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inverarityHow a nobody became the new Czar and the West got played.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, 640 pages
This book was published in 2020, before the current Ukrainian invasion, but the groundwork was already there so it remains timely. Putin's People has only sketchy biographical details about Vladimir Putin (whose biography is sketchy to begin with), but it's a meticulously documented biography of his political rise, and the tragic trajectory Russia took from the optimistic 90s to archvillain in a new (not so) Cold War today.
Catherine Belton was the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, and her investigative journalism for this book was quite thorough. Putin's People starts with a cast of characters, or "rogue's gallery," if you will, which frankly is necessary for us non-Russian-speaking readers. A list of Russian oligarchs, past and present government functionaries, and all the other men who enabled or briefly hindered Putin's rise to power. Belton personally interviewed many of the people in the book, from oligarchs to London bankers to Russian officials. She relates being threatened more than once and told not to return to certain places. Russian threats against journalists are not empty. All of the information is public, more or less, but Belton compiles it into a damning timeline of Russian villainy and greed and Western complicity and greed. Her basic thesis is that the West got played: from Angela Merkel and Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to Obama, Trump, and Boris Johnson, the EU, UK, and United States all wanted to believe that as Russia modernized and "reformed" its economy to enter Western markets, it would be forced to adapt to Western standards of legality and transparency. Prosperity and capitalism would change Russia. Instead, Russian changed the West.
Vladimir Putin started out as a minor cog in the KGB during Soviet days. Belton describes Putin as a young man who always dreamed of joining the KGB. In fact, he called the local KGB office as a teenager, eager to join, and was disappointed to be told he needed to graduate from university first. He carefully listened to the KGB officer's list of requirements, and then went about fulfilling them.
He did some spy stuff, was stationed in East Germany and apparently hated it because it was so boring, and eventually resigned from his post as Lt. Colonel and became the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Notably, even while still a KGB man, he made a point of taking communion and clearly never believed in communism. His supposed devotion to the Russian Orthodox Church is one reason why certain American conservatives consider Putin a culture warrior on their side to this day, though to Putin, this seemed to be less about piety and more about warding off Western degeneracy.
A modestly successful commissar, but hardly a power player, Putin eventually moved to Moscow and became the director of the FSB (the Russian intelligence agency that succeeded the KGB) under Boris Yeltsin. Putin was still a little-known figure, a small, unassuming "gray man," but he was calm and reassuring and looked good on TV. Meanwhile, Boris Yeltsin's regime was crumbling. Yeltsin and his family were being sucked into a corruption scandal involving sums that would be considered laughably small compared to the billions that Putin's people would later bilk from the state.
The Kremlin decided that Vladimir Putin, the little "gray man" from St. Petersburg, looked good enough to make him a prime minister. They figured he was their man. He'd serve their interests and do as he was told. Yeltsin supported Putin and even said he wanted him to be president.
Yeltsin, a poor bumbling drunk who managed to survive a coup and was briefly a Western darling, had shepherded Russia from the collapse of the USSR to its fumbling efforts to build a modern market economy. He probably had good intentions in his own fumbling, corrupt way. Putin owed Yeltsin everything for his rise to power, and it's probably because of that that Yeltsin, contrary to Russian tradition, was allowed to retire peaceably to a dacha instead of accidentally shooting himself in the back of the head while falling out a ninth floor window, which has happened to quite a few of Putin's adversaries.
When did the new Russian oligarchs begin to suspect they might have made a mistake? Perhaps when Putin, before his first election as President, said he wanted to eliminate the oligarchs. This was a very popular line with the Russian people, who were not doing well with the collapse of the Soviet system and the disappearance of pensions, while nouveau rich looted the country. But the oligarchs thought Putin was still their tool.
Putin, like the canny old KGB operative he was, played his hand brilliantly. When he stepped down as president because the Russian constitution limited him to two terms, he installed Dmitri Medvedev as a temporary replacement. Medvedev served one term, then resigned so Putin could return and essentially bury the constitution and become President For Life.
Putin's consolidation of state assets and power began with the destruction of Yukos, a Moscow-based oil and gas company that was purchased by Mikhail Khodorkovsky with some shady (but typical for Russia) loans after the privatization of Russian oil fields, making him one of the first of the new oligarchs and soon the richest man in Russia. Unfortunately, this also made him a target, and Putin soon demonstrated that the Kremlin could simply take anything they wanted. The government froze Yukos shares and assets, causing the company to collapse, then be broken up, and Khodorkovsky was arrested on various charges of fraud and tax evasion. Khodorkovsky's trial was expedited (the Kremlin was afraid the statute of limitations would run out on some of the charges), and the judges were taken to a luxury dacha owned by the government to write their verdicts. One judge resisted, and the Kremlin visited his supervisor in Moscow Superior Court to have him pressured. The Kremlin didn't completely own the judges yet, but according to Belton, Khodorkovsky's trial was the turning point after which Moscow courts simply issued verdicts the Kremlin wanted, and Russian oligarchs were all put on notice that their companies, their assets, their wealth, were all held on Putin's sufferance.
