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The 14 best books to help you understand Vladimir Putin’s Russia

This list offers the most incisive books on the past and present of Russia and its president.

By New Statesman

Putin’s Russia: The Definitive Account of Putin’s Rise to Power by Anna Politkovskaya

Harvill Press, 320pp, £10.99

The journalist Politkovskya told us exactly who Vladimir Putin was back in 2004, two years before she was assassinated in Moscow. It is both sobering and instructive to read her account of the horrors of the Second Chechen War between 1999 and 2009, carried out on Putin’s orders, given the subsequent invasion of Ukraine. A prophetic account of what was to come.

The Return of the Russian Leviathan by Sergei Medvedev

Polity, 140pp, £17.99

A professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Medvedev produces a brilliant collection of essays on the ideas, politics and history that are shaping contemporary Russian society under Putin, and how the Kremlin appeals to nostalgia and nationalism to stoke regime support.

Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia by Samuel A Greene and Graeme B Robertson

Yale, 296pp, £20.00

Drawing on extensive on-the-ground research, including focus groups and opinion surveys, Greene and Robertson examine the roots of Putin’s popularity and his support across different sections of Russian society. The current situation has revealed the importance of understanding who supports Putin and why.

Citizens and the State in Authoritarian Regimes: Comparing China and Russia , edited by Karrie Koesel, Valerie Bunce, Jessica Chen Weiss

Oxford University Press, 344pp, £23.49

Among this collection of articles, Aleksandar Matovski’s chapter on the logic of Putin’s popular appeal and his efforts to position himself as defending Russia against its external enemies and “making Russia great again”, is particularly pertinent. Other scholars examine the role of patriotic education and propaganda in authoritarian systems. This would be a good book to pair with Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies (1995) on why and how public opinion still matters under authoritarian rule.

The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War by Arkady Ostrovsky

Atlantic Books, 400pp, £9.99

This terrific, short history relays the experience of economic chaos and humiliating decline that accompanied the Soviet Union’s collapse for its citizens. It also describes how Putin and his inner circle took power and seized control of the media to shape the president’s popular image during his first decade in power.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia by Peter Pomerantsev

Faber & Faber, 304pp, £9.99

This remains one of the best (and most beautifully written) books on Putin and modern Russia in recent years. Pomerantsev’s work captures both the dizzying pace of change in Russia during the economic boom of Putin’s first two terms, and the endemic corruption and compromise that came with it. Though only seven years old, Pomerantsev’s Russia of excitement and possibility already feels like a different world from the repression and censorship that has since risen to the fore. It ably gives a sense of what has and is being lost.

Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s Russia by Joshua Yaffa

Granta Books, 368pp, £12.99

A fascinating character study of life in contemporary Russia under Putin, this work uncovers the trade-offs and compromises that individuals make under authoritarian rule. It is worth reading alone for the story of the zookeeper from Crimea during Russia’s annexation of the peninsula by Russia in 2014.

Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West by Catherine Belton

William Collins, 640pp, £8.49

An exhaustive account of Putin’s rise, from Dresden in the 1980s to the Kremlin. Belton explores his links with oligarchs, and the way those relationships have evolved over the years – to the point where Putin now uses oligarchs as messengers in return for allowing them to amass huge fortunes. Anyone who steps out of line pays the price. Belton is devastating on the extent of Kremlin-driven corruption and the salting away of illicit wealth overseas.

The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen

Granta Books, 528pp, £10.99

Gessen uses the life stories of four young Russians born in the 1980s to frame how Russia first opened up politically, then closed itself off again, with decreasing space for dissent. A vivid and deeply personal work of analysis.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

Bodley Head, 368pp, £10.99

A historian at Yale, Snyder dissects Putin’s thinking and the philosophers that inspired him. The book is especially good on the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and excoriates the West’s complacency and failure to understand the political and geopolitical forces at work.

Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy

Allen Lane, 432pp, £9.99

Plokhy analyses the ossification of policy and command structures in Soviet Ukraine that allowed the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster to happen. This is a story of how design flaws were compounded by human frailty.

All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin by Mikhail Zygar

PublicAffairs, 400pp, £14.99

Anyone interested in Kremlinology or in separating speculation from reality about the inner workings of the Kremlin and of Putin’s own circle should read this book.

