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Russia under Vladimir Putin has proved a prickly partner for the West, a far cry from the democratic ally many hoped for when the Soviet Union collapsed. Abroad, Putin has used Russia’s energy strength as a foreign policy weapon, while at home he has cracked down on opponents, adamant that only he has the right vision for his country’s future.
Former BBC Moscow correspondent Angus Roxburgh charts the dramatic fight for Russia’s future under Vladimir Putin—how the former KGB man changed from reformer to autocrat; how he sought the West’s respect but earned its fear; how he cracked down on his rivals at home and burnished a flamboyant personality cult, one day saving snow leopards or horseback riding bare-chested, the next tongue-lashing Western audiences. Drawing on dozens of exclusive interviews in Russia, where he worked as a Kremlin insider advising Putin on press relations, Roxburgh also argues that the West threw away chances to bring Russia in from the cold by failing to understand its fears and aspirations following the collapse of communism.
- Sales Rank: #977471 in Books
- Published on: 2012-02-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.65" h x 1.35" w x 5.94" l, 1.23 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Review
*A solid foreign correspondent narrative of Putin’s behavior* - Bill Keller, The New York Times
*The considerable value of this book lies in his painstaking and empathetic effort to understand how Mr.. Putin came to power, why many Russians still support him today, and how the West's approach to Russia has helped to shape his rule.* – The Wall Street Journal
*A serious book that portrays a Russian administration at sea in a world most of its officials did not comprehend. Putin himself emerges as a more complex character than the epithet *strongman* would suggest…Every chapter of this book is worth reading.” – The Independent (UK)
“[A] lively and absorbing study of the Putin years.” - The Guardian (UK)
*As a former adviser to the Kremlin in 2006-09, working for the Brussels based consultancy GPlus, Roxburgh had an excellent vantage point, and here he offers a stellar cast of sources, drawn from those closest to Putin and Western leaders. Their accounts make this is a valuable book.* - European Voice
*Roxburgh is a talented journalist and writer...a useful history of the Putin era....with views from Russian politicians, and some of the key players from the world of international politics, it is a book firmly rooted in fact and analysis. This means that Roxburgh’s approach is refreshingly free from some of the usual polemic, and he is to be congratulated for giving credit where credit is due and for underlining Putin’s role in stabilising Russia after the free-fall of the Yeltsin years.* - Good Book Guide
About the Author
Angus Roxburgh is one of Britain’s most distinguished foreign correspondents. An author and renowned journalist, he was the Sunday Times Moscow Correspondent in the 1980s until he was expelled from the Soviet Union in a tit-for-tat espionage row. He returned in the 1990s and was the BBC’s Moscow correspondent during the Yeltsin years. Subsequently, he worked as an advisor and speechwriter for Putin’s communications team, a role which gave him unrivalled access to the Kremlin’s inner circle.
Most helpful customer reviews
32 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
Ground breaking , balanced , tragicomic and of possible historic importance
By H. Williams
I must say that that this book was a well researched , balanced and ground breaking study of Putin as a Russian leader. It was very surprising to "digest" the information contained in this book especially as the author is a mainstream western journalist. Whilst there is criticism of Putin, the author instead of needlessly demonizing him like other western analysts and journalists, provides a lot of perspective in Putin's upbringing and KGB training as well as an explanation of Russia's experience in the 1990s to show that Russia was not going to become a democracy overnight. He provides criticism of western policies toward Russia and his style of doing so is shocking , well written, groundbreaking and candid. Thus phrases like "what the west missed in Yeltsin was a leader who was pliant" are a good way of phrasing an accurate view. He also provides interviews with key insiders that provide a lot of insight into events concerning Russia, NATO ,the west and the globe over the last 20 years. We hear from Dmitry Peskov how Khodorkovsky was plotting to take over the Kremlin by buying off the duma and we hear from Sergei Markov about the Kremlin's effort to fix the election in Ukraine in 2004 by stating a view that was absurd and conspiratorial in nature (the west was plotting to put an anti Russian candidate to rule Ukraine).Most importantly of all, we hear from Nicholas Burns , one of the architects of NATO expansion that NATO expansion was targeted at Russia. He basically says that he knew Russia would try to become strong and dominate Europe again and that they had to protect Eastern Europe.For me, this was a shocking revelation and it is astonsihing to see this view making it into a work by a mainstream western journalist.