It's hard to feel sorry for a billionaire who, while he was probably no worse than any other Russian oligarch, was certainly at least complicit in the looting of his own country, but Belton, like most media, paints Khodorkovsky as an honorable man who was wrongfully convicted. He was considered a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International. He was eventually pardoned by Putin in 2013 (supposedly with an informal agreement that he'd be a good boy, keep his mouth shut, and stay out of politics), and now lives in exile in the UK and has to content himself with being merely very, very rich instead of being super-ultra rich. Khodorkovsky has since been a very vocal critic of Putin and a supporter of Ukraine, and not coincidentally, Russia has designated him as a "foreign agent" and issued a warrant for his arrest for supposedly having a rival murdered in the 1990s. It's a safe bet that he won't be going home any time soon.
This pattern would repeat itself many times over the following decades. Putin effectively became a new Tsar. He disavows any involvement or influence over prosecutions (persecutions) of wayward billionaires and political rivals, but it was understood that all oligarchs owed Putin their fealty (and tribute), and anyone who balked would see their assets seized, their families threatened, sometimes their lives forfeit.
Putin's public image has relied heavily on projecting an image of calm manliness, including frequent much-memed shirtless photos. Yet the man Belton describes is not quite the steel czar he'd like us to think. For example, after the disaster of the Kursk, a Russian submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, Putin seemed paralyzed, and he got reamed on national TV by the angry families of the crew.
He supposedly wanted to resign after the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2013. Belton describes a second-hand account of him sitting at home in a pair of slippers watching old sitcoms, while his wife (who never wanted to be Russia's First Lady and had to be talked out of divorcing him during his reelection campaign) sullenly skulks about.
During his reelection campaign, Putin faced unexpected opposition, and simply could not believe that the demonstrations against him were real. He assumed the US was behind the Moscow protests, and this may have fueled the animosity that followed.
What drove all this? Why has Putin proven to be such a singularly nasty leader, when Russia had so much promise as it shook off the Soviet yoke?
Essentially, it was all willful delusion on the West's part. We were celebrating the fall of the Evil Empire, and we really wanted to believe that the Russian bear would finally become a teddy bear. But in reality, Russia was always Russia, they had always meant to be a great empire (and resented Europe treating them like backwards hicks going all the way back to Ivan I), and Putin wasn't having any of this "Westernization" bullshit. Belton describes what might have been Putin's own personal turning point, and a prelude to his seizing Yukos, when an American Exxon executive proposed to him that they were interested in buying Russian oil companies. Putin, who was, after all, still a KGB man at heart, had never imagined American capitalists buying up Russia's natural resources. His reaction was apparently a public "Hmm, interesting" and a private "Oh hell no."
And why has the West let Russia get away with so much to this point? In a word, money. While Russia is corrupt as hell, Belton paints a damning picture of European and American bankers and businessmen being dazzled by Russian riches and wanting to feed at the trough, not caring any more than the Kremlin does that this is all being looted from what should rightfully belong to the Russian people. Russia has falling birth rates, rising alcoholism, lowered life expectancies, and nonexistent social services, and meanwhile Russian oligarchs are buying entire London neighborhoods, American sports teams, and mega-yachts. It's a money train that keeps rolling in (as long as you play ball the Putin way), and Britain and the West optimistically thought that Russia would be transformed. Instead, Russian money transformed London.
It was perhaps the invasion of Crimea in 2014 when the West finally realized Russia wasn't going to join the new world order. Condemnation followed, but Russia proved surprisingly resilient against economic sanctions, in large part because of their vast reserves of off-the-books "slush funds" that the Kremlin can basically tap and use as it sees fit.
The final chapters are perhaps the weakest in the book, as they are more about Donald Trump than Vladimir Putin. While for the first part of the book, Belton catalogs Putin's history, Russian skullduggery, and British and European complicity with ample citations, she goes a little bit off the rails when it comes to Trump.