The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past by Shaun Walker

Oxford University Press, 288pp, £14.99

Putin’s call for “denazification” and attempted erasure of Ukrainian history makes this an ideal time to revisit Walker’s work on how historical narratives in Russia and Ukraine are used – and abused – in national politics.

Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

Fitzcarraldo Editions, 704pp, £14.99

Alexievich’s brilliant oral history of the collapse of the Soviet Union reminds us that the best way to understand what is happening to a people is to ask them.

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Putin: His Life and Times review – the collapse that shaped the man who would be tsar

Philip Short’s meticulous new biography forces us to look at Vladimir Putin’s most appalling acts from a Russian perspective

I n his speech on the night of the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, which Philip Short describes as “pulsating with anger and resentment” at 30 years of Russian humiliation, Putin seethed: “They deceived us… they duped us like a con artist… the whole so-called western bloc, formed by the United States in its own image is… an empire of lies.” For those who dismiss the speech and the invasion that followed as the words and actions of a man gone mad, dying or out of contact with reality due to Covid isolation, this new biography should be compulsory reading.

As Short observes, however authoritarian and corrupt modern Russia may be, “national leaders invariably reflect the society from which they come, no matter how unpalatable that thought may be to the citizens”. While his people may have been as surprised as the rest of the world at the timing, the invasion hardly came out of the blue and many Russians, not all blinded by propaganda, support it. For as the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, commented a couple of weeks later: “This is not actually, or at least primarily… about Ukraine. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like. Will it be a world in which the west will lead everyone with impunity and without question?”

Refreshingly, Short, in this meticulous biography of a man portrayed elsewhere as a 21st-century monster, refuses to moralise, opting instead to lay out how Putin’s recent actions can be seen as the consequence of the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The former BBC correspondent is at his best when pushing us to see the world from a Russian perspective. The importance of this is neatly illustrated in the publisher’s own claims for the book: “What forces and experiences shaped him [Putin]? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the cold war?” Short relentlessly traces the journey Putin has taken in rejecting that “peace”, the Pax Americana, the unipolar world in which, according to Russia expert Strobe Talbott, then US deputy secretary of state, “the US was acting as though it had the right to impose its view on the world”. From Moscow, Putin watched the US openly intervene in elections whenever it chose, encourage the break-up of the sovereign state of Serbia using bombs, invade Iraq on a tissue of falsehoods and then overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi without any UN resolution. As Putin commented in one of his acid asides that pepper Short’s account, when it came to concocting fables “those of us in the KGB were children compared to American politicians”. No wonder Xi Jinping of China and much of the world demur at the west’s claim to have done nothing to provoke the nightmare that has descended on Ukraine.

For all his recent whitewashing of Stalinism and Soviet history, in the early 1990s Putin understood the 1917 revolution had taken the country to an economic and political dead end. In his words, “the only thing they had to keep the country within common borders was barbed wire. And as soon as this barbed wire was removed, the country fell apart.” Yet running through all Putin’s thinking was a clear belief that the break-up of the Union in 1991 was a catastrophe for Russia; what was lost was not the Soviet dream but a country that physically stretched from Poland to the Pacific and historically back to Peter the Great and before. Putin mourned: “It was precisely those people in December 1917 who laid a time bomb under this edifice… which was called Russia… they endowed these territories with governments and parliaments. And now we have what we have.” Except we do not. For Putin and many of his fellow Russians have never understood how a country they believe saved the world from fascism at staggering personal cost just 50 years before dissolved in a matter of weeks.

Strikingly, the occasions Short records when outsiders have witnessed Putin’s inscrutable mask fracture nearly all relate to these “lost” lands, countries whose independent existence was to him an impossible outrage. There is the rant about Estonia to the British ambassador or former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s magnificent record of Putin’s “violent diatribe” over Georgia and its leader, who should be “hung by his balls”. That only ended when Sarkozy retorted: “So your dream is to end up like Bush, detested by two-thirds of the planet?” Putin burst out laughing. “You scored a point there.” Finally, most importantly, over Ukraine, which, whisper it quietly, in its present shape truly was a creation of Stalin and Khrushchev. The tragedy may be that it has taken Putin’s actions, the atrocities committed by the Russian army and tens of thousands of deaths, to finally prove Ukraine’s existence to the man himself.