That being said, the flaw of this book is that Mr. Roxburgh does not challenge the double standards of his western colleagues regarding their views on Russia.He even goes concurs with some of their myths. For example, he passes off Chechen terrorism as the result of centuries of Russian oppression. There is some truth to this view but why is such a sentiment expressed only in relation to Russia. AS the citizen of the greatest imperial power in the world , Mr Roxburgh must be familiar with the fact that the same thing could be said about the British experience with the Mau Mau and the Irish. I have personally spoken to a lot of Irish people who whilst being very devout have a burning hatred of the British and sympathize with the IRA. It must also be said that AL-qaeda uses the suffering of Muslims under tyrannical , pro-American regimes and under Israel to justify its use of terrorism. That being said, I find it ironic that Mr. Roxburgh says that Beslan was payback for the suffering that the chechens experienced at the hands of the Russians.
Mr Roxburgh also describes the bias against Putin and Russia indirectly but he does not come out and condemn it.Thus , he explains that Putin could not understand that a lot of the Western reaction towards him was due to his corrupt,undemocratic behavior at home , omitting that many of the west's allies throughout the world (Egypt under Mubarak, Saudi Arabia today, Yemen, Chile under Pinochet and Spain under Franco ). Angus really means to say that there is a strong Russophobic element in the west, otherwise how else can you explain the fact that many of the countries courted in the former USSR: Kazakhstan, Georgia and Ukraine also have problems with democracy, corruption and oligarchy , as he demonstrates in his book. I can't understand what is his reservation about using the word Russophobia. Similarly, Angus does not share the view of his western colleagues that Khodorkovsky is some kind of Russian Mandela. He notes that Khodorkovsky had a crooked start in gaining control of Yukos , that he sponsored a campaign of bribery of duma deputies, that he is not a saint, he notes the Kremlin's fear that he was trying to take power and his use of the word "politically ambitious" suggests that he agrees with them.Why he does not criticize his colleagues for their stupidity in lionizing this crook has left me pulling out my hair, especially as this is influencing Russian cooperation with regard to Libya and Syria (the Kremlin is not going to cooperate with regime change when it sees it as a pattern of behavior, especially since it looks at the Yukos affair as regime change) ! Again, whether he does this out of cowardice in not wanting to offend his colleagues or out of wisdom as a way to get his views across is a mystery to me.
In reading this book , I also have to say that it is a perfect illustration of how the neocons in the Bush administration "screwed up" over the last decade.If you look at all the episodes that lead to the breakdown between relations between Russia and the West (NATO expansion, Missile defence, the Iraq war,the Georgian war, asylum to Chechen separatists such as Ilyas AKhmadov who was an aide to Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev), it is not hard to find the influence of people like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Nicholas Burns and Richard Perle. It is indeed a tragedy and comedy of the first order, that a genuine chance to secure a lasting partnership between the two biggest nuclear powers was thrown away by these people (remember that Putin was very pro- American in his early years). Such an alliance could have guaranteed the security of the western world against threats such as a rising China, radical islam and Iran.It would be truly unfortunate if the west is defeated by any of these threats and if such a tragedy befalls us, this book may explain one of the reasons why.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A regime the West can't change
By R. L. Huff
Britain's veteran Russia specialist, Angus Roxburgh, offers a mature, reasoned, and experienced Western view of Putin and Putinism. It serves as a necessary counterpoint to the incessant demonizing of both emanating from the United States. I seriously doubt if it could have been written or published now in the US. Russia-bashing is an old American tradition, predating even the Bolshevik revolution (see David Fogelsong's "The American Mission and the `Evil Empire': The Crusade for a `Free Russia' Since 1881.") And unfortunately, in the wake of the Crimean annexation, it is the negative that's escalating to ever more shrill (and impotent) heights. Roxburgh bids us to stand back and look at the world not just from Putin's view, but that of Russia itself. The West has obliviously (or, perhaps knowingly) plowed on ahead with a self-interested agenda to simultaneously remold and contain the "New" Russia, as if said adjective was merely a supporting prop.