Belton obviously loathes Trump and heavily pushes the "Trump is a Russian asset" theory. She never directly says this, but fills the last part of the book with highly suggestive business dealings and interactions between the Trump family and various Russian figures. And to be sure, there is a lot of suggestive interaction. Is Trump a useful idiot whose strings are being pulled by the Kremlin, or is he actively Putin's man? As, ahem, not a Trump fan, I found a lot of what Belton suggests plausible, but still, there was an awful lot of circumstantial evidence and raging about how Trump's actions served Russian interests. Yes, Putin preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton, and yes, I have no doubt Russia is trying to influence American elections. (Frankly, if I were Putin, I'd fire my intelligence chiefs if they weren't trying to influence American elections.) Still, this was not a book about Trump's Russian connections and if you want to make that argument, you need to present a better case than some guilt-by-association in the final chapter of your book.
Overall, this was a pretty thorough timeline of Putin's rise to power, some good insights into how Russia works and how Putin stays in power, and why Russia is not going to be our friend any time soon. The investigative journalism and thorough documenting of Putin's regime is very informative, but it was a rather dry read throughout, except at the end when you could see the author's horror at the possibility of Trump being reelected.
Now, with Russia a pariah state at war with Ukraine (which is treated sympathetically but not uncritically in this book, as Ukraine was and is pretty damn corrupt itself), we can see the events of the last two years as merely a continuation of a pattern. Belton warned that Putin had visions of restoring the Russian Empire and that he considered Ukraine part of Russia, and she even brings up his arguments about "de-Nazification" and protecting Russian ethnic minorities, which he made back in 2014.
I don't know if Putin's People is the best book on the subject, since obviously there have been many books about Putin and his regime in recent years, but if you know very little about the history behind Putin's rise, this one will give you a pretty good understanding.
My complete list of book reviews.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, 640 pages
Interference in American elections. The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it?
In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche - a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad.
Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach - and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match - Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.
This book was published in 2020, before the current Ukrainian invasion, but the groundwork was already there so it remains timely. Putin's People has only sketchy biographical details about Vladimir Putin (whose biography is sketchy to begin with), but it's a meticulously documented biography of his political rise, and the tragic trajectory Russia took from the optimistic 90s to archvillain in a new (not so) Cold War today.
Catherine Belton was the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, and her investigative journalism for this book was quite thorough. Putin's People starts with a cast of characters, or "rogue's gallery," if you will, which frankly is necessary for us non-Russian-speaking readers. A list of Russian oligarchs, past and present government functionaries, and all the other men who enabled or briefly hindered Putin's rise to power. Belton personally interviewed many of the people in the book, from oligarchs to London bankers to Russian officials. She relates being threatened more than once and told not to return to certain places. Russian threats against journalists are not empty. All of the information is public, more or less, but Belton compiles it into a damning timeline of Russian villainy and greed and Western complicity and greed. Her basic thesis is that the West got played: from Angela Merkel and Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to Obama, Trump, and Boris Johnson, the EU, UK, and United States all wanted to believe that as Russia modernized and "reformed" its economy to enter Western markets, it would be forced to adapt to Western standards of legality and transparency. Prosperity and capitalism would change Russia. Instead, Russian changed the West.
Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin started out as a minor cog in the KGB during Soviet days. Belton describes Putin as a young man who always dreamed of joining the KGB. In fact, he called the local KGB office as a teenager, eager to join, and was disappointed to be told he needed to graduate from university first. He carefully listened to the KGB officer's list of requirements, and then went about fulfilling them.
He did some spy stuff, was stationed in East Germany and apparently hated it because it was so boring, and eventually resigned from his post as Lt. Colonel and became the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Notably, even while still a KGB man, he made a point of taking communion and clearly never believed in communism. His supposed devotion to the Russian Orthodox Church is one reason why certain American conservatives consider Putin a culture warrior on their side to this day, though to Putin, this seemed to be less about piety and more about warding off Western degeneracy.
A modestly successful commissar, but hardly a power player, Putin eventually moved to Moscow and became the director of the FSB (the Russian intelligence agency that succeeded the KGB) under Boris Yeltsin. Putin was still a little-known figure, a small, unassuming "gray man," but he was calm and reassuring and looked good on TV. Meanwhile, Boris Yeltsin's regime was crumbling. Yeltsin and his family were being sucked into a corruption scandal involving sums that would be considered laughably small compared to the billions that Putin's people would later bilk from the state.
The Kremlin decided that Vladimir Putin, the little "gray man" from St. Petersburg, looked good enough to make him a prime minister. They figured he was their man. He'd serve their interests and do as he was told. Yeltsin supported Putin and even said he wanted him to be president.