Critics point to Putin’s work for the KGB as revealing the core of the man, as so often investing its members with inhuman powers of control, deception, amorality and evil. Short, instead, places the real shaping of the man both before and after his KGB years. Born in the harsh courtyards of postwar Leningrad, he emerged a cautious operator, shy and unreadable, but with a startling streak of brutality. Working for the city’s famously liberal mayor through the whirlwind of chaos and violence that swept his city and Russia in the early 1990s, he forged lasting bonds with everyone from the new business elite to leading mafia bosses and senior players in the Kremlin. He labelled himself a bureaucrat, not a politician. Avoiding conspicuous consumption and not known for swimming in the oceans of corruption around him, he was at the same time not above buying himself a dissertation towards a Candidate of Sciences degree, whose subject was “Strategic Planning for the Rehabilitation of the Mineral Resources Base in the Leningrad Oblast”. Its true author, according to Short, would later receive “several hundred million dollars’ worth of shares”. Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years, as the puritan has spectacularly lost his inhibitions. His subsequent rise was public yet shadowy, a sequence of well-chosen battles engaged when he knew he could win.

Ironies haunt the book: “Those who believe that [military force] is the most efficient instrument of foreign policy in the modern world will fail again and again… One cannot behave in the world like a Roman emperor,” he said after one US military adventure. Equally haunting are the lost opportunities to avoid rubbing a proud nation’s nose in their defeat at every turn: expanding Nato to Russia’s very borders, breaking at the very least the spirit of clear promises; or not taking seriously Putin’s coherent attempt to create a joint front against radical Islam after 9/11, when he defied his own military’s cold war warriors to help Bush. Torture in Chechnya, it seems, can never be the same as torture in Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib to the victors. “We won, they didn’t,” trumped Bush senior in 1991; Clinton said “Yeltsin could eat his spinach”, while Obama more recently dismissed Russia as simply a “regional” power.

Short is too astute to indulge in easy post-event speculation about different outcomes. Instead, he charts the inexorable march away from the genuine more liberal aspirations of Putin’s early days to the harsh autocratic isolated tsar of recent years, from a Russia culturally and mentally in Putin’s words “an inalienable part of Europe” to the present rupture, which will surely separate it for at least a generation. Who remembers that Putin asked the BBC’s Bridget Kendall to moderate the first of his annual phone-ins to speak to the nation and the world? Now, he talks of the end of the “so-called liberal idea” while promoting traditional Russian spiritual values, the collective over the individual, rejecting the west in tones redolent of Soviet propaganda. But will a younger generation who have grown up feeding on internet social media, able to travel freely and getting information how and when they like, really admire an authoritarian regime that is rotten to its core? That was the challenge laid down by the anti-corruption campaigner, Alexei Navalny, and he had to be locked away . Can the ageing tsar, whose acolytes still seem keen to educate their offspring in Britain and the US when not out sailing on ever-larger yachts, really believe himself a persuasive model for those ancient values?

There is a blank evenness to Short’s prose, a steady accumulation of information built through intelligence and concentration on detail with emotions coiled tight, which makes this book a perfect mirror to its subject. He calls Putin a liar, regularly, but again and again he pulls back from laying direct responsibility on him for some of the more egregious acts. “Hard to judge” or “Nothing concrete suggests” and other such qualifiers litter his accounts of critical moments. Sometimes, they usefully temper the more extreme personal charges against Putin. Overall, however, they let him escape true responsibility, not for individual crimes, but for failing to transform Russia, instead reaching back to an arthritic mythical past, not forward to a different future.

The result is a step-by-step journey, whose penultimate chapter is a little surprisingly called “The Endgame”, hobbled by being published as the climax approaches, not after the event. Short, let alone history, has not had time to judge the success or failure of the latest horrifying act in Putin’s astonishing drive to make Russia great again.

Film-maker Angus Macqueen has helped create a platform of award-winning documentaries, Russia On Film

Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short is published by Bodley Head (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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Putin: The explosive and extraordinary new biography of Russia's leader Paperback – 5 July 2022

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• Print length 848 pages
• Language English
• Publisher JONATHAN CAPE & BH - TRADE
• Publication date 5 July 2022
• Dimensions 15.3 x 4.8 x 23.4 cm
• ISBN-10 1847923380
• ISBN-13 978-1847923387
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ JONATHAN CAPE & BH - TRADE (5 July 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 848 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1847923380
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1847923387
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.3 x 4.8 x 23.4 cm
• 19 in Biographies of Terrorists & Freedom Fighters
• 58 in Historical Russia Biographies
• 64 in Russian & Soviet Politics

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Philip short.

