It’s no surprise to literally anyone who knows me that I’m really into Eastern European and Russian history. I mean, really into it. With recent events in Ukraine, however, I’ve realized that my reading niche has been solidly rooted in the time from the Russian Revolution to the death of Stalin, and not much outside that (though I’ve read a fair bit both pre-revolution and post-USSR).
When something happens in the world, my default state is to try and understand the mechanisms at work that paved the way for this sort of thing to happen. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Stalin wasn’t born Stalin; he became that way as a result of his own personality traits and the push/pull of social tensions happening around him. Similar, I’d say, with just about anyone. Even Vladimir Putin.
So, Ukraine is a hotspot and the world is poised on the brink. Everyone is talking about Putin. Is he insane? Did he grossly miscalculate? He can’t hope to win this, what are his end goals? And me being me, I don’t really want to read think pieces about this on the internet. Everyone who is anyone can have an opinion and post it somewhere. No, what I want is a big, beefy book to read. I want sources and editors, fact checkers in place. I want to go dive into the roots of situations and study the seeds of conflict.
I don’t want to know. I want to understand.
On Friday, Audible yelled at me because I had too many credits and they were going to expire. “Oh no!” I said, so I went on there and I nabbed a few books, one of which was about Putin. I finished it last night, and when I did, I realized there are a few books on Putin and his power that I've read over the years which I'd consider easy to read, entry-level, and fundamental for understanding what is happening and his stake in it all.
Recently, I've been asked by a lot of people what books I'd recommend on Putin.
And here we are.
So, if you’re curious about Putin, about this invasion of Ukraine, about the West and Russia and their complex uh… relationship… here are three books you might want to check out.
Putin’s People by Catherine Belton
I can’t begin to tell you how much I loved this book. Hands down, one of the best books on modern Russia and Putin I’ve ever read. This one is quite a doorstopper, landing at about 640 pages total. Putin’s People details the fall of the USSR and the rise of Vladimir Putin, as well as the oligarchs and powerbrokers around him. Every detail is carefully covered and explored and nothing is overlooked.
What Belton truly excels at, is showing how the past and the present aren’t often as separate as we like to think they are. The Russia of today hasn’t changed much from the Russia of 1991. The same goals that were present during the fall of the Soviet Union are still very much bedrock in the political psyche of such people as Vladimir Putin and those he surrounds himself with. And what are they? Basically, Russia wants to be a powerbroker, a dominant force in the world and if they can’t be that, then they at least do not want to be subservient.
So, if the goals haven’t changed, what has changed is the methods of attaining them. Belton shows how Putin’s methods of attaining his aims are rooted solidly in his Cold War, KGB days in Eastern Germany, and his connections with organized crime, which were formed when he’d returned from East Germany during the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The bulk of the people covered here fall in to one of a few camps (sometimes a few of these camps, or all of them): Business tycoons, Russian organized crime, and KGB officials. Through a network of contacts, paper trails, and risky interviews, Belton shows how money is used as an under-the-table means to exercise Putin's power and authority—grease the wheels, as it were—and keep his people loyal to him and his cause, creating a kleptocracy that is truly a thing to behold.
Though this book focuses primarily on Putin, his rise to power, and how he exercises his authority, to understand the present one must understand the past, and a lot of history is covered here too. One of the things that fascinates me about Russia in particular is how obvious this connection between past and present is, which is often overlooked or underexplored in most other regions of the world. Here, though, the past makes the present possible, and Belton unflinchingly takes readers through the upheavals and difficulties presented by history, and shows how it impacts the present.
To understand how Putin is operating, one must understand the man himself and the people he surrounds himself with. This book does an amazing job at just that.
The New Tsar by Steven Lee Myers
This is a biography of Vladimir Putin, a detailed story of his rise to power. Yes, it can be a bit dry, but it’s well worth reading, especially if you’re interested in the roots of where Putin came from, as well as how he’s come to exercise his power.
Clocking in at about 600 pages, it’s not a small book, and there’s a lot that’s covered, a lot of events that might get a passing reference in other texts gets time on this stage. That being said, where this book truly excels is how Myers digs deep into the early career of Putin, his time in the KGB, his formative early years in the Russian government. Myers has done a lot of work to shine light on a part of Putin’s life that can seem shrouded in mystery.
Putin, however, has a gift for switching the narrative and gilding the lily. So, here we see how he took an event, like Chechnya, and brutally suppressed it, then turned it into something that bolstered his popularity and increased national zeal and fervor at the same time. Then, we see how all of that impacted his political career and prospects. It all spirals a bit, and Myers does a fantastic job at showing the formative events in Putin’s career, and how he managed to take them and use them to create… himself.
That is truly where this book rises above the others. Here, we see a lot of events we might only know about in passing, but through studied focus on Putin, we see how he used them as tools to further his own political prospects and career. There’s a lot of detail here, and a lot of names and events. If you aren’t into this sort of thing already, you might get a bit lost in all of it. However, if you stick it out, the reward is well worth the effort. Very rarely have I seen an author do as good of a job showing the rise of a powerful person, and how he used events as building blocks, how he changed the narrative, and how certain happenings informed his perspectives on the West, NATO, the UN and more.
Dry? Yes, a bit, but oh-so-informative.
From Russia With Blood by Heidi Blake
I just finished this book last night, and to say I was captivated is an understatement. I remember a lot of the deaths mentioned in these pages, but so many of the details that are discussed here never made news headlines. Furthermore, Blake goes back in history a bit, and talks about how Putin made the shift from KGB to powerbroker in Petersburg, ties with various crime syndicates (and why he formed them). What From Russia With Blood does really well, though, is show how past events impact current events through a more personal lens.
The Moscow Bombings, and the gassing of the theater, the war in Chechnya are all things I’ve heard about in the periphery, but they never really made huge headway in Western media. Blake, however, ties them all to Putin, the dynamics of his power, and then his covert assassination program of expatriates. It's quite a tangled web, and somehow it remains clear throughout, regardless of which thread the author is pulling at the time.
And while you might be wondering how this, in any way, informs the current situation in Ukraine, it’s important to realize that nothing that is happening is really new. All of this has been done before, and Putin absolutely has some default behavior patterns which you’ll pick up on if you read enough about him. This book does a magnificent job of showing how Putin views the West, and how he keeps an iron fist clamped around the source of his power and authority.
Blake uses declassified texts to weave a narrative of a covert assassination campaign which has been used to tidy up loose ends via people falling out of windows, or being dosed with Novichok, and how the UK government often overlooked this in favor of strengthening Russia/UK ties. While Blake does poo-poo the UK government a bit for how they handled this, I tend to take a bit of a more lenient view of it all, as it must have been an impossible situation for the government at the time. That being said, I'm not a British person, so take that for what it's worth. I'm looking at it from the outside.
There are some weaknesses here. Blake obviously has an agenda and she’s setting out to prove her point. This doesn’t mean she’s wrong on any of this, it just means that sometimes there’s spin. However, the way Blake weaves together events like the fall of the USSR, the rise of organized crime, brutality like what happened in Chechnya and the Moscow Apartment Bombings right when Putin was really solidifying his power is nothing short of captivating, and extremely informative. To see how the man operates is to better understand how he interacts with the world.
What surprised me about this one was how it felt a bit more personal. Blake weaves together interviews, court transcripts, letters, emails and more, giving all of these people their own voices, which is something I think a lot of nonfiction books lack.
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