Roxburgh is good at demonstrating the Western "forked tongue" over NATO expansion eastward, which is ultimately behind most of the post-Soviet angst. But he shies short from connecting the dots. The Latvian president's tear-jerking ode to her country's freedom from Russian domination at the Prague summit of 2002 (p. 97) left many Russian eyes dry, as they recalled the two Latvian SS divisions that served Nazi occupiers in the Third Reich's thrust toward Moscow. The Kremlin cries today of "Ukrainian fascists" who have taken over Kiev hearken to the same bloody memories, still willfully ignored by the West as it seemingly patronizes groups precisely for their anti-Moscow militance.
Roxburgh is also, I feel, being disingenuous when he wonders why post-communist Russia has not "turned itself into a thriving manufacturing country like China or many other developing economies" (p. 283). He seems unaware that Russia is not a developing country, but an old developed economy whose industries were of the same rust-belt generation as the mills, mines, and factories of Youngstown or Pittsburgh. The thrust of "economic reform" was thus to dump old industrial investment for new finance-driven capitalism, exactly as in the old-money West - with the added inducement that Russia's modernization was further hamstrung by bans on new-technology sales to Moscow. This policy is far from dead, as the quashing of Russia's bid to acquire GM asset Opal attested: to keep Russia from acquiring the very technology required to make it competitive.
I disagree with Roxburgh's take that Russian reform has always "come from above." The Tzar's granting of a Duma in 1906, and initiating land reforms, was inspired solely to quell the revolutionary movement of the streets and villages. Similarly, the Russian revolution re-erupting in February, 1917, was a perfect parallel to Egypt's Arab Spring as a groundswell of street activism, bringing down two governments within a year. But it's true that Putin has rolled back the glasnost era, when Russian liberty seemed to have arrived into its own at last. Two points here: Yeltsin was not the "democrat" the West made him out to be, as Roxburgh accurately recalls, but an authoritarian predecessor for all that it now objects to in Putin. Secondly, Yeltsin's entourage was composed not only of Democratic Russia liberals, but entrenched apparatchiks who hated Gorbachev, who abandoned the old CP because it was no longer theirs - like Yeltsin himself. Mouthing democratic phrases was a small price to pay for access to Western loot. The rise of Putin in 2000 demonstrated the final eclipse of the liberal DemRossiya wing of Yeltsin's movement. It has been a downhill slide since, but with equal responsibility from a self-serving West.
Putin's role, as he sees it, is to reconstruct the Russian, not the Soviet empire. His vision is the old mantra of "Great Russia, One and Indivisible." Western fuming over the return of the USSR shows an ignorance as mutual as the Russian belief that 9/11 was a Zionist-CIA plot. He highly resembles another "strongman", the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. Yet the West will not be able to bomb Putin to the negotiating table. It will have no other option but diplomacy and recognizing Russian interests. Russia - like GM - is simply "too big to fail."
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Easy Fun Read with lots of insider info
By The Kid
This is both a well written book and an enjoyable read. It doesn't take a stance heavily one way or the other which keeps the book from being to heavy handed. There are many times in which he gives the opinions and view points from people behind the scenes and this is what makes this a really good book. I really enjoyed reading this and felt I knew the Russians and Putin's stand on things better after reading it. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to better understand the Russian approach to foreign policy, Great Book!
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