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Putin: The explosive and extraordinary new biography of Russia’s leader Hardcover – 30 Jun. 2022

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**A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022** 'Anyone wanting to learn more about Putin's personality, ideas, power...should read this outstanding biography' Ian Kershaw, author of Personality and Power This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is happening in Ukraine today. Vladimir Putin has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. Yet many Russians continue to support him. Despite western sanctions, the majority have been living better than at any time in the past. By fair means or foul, under Putin's leadership, Russia has once again become a force to be reckoned with. Philip Short's magisterial biography demolishes many of our preconceptions about Putin's Russia and explores in unprecedented depth the personality of its enigmatic and ruthless leader. What forces and experiences shaped him? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the Cold War? To explain is not to justify. Putin pursues his goals relentlessly by whatever means he thinks fit. But on closer examination, much of what we think we know about him turns out to rest on half-truths.

• Print length 864 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Bodley Head
• Publication date 30 Jun. 2022
• Dimensions 16.4 x 5.8 x 23.6 cm
• ISBN-10 1847923372
• ISBN-13 978-1847923370
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Philip Short has written authoritative biographies including Mao: A Life and Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare, following a long career as a foreign correspondent for the BBC in Moscow, Washington and other world capitals. He spent eight years researching and writing this book, working mainly from sources within Russia, but also in Britain, France, the United States and a dozen other countries.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bodley Head (30 Jun. 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 864 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1847923372
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1847923370
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.4 x 5.8 x 23.6 cm
• 92 in Cold War History
• 257 in Russian Historical Biographies
• 922 in Political Leader Biographies

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What Is Driving Vladimir Putin?

Understanding Putin is crucial to deciphering his goals in attacking Ukraine. The Russian American journalist Masha Gessen recommends books on the Russian president and the forces that shaped him.

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By Alexandra Alter

In an interview more than two decades ago, Vladimir V. Putin described his younger self, with a hint of self-congratulation, as “a hooligan.” When the interviewer asked if he was exaggerating about his tendency to get into brawls as a schoolboy, Putin took offense.

“You are trying to insult me,” he said. “I was a real thug.”

Masha Gessen, a Russian American journalist and Moscow native, recounts this exchange in a 2012 biography, “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,” which was praised as “part psychological profile, part conspiracy study” in The New York Times Book Review. To Gessen, Putin’s unabashed description of himself as “a thug” was key to his self-image: someone who could not be bullied, who would lash out unpredictably if he felt slighted and who relished violence.

Understanding Putin and the forces that shaped him has become an urgent global concern, as leaders around the world try to determine his motivations in launching an unprovoked and disastrous invasion of Ukraine , how to best engage with him and how the conflict might evolve .

So far, the military assault appears to be a catastrophic misstep , one that has resulted in crippling economic sanctions and heavy military losses for Russia, as well as mass civilian casualties and destruction in the very Ukrainian cities Putin claims he wants to “liberate.”

To all this, Putin has said, repeatedly, in public comments that the war is going “according to plan.”

As the conflict escalates, the question of what is driving Putin has become an increasingly perplexing one, with no obvious answers, but with enormous consequences : The war will end, some experts say, when the Russian president allows it to end.

Gessen set out to understand the Russian leader’s mind-set more than a decade ago, first in an article for Vanity Fair, then in “The Man Without a Face.” Tracing Putin’s rise from a petulant and unruly schoolboy to a KGB operative who ascended to the Russian presidency, Gessen examined the post-Soviet political, cultural and economic forces that enabled Putin’s rise, and the way he vilified the West to solidify his grip on power.

After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Gessen wrote a postscript summarizing Putin’s increasingly aggressive stance toward Western democracies, and his evolution from “a bureaucrat who had accidentally been entrusted with a huge country into a megalomaniacal dictator who believed he was on a civilizational mission.”

In a recent phone interview, Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker, discussed several books that offer insights into Putin’s psychology, as well as titles that illuminate the cultural and geopolitical context that helped shape Putin’s Russia.

Below are Gessen’s recommendations, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

‘Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.’ By Garry Kasparov. PublicAffairs, 2015.

Kasparov, the russian chess grandmaster, is a longtime critic of putin..

