they do occasionally strike me as too tidy or axiomatic. Certainly a book to skip if you fear becoming a Putinversteher but I’m not sure what there is to fear from verstehen?

[❀ Carla ❀ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the kind of biography that’s going to make a lot of people, with completely opposite perspectives, very upset.

A timely and interesting biography with a style reminiscent of beloved historical biographer Ron Chernow. Philip Short teeters the line between academic, political journalist and provides personal touches and details about the personalities, beliefs and logics of the people at the heart of the biography.

[Aqeel Haider · Rating 5 out of 5]

#NonfictionGeek
#BookReview

𝐏𝐔𝐓𝐈𝐍 by 𝐏𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐩 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭
(His Life and Times)

Comprehensive biography of Vladimir Putin. Philip Short is a British Journalist who spent 8 years searching for the men and material to write this Book.

Volodaya, as he was known in his teenage, is a mysterious figure in the West. West is still unable to understand him after two decades in Power. He grew up in Leningrad (Now St. Petersburg), where he was born after the Second World War in 1952. He is the only Son. The book elaborately explains the circumstances he brought up and what the USSR was going through then. The book mainly focuses on the Political aspect of Russian life and Putin's ascending to Power. His tenure was in East Germany in Dresden as a KGB Official. His marriage with Ludmilla.

After USSR fall, Come Boris Yeltsin era. He was assistant to Anatoly Sobchak in Leningrad. And finally becoming deputy Mayor of Leningrad. From there, he served Yeltsin in Moscow. Finally, becoming Yeltsin's successor. Short enlightened reader of his personality traits. Specially audacity. Controlling his temper and emotions. Judo and KGB made him more expert in that. He also served as FSB director. Putin War against Chechnya, Provincial Governors and Russian Oligarchs. Last but not least, he had an authoritative style, and Siloviki ruled in his government. His ruthless means to counter his opponent Alexie Navalny recently got killed. His reputation with foreign leaders, especially George W Bush, Obama, Trump, Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, Yulia Tomyashenko, and Viktor Yanukovych.

#Recommended!

#thanks

[Marren · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book should be titled "Putin According to Putin"

Short comes off as a Putin apologist. "It was never about the money for Putin"? So why has he built a moldy palace in Gelendzhik instead of donating his funds to provide more citizens with indoor plumbing?

Short failed to mention accounts that demonstrate Putin's increasing paranoia. While not all accounts of Putin's paranoia are well-corroborated, for example, do he and Shoigu really do shamanic rituals? What does he use his anti-aging cryogenic chambers for? However, some of the information Short decided to include had around the same amount of evidence but painted Putin in a much more favorable light.

A couple positives were that there was information about his early years before coming into presidency, though who knows how accurate it is. It also gave some insights into Putin's personal relationships with some oligarchs.

Overall, this book is a useful account for studying Putin to understand his perspective more, and needs to be taken into account with many other perspectives and accounts.

[Rob Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lies have short legs.

“No one should be cornered. No one should be put in a situation where they have no way out.”

Inakomyslyashcie

The law [is] an instrument of the state, and its primary role [is] to protect state interests.

It’s “like trying to convert a submarine into an airplane while keeping its functioning with the same crew throughout.”

“If we catch them in the shithouse, we’ll wipe them out in the shithouse.”

A person’s beliefs were ‘inside a man’s heart’, not to be flaunted on the public stage.

Those who are destined to be hanged are not going to drown.

“There are people who can’t and won’t understand, no matter how you try to explain to them. The only thing they understand is strength.”

“It will pass. Everything passes, and this will pass as well.”

Power means the right to commit violence without punishment. The one whose violence goes unpunished is the ruler.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philip Short through extensive interviews, research and a career as a foreign correspondent has produced a weighty (in paper and thought) work on Putin. It is more extensive and even tempered than Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putinor Richard Lourie’s Putin: His Downfall and Russia's Coming Crash.