Yeltsin, a poor bumbling drunk who managed to survive a coup and was briefly a Western darling, had shepherded Russia from the collapse of the USSR to its fumbling efforts to build a modern market economy. He probably had good intentions in his own fumbling, corrupt way. Putin owed Yeltsin everything for his rise to power, and it's probably because of that that Yeltsin, contrary to Russian tradition, was allowed to retire peaceably to a dacha instead of accidentally shooting himself in the back of the head while falling out a ninth floor window, which has happened to quite a few of Putin's adversaries.
When did the new Russian oligarchs begin to suspect they might have made a mistake? Perhaps when Putin, before his first election as President, said he wanted to eliminate the oligarchs. This was a very popular line with the Russian people, who were not doing well with the collapse of the Soviet system and the disappearance of pensions, while nouveau rich looted the country. But the oligarchs thought Putin was still their tool.
Ahead of the presidential election, one oligarch had apparently gone to see Putin in the white house, the seat of the Russian government, where he still kept his office and told him in no uncertain terms that he should know he would never be elected without their support, and that he should therefore understand how to behave. Putin barely batted an eyelid, and merely replied, "We'll see." He didn't throw anyone out of his office, but of course, he was playing with them. They absolutely underestimated him.
Putin, like the canny old KGB operative he was, played his hand brilliantly. When he stepped down as president because the Russian constitution limited him to two terms, he installed Dmitri Medvedev as a temporary replacement. Medvedev served one term, then resigned so Putin could return and essentially bury the constitution and become President For Life.
In Russia, rich do not own the government, government owns the rich
Putin's consolidation of state assets and power began with the destruction of Yukos, a Moscow-based oil and gas company that was purchased by Mikhail Khodorkovsky with some shady (but typical for Russia) loans after the privatization of Russian oil fields, making him one of the first of the new oligarchs and soon the richest man in Russia. Unfortunately, this also made him a target, and Putin soon demonstrated that the Kremlin could simply take anything they wanted. The government froze Yukos shares and assets, causing the company to collapse, then be broken up, and Khodorkovsky was arrested on various charges of fraud and tax evasion. Khodorkovsky's trial was expedited (the Kremlin was afraid the statute of limitations would run out on some of the charges), and the judges were taken to a luxury dacha owned by the government to write their verdicts. One judge resisted, and the Kremlin visited his supervisor in Moscow Superior Court to have him pressured. The Kremlin didn't completely own the judges yet, but according to Belton, Khodorkovsky's trial was the turning point after which Moscow courts simply issued verdicts the Kremlin wanted, and Russian oligarchs were all put on notice that their companies, their assets, their wealth, were all held on Putin's sufferance.
It's hard to feel sorry for a billionaire who, while he was probably no worse than any other Russian oligarch, was certainly at least complicit in the looting of his own country, but Belton, like most media, paints Khodorkovsky as an honorable man who was wrongfully convicted. He was considered a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International. He was eventually pardoned by Putin in 2013 (supposedly with an informal agreement that he'd be a good boy, keep his mouth shut, and stay out of politics), and now lives in exile in the UK and has to content himself with being merely very, very rich instead of being super-ultra rich. Khodorkovsky has since been a very vocal critic of Putin and a supporter of Ukraine, and not coincidentally, Russia has designated him as a "foreign agent" and issued a warrant for his arrest for supposedly having a rival murdered in the 1990s. It's a safe bet that he won't be going home any time soon.
This pattern would repeat itself many times over the following decades. Putin effectively became a new Tsar. He disavows any involvement or influence over prosecutions (persecutions) of wayward billionaires and political rivals, but it was understood that all oligarchs owed Putin their fealty (and tribute), and anyone who balked would see their assets seized, their families threatened, sometimes their lives forfeit.
Putin: does not actually wrestle bears
Putin's public image has relied heavily on projecting an image of calm manliness, including frequent much-memed shirtless photos. Yet the man Belton describes is not quite the steel czar he'd like us to think. For example, after the disaster of the Kursk, a Russian submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, Putin seemed paralyzed, and he got reamed on national TV by the angry families of the crew.
He supposedly wanted to resign after the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2013. Belton describes a second-hand account of him sitting at home in a pair of slippers watching old sitcoms, while his wife (who never wanted to be Russia's First Lady and had to be talked out of divorcing him during his reelection campaign) sullenly skulks about.
During his reelection campaign, Putin faced unexpected opposition, and simply could not believe that the demonstrations against him were real. He assumed the US was behind the Moscow protests, and this may have fueled the animosity that followed.
What drove all this? Why has Putin proven to be such a singularly nasty leader, when Russia had so much promise as it shook off the Soviet yoke?