“Kasparov thinks about life as chess. And he looks at this as a series of plays. He doesn’t look at Putin’s psychology so much as he looks at the logic of his actions and says, ‘OK, well, this is how we game it out.’ And it is not uplifting. I mean, the book is not recent, and he was quite sure then that Putin was at war with the west at that point.

It’s funny, because one didn’t really have to press in to see that, one just had to pay attention and not be beholden to the conventional wisdom that says, “but that’s not possible, that’s crazy, he doesn’t really mean it.” We’re going to look at this period between 2012 and 2022 as a period when there’s a lot of that happening, when the war was slowly ramping up in plain view and most of the world was in denial about it.”

‘First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President.’ By Vladimir Putin. PublicAffairs, 2000.

A compilation of interviews with putin published in the united states in 2000..

“I found it incredibly illuminating because, if you read it as a document of what this man wants to tell the world about himself, you learn a lot. It’s not a very long book and it doesn’t have a lot of variety, but he recounts three different fights that he had. One was when he was a kid and he felt mistreated by a teacher, if I remember correctly. One was when he was a student and one was when he was a young officer. And in all three cases, he lashes out. He basically loses his temper and then he goes quiet for a bit, and then he strikes again.

This is what it communicates: that this is somebody who has no desire to control his temper. He thinks of himself as somebody who will lash out, somebody who’s vengeful. Somebody who likes to strike out of the blue, but also — and this is the thing that I’m most worried about now — he will go quiet for a bit and then he will strike again. That’s actually an M.O. that is important to his self-conception.”

‘Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources.’ By Alexander Etkind. Polity, 2021.

This book examines how civilization and politics have been shaped by resources like coal, oil and grain..

“I recommend anything by Alexander Etkind, who is a cultural historian of Russia. His latest book is called “Nature’s Evil” and it’s a cultural history of natural resources. It’s not entirely limited to Russia, but I think it actually goes a very long way to explaining how Russia works.”

‘The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes.’ By Balint Magyar and Balint Madlovics. CEU Press, 2020.

Magyar, a social scientist and former politician, looks at the ways in which post-communist regimes have given rise to autocrats who have cracked down on media and political dissent..

“Anything by Balint Magyar. He is a Hungarian social scientist and he has this tome, it’s this huge book called ‘The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes.’ It’s a little on the technical side, but it’s so incredibly illuminating. I think my favorite book of his is called “The Post-Communist Mafia State,” which pretends to be about Hungary, but is the best book for understanding post-Communist Russia and how the regime works.”

Alexandra Alter writes about publishing and the literary world. Before joining The Times in 2014, she covered books and culture for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she reported on religion, and the occasional hurricane, for The Miami Herald. More about Alexandra Alter

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

Ahead of the U.S. elections, Russia is intensifying efforts to elevate candidates  who oppose aid for Ukraine and support isolationism, disinformation experts say.

President Vladimir Putin said that claims Russia planned to invade other countries were “nonsense,” but warned them against hosting  warplanes meant for Ukraine.

A large-scale Russian missile and drone attack damaged power plants  and caused blackouts for more than a million Ukrainians in what Ukrainian officials said was one of the war’s largest assaults on energy infrastructure.

Symbolism or Strategy?: Ukrainians say that defending places with little strategic value is worth the cost in casualties and weapons , because the attacking Russians pay an even higher price. American officials aren’t so sure.

Elaborate Tales: As the Ukraine war grinds on, the Kremlin has created increasingly complex fabrications online  to discredit Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, and undermine the country’s support in the West.

Targeting Russia’s Oil Industry: With its army short of ammunition and troops to break the deadlock on the battlefield, Kyiv has increasingly taken the fight beyond the Ukrainian border, attacking oil infrastructure deep in Russian territory .

How We Verify Our Reporting

Our team of visual journalists analyzes satellite images, photographs , videos and radio transmissions  to independently confirm troop movements and other details.

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9 Books That Can Help You Understand Russia Right Now

A s an influx of news comes out about Russia ‘s potential influence on the U.S., many Americans may be curious to learn more about the country’s recent history. What has motivated Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and what defines its president, Vladimir Putin ?