In engrossing prose, Short shows Putin’s youth as the only surviving child (a brother died in the siege of Stalingrad, most likely of starvation) of a doting mother and a true believer communist father. He lived in a neighborhood of tough, criminal kids and became one himself. In mid-teens – inspired by TV movies to be a spy - he buckled down and studied… somewhat. His better than average grades got him into an elite law school, in something that sounds like a Russian style affirmative action program… one of the spots reserved for children of the proletariat!

His stint with the KGB in East Germany for the most part is portrayed as more pedestrian than it is in Gessen’s book. In the chaos following the fall of the Berlin wall, he shows leadership in burning records before and during a crowd siege of Dresden's Stasi headquarters.

How and why he left the KGB for the Anatoly Sobchak (of all mis-matched people) mayoral administration is not clear. Unlike the Gessen and Lourie books, Short shows Putin as being only marginally corrupt (was he still under the influence of his true believer father?) in a place where businessmen, bureaucrats, politicians and criminals are one and the same. Operating at the highest level (even serving as acting mayor) he honed skills and made connections that served him very well in his move to Moscow.

As in Gessen and Lourie, he is shown as the available man for Yeltsin and his need for a temporary successor. No one expected him to say on. In Lourie, Putin’s relationship with Yeltsin and the Yeltsin family implies Putin’s position is owed to his ability to protect Yeltsin and his family’s (presumably ill gotten) wealth. Short avoids whatever scandal may have occurred, but shows Putin’s new life style that now includes horses and opulent homes that shock (even) Tony Blair.

Short notes Putin’s disappointments with the west (promised aid for Gorbachev never came; treated as a second class partner in Kosovo; NATO adds eastern European members; no thanks for allowing US operations on Russian affiliated soil for the Afghan War; the invasion of Iraq, US rhetoric particularly Condi Rice and other hawks in the State Dept.).

There is detail on Mihail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky. There are skirmishes with Russia’s “near abroad” entities. There are speeches that condemn Stalin and his purges and speak to Russian culture. He makes western sounding statements on religious and LGB tolerance. There are descriptions of the various poisonings and the credibility of Putin's denials. There are anecdotes that that touch on the controversial issues (pension reform, the war with Georgia, dealing with corruption etc.) that show a rift between Dmitry Medvedev, his handpicked (puppet) president and then prime minister.

There is a lot in this book. Here are a few take-aways:
- The Russian Constitution protects the State. This is a big contrast to the US Constitution that protects the individual.
- Putin is loyal. The toughs from his neighborhood and judo classes and from his East German assignment recur with plum positions. He goes to extremes to visit Sobchak in the hospital.
- Putin’s years as President and Prime Minister and President again show a growing authoritarian outlook.
- Short shows how the early Putin looked to the west for models of Russian development. Disappointments over many years changed his impression of the west (greedy hypocritical bullies) and made him resentful and hostile towards it.
- Putin has so much plausible deniability that it is hard to prove he has actually authorized anything.
- Putin has empowered his oligarchs and puppets in the “near abroad” such that they could be authorizing assassinations.
- Some “near abroad” rulers have levers they can pull to get what they need from him.
- Short often refers to Putin’s approval ratings of 60-80%. It is hard to believe the Russian people will actually give pollsters their opinions.
- In recent years Putin’s speaking of his grandchildren and writing history may indicate that he is considering retirement, in which case the invasion of Ukraine was meant to be his farewell achievement.
- In many ways, the Ukraine invasion, for Short, represents Putin’s final jab at the West.

This was a slow read, but well worth the time. I’ve come away with a better understanding of who Putin is and what motivates him. If you are interested in Putin, and/or contemporary Russia, and have the time, this is highly recommended.

[Max Gwynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite being a tome of a book, Short’s biography of Putin stands as the seminal text on the man.

Short writes without an agenda, presenting the reader with a non biased examination (as much of one as is possible anyway), providing an overview unparalleled previously seen in other biographies.