Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin Author: Ben Judah | Language: English | ISBN:
B00CE7NZC2 | Format: EPUB
Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin Description
From Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Russian Far East, journalist Ben Judah has travelled throughout Russia and the former Soviet republics, conducting extensive interviews with President Vladimir Putin’s friends, foes, and colleagues, government officials, business tycoons, mobsters, and ordinary Russian citizens. Fragile Empire is the fruit of Judah’s thorough research: a probing assessment of Putin’s rise to power and what it has meant for Russia and her people.
Despite a propaganda program intent on maintaining the cliché of stability, Putin’s regime was suddenly confronted in December 2011 by a highly public protest movement that told a different side of the story. Judah argues that Putinism has brought economic growth to Russia but also weaker institutions, and this contradiction leads to instability. The author explores both Putin’s successes and his failed promises, taking into account the impact of a new middle class and a new generation, the Internet, social activism, and globalization on the president’s impending leadership crisis. Can Russia avoid the crisis of Putinism? Judah offers original and up-to-the-minute answers.
- File Size: 1355 KB
- Print Length: 403 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0300181213
- Publisher: Yale University Press (April 15, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00CE7NZC2
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #29,499 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > International > Economics - #7
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Russia
- #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > International > Economics - #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > World > 21st Century - #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Russia
I picked up this book based on positive reviews in Bloomberg and elsewhere and was very impressed. I have a reasonably good understanding of Russia based on military history and a decent understanding of the global energy business.
The first thing that comes to my mind is how brave the author must be to go around Russia asking questions about Putin. From my understanding and this book that is a very risky thing to do since the primary purpose of the security apparatus in Russia is to keep Putin in power.
The book follows Putin from the chaos in post-collapse St Petersburg where he worked for a local politician through his election to presidency, the Medvedev years (which were actually the Putin years), and then back into his current stint in charge.
The book is not all negative about Putin, which is what I find most interesting. The oligarchs that took control of the energy and media companies were extremely un popular and Putin brought them to heel. This was in fact popular among much of the population. He also took energy revenues and used them to pay some salaries and pensions and bring some modest amount of stability to the poor. And Moscow was substantially re built with sky scrapers and other elements. He also resolved (for the time being) the situation in Chechnya by allying with the current warlord and this momentarily resolved a horrible active war that was being fought in an embarrasing way for Russia.
It is very interesting to see how close associates of Putin, even those in his Judo club and KGB days, have become billionaires. They have taken control of the energy infrastructure and then a swiss trading function is another source of his supposed vast personal wealth (unproven).
The subtitle of this book, “How Russia fell in and out of love with Vladimir Putin” is an apt summary. Judah chronicles the rise of Putin from virtual nobody (1991), to lionized tsar (2008), to a putative Tsar Nicholas II or Boris Gudonov (2012). It is a compelling account, based on thousands of interviews with ordinary Russians, and dozens with “influentials” past and present.
Judah shows Putin to be a man who has assumed the guise demanded of him by events and history: a Chekist in the last days of the USSR, a democrat under Sobchak, a loyal servant under Yeltsin, a militant war president riding a popular tide that wanted security and stability above freedom. But, in the process of that last bit, Judah argues, Putin and his coterie built centralizing institutions that eviscerated civil society and the democratic accomplishments of the Yeltsin era. The manipulative interim presidency of Medvedev, followed by the re-re-election of Putin showed that the Vertical of Power had no clothes, that “managed democracy” had only “the formal institutions of democracy... gutted of meaning,” that the Party of Power was in fact the “party of crooks and thieves.”
The vertical of power turned into a vertical of corruption, United Russia turned into a patronage network not a party, and the ‘dictatorship of law’ turned out to be a dictatorship of predatory officials. They left Russia a fragmented and feudalized country in which all corrupt policeman, inspectors and governors had been signed up into Putin’s party.
The mass demonstrations of 2011-12, Judah says, were signs of a discontent that he says is far from limited to the capital. The discontent “is vast,” he says, “but resistance is tiny.
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