In times of rapid breaking news and quickly shifting political positions, it can be helpful to take a step back and read something substantive for context. TIME asked experts from the Atlantic Council, the Wilson Center and other institutions to recommend books on Russia that would be accessible and illuminating for the general interest reader. Here are the volumes they suggested, covering everything from Kremlinology to the country’s cyber landscape.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014)

By Peter Pomerantsev

Both Alina Polyakova, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, recommend this cross-section of Russian society. “The book stands out because it manages to be entertaining and very accessible to a general reader while capturing a key moment of Putin’s Russia: the emergence and consolidation of the tools of state-sponsored propaganda,” says Polyakova.

All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (2016)

By Mikhail Zygar

McFaul and Anders Åslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, both recommend this book, with Åslund calling it an “excellent recent presentation of the people around Putin and how Russian policy is made,” though he notes “it downplays Putin’s importance too much.”

The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (2015)

By Steven Lee Myers

Åslund, McFaul, and Sestanovich all recommend this account of the president’s ascent from a childhood of poverty, through his work for the KGB, to his powerful role at the center of the Kremlin. Åslund calls it “the best political biography of Putin.”

Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (2013)

By Ben Judah

John Herbst, director of the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, recommends this different look at Putin’s regime, calling it “a good overall look at Russia” that is “easy to read and impressionistic.”

Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (2016)

By Charles Clover

Åslund recommends this historical exploration of “Eurasianism,” a theory of Russian nationalism based on geography and ethnicity. Clover traces its roots from the White Russian exiles of the 1920s through today, including interviews with close advisers to Putin.

Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (2012)

By Thane Gustafson

Åslund calls this volume “outstanding on Russian oil.” The book explores the massive market for Russian oil, as well as the country’s economic and political dependence on the industry.

The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries (2015)

By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan

Åslund calls this book “excellent on Russian cyber.” Through analysis of everything from hacking to digital surveillance, Soldatov and Borogan explain the potential for the Internet to either solidify or undermine totalitarianism in Russia.

Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire (2016)

By Agnia Grigas

Herbst suggests this book for its “insight into the Kremlin’s effort to regain control in the post-Soviet space.”

Peter the Great: His Life and World (1980)

By Robert K. Massie

“I think in many ways reading some really foundational but still accessible and entertaining works of history and literature will teach Americans much more about Russia that’s relevant to today, than if they simply read the latest trade or scholarly book on Russian foreign policy or Putin,” says Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Case in point: this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of “Russia’s most extraordinary autocrat, a man whose imprint is still felt on people, places and politics from the Far East to the heart of Europe, even three centuries after his death.”

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'Magisterial' - Guardian 'Outstanding' - Ian Kershaw Vladimir Putin is a pariah to the West. Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. The regime he heads is autocratic and corrupt. Yet many Russians continue to support him. Despite western sanctions, the majority have been living better than at any time in the past. By fair means or foul, under Putin's leadership, Russia has once again become a force to be reckoned with. Philip Short's magisterial biography explores in unprecedented depth the personality of its enigmatic and ruthless leader and demolishes many of our preconceptions about Putin's Russia. Since becoming President in 2000, his obsession has been to restore Russia's status as a great power, unbound by western rules. What forces and experiences shaped him? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the Cold War? To explain is not to justify. Putin's regime is dark. He pursues his goals relentlessly by whatever means he thinks fit. But on closer examination, much of what we think we know about him turns out to rest on half-truths. This book is as close as we will come to understanding Russia's ruler. It also makes us revise long-held assumptions about the course of global politics since the end of the Cold War.

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Philip Short has written authoritative biographies including Mao: A Life and Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare, following a long career as a foreign correspondent for the BBC in Moscow, Washington and other world capitals. He spent eight years researching and writing this book, working mainly from sources within Russia, but also in Britain, France, the United States and a dozen other countries.

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New biography 'Putin' takes a deep dive into the Russian leader

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<iframe width="100%" height="124" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://player.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/07/26/putin-book-philip-short"></iframe>

• Emiko Tamagawa

Editor's note: This segment was rebroadcasted on Dec. 26, 2022. Find that audio here .

Vladimir Putin may be the most dangerous man in the world. But longtime foreign correspondent Philip Short is taking a closer look into the Russian President’s story.

Short’s new book “Putin” examines Putin’s life and how he became the leader he is today, one that associates describe as a shapeshifter or unreliable narrator. The book also dives into Putin’s complicated relationship with the West, how he functions as a leader in Russia, and how Russia has become more authoritarian over time.