None of this would have mattered if the KGB men who ran Russia had sought to use the country's wealth to strengthen market and democratic institutions rather to preserve and project their own power. It wouldn't have been an issue had the hardcore siloviki around Putin seen the West as a possible partner and not increasingly as the enemy, intent on weakening Russia as a global power. But they came from a world where the Cold War had never really ended, where the only thing that mattered was restoring Russia's geopolitical might. Theirs was a world in which, from the start of Russia's transition to the market, factions of the KGB had seen capitalism as a tool for one day getting even with the West. A world in which Putin believed he could buy anyone. For Putin's people, the encroachment of the West, through NATO, ever closer to Russian's borders, was an existential threat, while the democracy movements that overturned pro-Russian governments in Ukraine and Georgia were seen as US-funded revolutions, not as an expression of the people's free will. These paranoias were born of the collapse of empire. Grounded in the bitter defeat of the communist system.
Essentially, it was all willful delusion on the West's part. We were celebrating the fall of the Evil Empire, and we really wanted to believe that the Russian bear would finally become a teddy bear. But in reality, Russia was always Russia, they had always meant to be a great empire (and resented Europe treating them like backwards hicks going all the way back to Ivan I), and Putin wasn't having any of this "Westernization" bullshit. Belton describes what might have been Putin's own personal turning point, and a prelude to his seizing Yukos, when an American Exxon executive proposed to him that they were interested in buying Russian oil companies. Putin, who was, after all, still a KGB man at heart, had never imagined American capitalists buying up Russia's natural resources. His reaction was apparently a public "Hmm, interesting" and a private "Oh hell no."
And why has the West let Russia get away with so much to this point? In a word, money. While Russia is corrupt as hell, Belton paints a damning picture of European and American bankers and businessmen being dazzled by Russian riches and wanting to feed at the trough, not caring any more than the Kremlin does that this is all being looted from what should rightfully belong to the Russian people. Russia has falling birth rates, rising alcoholism, lowered life expectancies, and nonexistent social services, and meanwhile Russian oligarchs are buying entire London neighborhoods, American sports teams, and mega-yachts. It's a money train that keeps rolling in (as long as you play ball the Putin way), and Britain and the West optimistically thought that Russia would be transformed. Instead, Russian money transformed London.
It was perhaps the invasion of Crimea in 2014 when the West finally realized Russia wasn't going to join the new world order. Condemnation followed, but Russia proved surprisingly resilient against economic sanctions, in large part because of their vast reserves of off-the-books "slush funds" that the Kremlin can basically tap and use as it sees fit.
Orange Man Bad
The final chapters are perhaps the weakest in the book, as they are more about Donald Trump than Vladimir Putin. While for the first part of the book, Belton catalogs Putin's history, Russian skullduggery, and British and European complicity with ample citations, she goes a little bit off the rails when it comes to Trump.
Belton obviously loathes Trump and heavily pushes the "Trump is a Russian asset" theory. She never directly says this, but fills the last part of the book with highly suggestive business dealings and interactions between the Trump family and various Russian figures. And to be sure, there is a lot of suggestive interaction. Is Trump a useful idiot whose strings are being pulled by the Kremlin, or is he actively Putin's man? As, ahem, not a Trump fan, I found a lot of what Belton suggests plausible, but still, there was an awful lot of circumstantial evidence and raging about how Trump's actions served Russian interests. Yes, Putin preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton, and yes, I have no doubt Russia is trying to influence American elections. (Frankly, if I were Putin, I'd fire my intelligence chiefs if they weren't trying to influence American elections.) Still, this was not a book about Trump's Russian connections and if you want to make that argument, you need to present a better case than some guilt-by-association in the final chapter of your book.
Overall, this was a pretty thorough timeline of Putin's rise to power, some good insights into how Russia works and how Putin stays in power, and why Russia is not going to be our friend any time soon. The investigative journalism and thorough documenting of Putin's regime is very informative, but it was a rather dry read throughout, except at the end when you could see the author's horror at the possibility of Trump being reelected.
Now, with Russia a pariah state at war with Ukraine (which is treated sympathetically but not uncritically in this book, as Ukraine was and is pretty damn corrupt itself), we can see the events of the last two years as merely a continuation of a pattern. Belton warned that Putin had visions of restoring the Russian Empire and that he considered Ukraine part of Russia, and she even brings up his arguments about "de-Nazification" and protecting Russian ethnic minorities, which he made back in 2014.
I don't know if Putin's People is the best book on the subject, since obviously there have been many books about Putin and his regime in recent years, but if you know very little about the history behind Putin's rise, this one will give you a pretty good understanding.
My complete list of book reviews.
