Putin: His Life and Times

In this incisive and well-timed biography, journalist Short (Pol Pot) paints Russian president Vladimir Putin as a perfect fit for post-Soviet rule: a former KGB apparatchik who built a kleptocratic coalition of police and military bureaucrats, billionaire oligarchs, and organized-crime gangs; a genuinely popular politician who manipulated elections and suppressed political opposition; and a canny statesman who advanced Russia’s recovery of territory and international clout. Short guides readers through the corrupt dealmaking and power plays that marked Putin’s career, credits him with restoring stability and economic growth, and evenhandedly assesses the dire allegations critics lodged against him. For example, Short exonerates Putin of charges that he secretly masterminded terrorist bombings that were blamed on Chechen separatists but finds him guilty of authorizing the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny. The man himself, in Short’s shrewd portrait, is an icily self-controlled, Machiavellian realist, often vulgar (“They picked all this out of their noses and smeared it over their papers,” Putin declared when asked at a news conference about accusations of graft), conciliatory when necessary, brutal when convenient, and, unfortunately for Ukraine, doggedly tenacious. Short’s elegant prose conveys a trenchant view of post-Communist society—“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”—that makes Putin a striking embodiment of Russia’s troubled soul. This is a must-read. (July)