Interview Highlights

On Putin’s story working as a KGB intelligence officer in the ‘80s, where a mob allegedly threatened to storm the KGB headquarters “It's theatrical, isn't it? Moscow is silent and it's a paraphrase of [​​Alexander] Pushkin. He is a person who is in many respects an actor. He assumes guises. If you actually look back at what happened that day, there wasn't a mob storming the KGB headquarters. Yes, there was a crowd who were pretty angry, but they weren't going to do anything. And he dramatized that in his mind. And he said Moscow was silent.

“Actually, the local Red Army base sent in troops to help him within thirty minutes. So this is typical. You have to be very, very careful in what you believe in. One of his friends, a German businessman in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, says he's a shapeshifter. He assumes guises, he assumes images which fit with the narrative that he wants to tell and with the person he's talking to.”

On how Putin spun the narrative when discussing the story years later “The narrative essentially is one which we've heard very often since that the collapse of the Soviet Union, the humiliation of the Soviet Union, the failure of the Soviet Union to defend its friends. This was a monumental tragedy. But again, you've got to watch it rather carefully, because he's also said anyone who doesn't want the Soviet Union back again, anyone who doesn't regret the collapse of the Soviet Union doesn't have a heart. Anyone who actually thinks that it should be brought back, who think they could bring it back, doesn't have a head.”

On if Putin was open to closer relations with the U.S., NATO and Western Europe “Putin did genuinely believe that Russia's future was with the West, that Russia's future was certainly as part of Europe, and that Russia should become part of what he called the ‘civilized world,’ which was the Western led-world. So when people say he's been kind of acting from the very beginning and he was always deeply hostile to the West. That is simply not true. There's been an incremental change which has spread out. It's been a kind of tragic inevitability in many ways of what has happened over the last twenty years from really genuinely pro-Western Putin to a very hostile Putin.”

On what Putin thought about George Bush’s 2005 inaugural address, which acknowledged Central and Eastern European citizens’ right to decide their future. “[Putin] was reading it as a commitment by the United States to promote democracy in the rest of the world, but not just democracy, but the American conception of democracy. And it was one of the elements which convinced Putin that America wanted to call the shots and that Russia would absolutely have to follow both countries.

“I think it's really important to say this. Both countries, the United States and Russia, made mistakes. Things could have worked out differently. But who won the Cold War? America won the Cold War. It's always the victor in a war who determines what the subsequent evolution of events is going to be. If you look at the various things that America did, it's not just NATO's expansion, that's possibly not even the most important. But walking away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty because it was was seen as constraining ability, America's ability to develop new weapons systems.

“The Iraq War, where not just Russia, but many of America's allies were in disagreement. The decision to set up a national missile shield in Europe against missiles supposedly coming from Iran and North Korea. There were a whole load of things which the Russians really didn't like and they felt, look, after 9/11, we gave you enormous help. We gave you transit rights through Russian airspace. We helped to make available bases in Central Asia and so on. And what did we get back? So rightly or wrongly, and this is a question of perception as much as anything else, a perception developed that America was trying to constrain Russia, to contain it, to bring it to its knees and make it follow American diktat. And that is what over the years and again, lots of Russian fought, that has led to the situation we're in today.”

On what’s happening in Russia as relations with the West deteriorate “I think it's a kind of vicious circle. As relations with the West deteriorate. Russia becomes more authoritarian. This is not something which just happened under Putin. If you look back at the Soviet Union, that was a trend then and indeed even earlier in imperial times. And what you've had, is as everything has turned sour with the West, Russia has moved and Putin's regime has moved from a kind of relatively open authoritarianism to a very closed dictatorship, becoming not yet completely totalitarian, but it's moving closer and closer to a totalitarian system.”

On if there’s a connection between outside relations and how Putin rules Russia “As relations with the outside deteriorate, the hard liners, the hawks in Russia say, ‘Look, we've always told you this, those westerners were completely untrustworthy.’ And their influence increases. And the liberals, those who want closer relations with the West, they are increasingly excluded from decision-making. So it kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Relations go down, hawkishness goes upward in Russia, the dictatorial part of the regime gets stronger and freedoms are restrained increasingly, and you get a much more dictatorial system. And that's exactly what we've been seeing happening over the last three or four years.”

