Russian evolution

Three books offer a succinct picture of Putin's Russia and its problematic relationship with Ukraine

Like Narendra Modi in India, many books have been written about Vladimir Putin in Russia. Books about Modi focus on the consequences of his politics and style of governance on India. Most books about Putin recognise that the domestic landscape of post-superpower Russia has had a profound impact on geopolitics because of the country’s huge oil and natural gas reserves. Putin’s “special operation” in Ukraine, now into its third month, has been a rude reminder of those consequences.

Many more books on Putin and the Ukraine crisis will emerge from the publishing assembly line as the conflict drags on. If you want to understand, beyond the media insta-analysis, post-Soviet Russia and the man who shaped it, you could do no worse than read these three books. Two trace Putin’s rise and the third chronicles Ukraine’s complicated history and Russia’s place in it. These are, in order of appearance, Putin and The Rise of Russia by Michael Stuermer; Putin’s People: How the KGB took Back Russia and Then Took on the West by Catherine Belton and The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy.

One of the earliest books on Putin — it was published in 2008 — Putin and The Rise of Russia may appear dated given the torrent of information that has been disgorged on the internet since his invasion of Ukraine. But Stuermer’s book is interesting because as a journalist with the German daily, Die Welt, he met Putin several times and tracked his rise from a bureaucratic functionary to the presidency.

Stuermer’s first encounter was in 1992 when Putin was acting as a translator at a meeting with Anatoly Sobchak, the charismatic mayor of St Petersburg, and, as we now know, the godfather who enabled Putin’s emerging kleptocracy. Stuermer’s first impression is worth repeating: “… a slight, youngish-looking man of indeterminate age and light blue eyes whom Sobchak introduced, in English, as a member of the administration of St Petersburg.  … His German was remarkably good and I remember meeting a few KGB officers whose English was flawless, Etonian. Meanwhile, the man in the grey suit contributed little to the conversation that ranged across Russia’s past and possible future. His name, Vladimir Putin, did not ring any bells — noticed and forgotten.”

Stuermer’s book hews to the descriptive and factual, stopping short of admiration for the apparent order that Putin’s presidency had brought to Russia after the chaos of the Yeltsin years. Putin’s unhappiness with Nato’s expansion, his desire to be respected as a European power of consequence and his ambitions for Ukraine were all in evidence in those early years but, interestingly, these are not elements that Stuermer picks up on as seeds of future crises. He is more aware of the immediate problems — the “vacuum cleaner method” of privatisation, the emergence of Gazprom as a multinational player, the singular focus on natural resources, and the unrest on the peripheries of the former empire, Chechnya being on the boil at that point. Towards the end of his second term as president, which marked the formal constitutional limit, Stuermer quotes Putin’s elliptical declaration: “I shall leave the Kremlin but not Russia.” In retrospect, it’s an adroit description of his subsequent constitutional legerdemain to appoint himself leader for life.

By then, Russian oligarchs had emerged on the European stage, outdoing West Asian oil barons as lavish spenders on yachts, jets, mansions and champagne-and-caviar lifestyles. How did they become so powerful? Former Financial Times journalist Catherine Belton’s 500-page doorstopper Putin’s People provides the answers in eye-popping detail. This page-turner reaches back into Russia’s Soviet history to explain the seamless connectivity between the Soviet-era KGB, in which Putin served, and the oligarchy that orbits Russia’s president for life.

Belton chronicles how the KGB systematically looted the Soviet Union by squirrelling scarce foreign exchange into anonymous accounts overseas ostensibly to finance its black ops around the world. These accounts, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars and gold reserves, became the resource base on which Putin and his cronies drew to acquire swathes of assets in the post-Soviet privatisation fire sale, creating networks of financial and natural resource corporations that operate in opaque closed user groups of wealth and power. Belton’s book is a study in Kleptocracy 1.0. If you want a sharp insight into what makes Putin tick, this is the best book yet.

But what of Ukraine, the country that has excited Putin’s revivalist ambitions? The narrative that Putin (and, oddly, US right-wingers) put about is that Russia and Ukraine have been integral since the mists of time and Putin’s conquests were correcting a historical blunder. The Gates of Europe, by historian Serhii Plokhy elegantly demonstrates why this view of history is bunk. Though the book was published in 2016, two years after Putin’s Crimean conquest, its relevance has been enhan­ced by current events.

Plokhy traces the evolution of Ukraine from prehistoric times through the tenth-century empire of Kievan Rus’, a people of Scandinavian origin, which developed around Kiev at a time when Moscow was a backwater. Later, its partial amalgamation into a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose rivalry with the Russian Czars encouraged the latter to turn their conquering attentions to the fertile Ukrainian steppes. Plokhy describes the complex rambunctious history of Mongol invasions, Cossack Hetmanates (chieftainships) and the cultural and religious tensions between the Russified east and Europeanised west bordering Poland, the Baltics, Romania and Hungary. After two world wars of shifting borders and population exchanges, Ukraine emerged as a multicultural, multi-religious nation with a distinct — and, Plokhy underlines — European identity.

As for Crimea, Putin’s chief raison d’etre for conquest, Plokhy points out that Nikita Khrushchev granted the province, annexed by Russia in 1783, to Ukraine principally because he saw no value in Russia retaining it. The region was in sharp decline thanks to Stalin’s collectivist ambitions and mass deportations of Crimean Tatars in the 1930s; Khrushchev had hoped the Ukrainians would be able to revive it. Even if some of the conclusions in the book are open to debate, The Gates of Europe is a classic that is well worth its steep price of Rs 938.

Meanwhile, watch for Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, State-Sponsored Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath by Bill Browder, which is just out. It’s a real-life thriller of what happens when a foreign investor crosses Putin. Spoiler alert: The narrator lives to tell the tale.