Our former Moscow correspondent picks seven books on Russia

First Person (2000). By Vladimir Putin. PublicAffairs; 208 pages; $16 and £11.99

Vladimir Putin gave notice of who he was, and what he was capable of, in “First Person”, a transcript of interviews published in 2000, at the start of his overlong rule. In his youth, he recalled, he had been a tough little hoodlum who fought rats in the stairwell of his communal-apartment building and, later, brawled with strangers on the streets of Leningrad. “A dog senses when somebody is afraid of it,” he had learned, “and bites.” He prized loyalty and feared betrayal. He was hypersensitive to slights, to both his country and himself. He bore grudges. Sometimes the Mr Putin of “First Person” appears frank, at others, cagey and withdrawn. Few people knew him well; he was seen as a grey man, inscrutable. Read our longer review of this and other books.

Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2004). By David Satter. Yale University Press; 326 pages; $30 and £23

David Satter was among the first Anglophone analysts to gauge the evil in Mr Putin’s system. In “Darkness at Dawn” he accused the FSB, the domestic security service, of orchestrating a string of bombings in Russia in 1999 that killed around 300 people and ignited the second Chechen war—thus helping Mr Putin, who oversaw the fighting, to secure the presidency. Few were ready to digest that theory; several Russians who pursued it came to a sticky end.

The Man Without a Face. By Masha Gessen. Riverhead; 314 pages; $27.95. Granta; £20

In this polemical biography, Masha Gessen characterised Mr Putin, then set to reclaim the presidency after a pro-forma stint as prime minister, as a killer and extortionist. This version of him—a KGB thug turned mafia godfather—had been “hidden in plain sight”, but obscured by wishful thinking and that grey veneer. Death and terror were politically useful to Mr Putin, the author wrote. He made no distinction between the state’s interests and his own. Read our review from 2012.

Putin’s People. By Catherine Belton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 640 pages; $35. William Collins; £21.99

The gangster network that oversees Russia was definitively elaborated in “Putin’s People”. In the system of “KGB capitalism” that Catherine Belton described, government was a machine for extracting rents and expropriating assets, politics a squabble over who got them, and the president its referee. The siloviki (strongmen) were bound together by a regime of mutual blackmail, in which secrets were both weapons and liabilities; for his part, Mr Putin had spilled too much blood and made too many enemies to retire. Besides self-enrichment, the spoils were used to undermine the West, black cash sloshing around the world to fund “active measures” and the “restoration of the country’s global position”. We reviewed the book, and included it as one of our Books of 2020.

The New Tsar. By Steven Lee Myers. Vintage; 592 pages; $22. Simon & Schuster; £9.99

The author perceptively identified the Orange revolution in Ukraine in 2004 as a breaking-point. Huge protests overturned the result of an election rigged in favour of Mr Putin’s candidate. The reversal combined personal humiliation with a geopolitical rebuff; his fear of crowds, and sense of the jeopardy of democracy, were inflamed. He “nursed the experience like a grudge”, Mr Lee Myers wrote, tightening the screws in Russia, ramping up his propaganda and setting up tame youth movements to dominate the streets. Mr Putin’s bleak Chekist mindset could not admit the possibility that Ukrainians were turning West—and rejecting him—of their own volition. Convinced that the CIA had paid or cajoled them, he embarked on a spiral of meddling that culminated in the latest invasion. By 2014, thought Mr Lee Myers, he had found a “millenarian” mission as the indispensable leader of an exceptional power. “The question now was where would Putin’s policy stop?”

Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. By Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy. Brookings Institution Press; 400 pages; $29.95 and £19.99

The authors saw Mr Putin’s efforts to make Russia’s economy more resilient, and to eliminate domestic opposition, as a long-haul preparation for confronting the West. His bid to undermine Western democracies through fifth columnists, bribery and kompromat was part of the same strategy. The greyness, they wrote, had always been tactical: Mr Putin was “the ultimate political performance artist”, his mercurial public persona a way to keep his adversaries off-balance. Mr Gaddy and Ms Hill—who became the top Russia adviser in Donald Trump’s National Security Council—concluded that he was more than an avaricious gangster. His objective was to survive and overcome his foes, who, in his view, were Russia’s enemies too; to that end he was waging a long, hybrid war against the West. He would pounce on weaknesses, the pair warned, and fulfil his threats. “He won’t give up, and he will fight dirty.” Yet even these authors judged that, if only for reasons of trade, Mr Putin “does not want Russia to end up being a pariah state”. Read our 2013 review of an early edition of the book.

Day of the Oprichnik. By Vladimir Sorokin. Translated by Jamey Gambrell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 208 pages; $16. Penguin Classics; £9.99

The book that most clearly saw where Putinism was heading was not a history or biography but a novel (first published in 2006) set in 2028. The Russia it depicts seems to exist in two time-frames at once, futuristic technology jostling with medieval barbarity and obscurantism. The country is walled off from Europe and the tsar has been restored. His word is law, but even he must “bow and cringe before China”, which (along with gas exports) props up the economy. The oprichnik of the title is one of his elite henchmen—the name comes from an order of pitiless enforcers under Ivan the Terrible. Their methods are murder and torture, their sidelines extortion and theft. Vladimir Sorokin’s satirical dystopia has come to seem more prescient than outlandish. The details are grotesque, but also, sometimes, horribly familiar. In the story, when the wall was built “opponents began to crawl out of the cracks like noxious centipedes”—imagery that anticipates Mr Putin’s dehumanisation of his critics as gnats. Chillingly, when the oprichniks gather for a debauch, one of their toasts is “Hail the Purge!”■
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Our former Moscow correspondent is the author of several novels, including:

Snowdrops. By A.D. Miller. Anchor; 272 pages; $14.95. Atlantic; £7.99

An amorality tale set over a Russian winter that was shortlisted for the Booker prize. “An electrifying tour of the dark side of Moscow, and of human nature,” said the Independent.

Independence Square. By A.D. Miller. Pegasus Books; 228 pages; $25.95. Vintage; 304 pages; £8.99

A story of revolution and betrayal set during the Orange revolution in Ukraine. The Spectator called it “gripping...a searing indictment of our times”.
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