On if Moscow’s relationship with the West will change in the future “I don't think it will. Not quickly in 20, 30 years time, perhaps. Indeed, probably because there is a generation that will be a generation that comes to power that was not alive in Soviet days. But it depends not just on Russia. It depends on us as well, whether we are capable of bringing about a security architecture in Europe, which the Russians feel is not threatening and where conflict is ruled out. It's both sides. It takes two to tango. We both have to change our attitudes, the Russians in particular. But us too.”

Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Gabe Bullard . Jeannette Muhammad adapted it for the web.

Book excerpt: 'Putin'

by Philip Short

Baskov Lane

Vladimir Putin was born on Tuesday, October 7, 1952, at Maternity Hospital No. 6, known locally as the Snegiryov hospital, five minutes’ walk from his parents’ home on Baskov Lane, which, despite its name, was a straight, wide street of what had once been elegant nineteenth-century apartment buildings, now shabby and dilapidated, just north of Leningrad’s principal thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, leading to the Winter Palace.

The hospital, founded in 1771 by Catherine the Great, was the oldest in Russia and the largest and reputedly the best in Leningrad.  That was not saying a great deal. In Russian maternity clinics in those days, expectant mothers were crammed into filthy wards, infested with cockroaches, with blood and faeces on the floor and soiled bedlinen, where they were left to the mercy of nurses who, when they were not sadistic, were often callous. ‘It doesn’t hurt when you’re screwing your husband, does it, but now you’re having a baby, you’re wailing,’ one woman remembered a midwife telling her. Even at the Snegiryov, cleanliness was rudimentary and painkillers were unknown. Babies were separated from their mothers for 36 hours after birth. From the outset it was the survival of the fittest. One newborn in 50 died before leaving hospital. Husbands were kept away, and Putin’s father had to stand on the street outside with the other men, hoping to see his wife at one of the windows and to learn from her or another woman if the birth had gone well and whether he had a son or a daughter.

Other traditions proved equally tenacious. In the cities, infants were no longer swaddled, as they were in the countryside; instead they were ‘wrapped tight’, so that they could not move, which amounted to the same thing. Otherwise, it was believed, their arms or legs would ‘turn out crooked’. Forty years later, a French medical team visiting the city was appalled to find that this ‘medieval practice’ continued and ‘no one questions that it is correct.’

Young Volodya, as his parents called him, spent the first weeks of his life in a wicker basket, suspended from the ceiling, as had been the custom in the countryside. Both his father and mother had grown up near Tver, on the Volga River, 110 miles north-west of Moscow along the main highway to Leningrad. They lived in neighbouring hamlets which had once formed part of the domains of a Privy Councillor to Tsar Alexander the First, where Putin’s great-grandfather, Ivan Petrovich, had been a serf. Ivan’s son, Spiridon – Putin’s grandfather – had moved to St Petersburg, then Russia’s capital, in the 1890s, to train as a chef, eventually taking charge of the kitchens at the Astoria Hotel, the newest and most luxurious establishment in the city, built for the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. The family was comfortably off and lived in an apartment in nearby Gorokhovaya Street. It was there, two years earlier, that Putin’s father, Vladimir, had been born. Among Spiridon’s regular clients was Grigory Rasputin, the Siberian mystic whose hold over Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, helped bring about their downfall. According to family legend, when Spiridon cooked for him, the monk would tip him a ten-rouble gold coin. But after the Revolution, the hotel closed and the rooms were taken over by Communist Party officials. The banks closed, too, and Spiridon, a frugal man, lost his considerable savings. As the White Russian armies, backed by the European powers, sought to strangle the new revolutionary regime at birth, civil war broke out. The Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, unleashed a ferocious wave of terror against suspected counter-revolutionaries, conducted by the newly established Cheka, the ancestor of the KGB, which claimed at least a hundred thousand lives. Famine set in, killing five million more. In Leningrad two thirds of the population, recent immigrants from the countryside, fled back to the villages from which they had come. The city became a wasteland, with grass growing in the streets.

Spiridon left, too, taking the family to his birthplace at Pominovo, a tiny settlement of crooked wooden houses straight out of a painting by Chagall, strung out along either side of a narrow dirt road, three hours on foot from Tver. It was there that his second son, Putin’s father, Vladimir, met his future wife, Maria Ivanovna Shelomova, from the hamlet on the other side of the river. They married in 1928, when both were seventeen, and four years later moved to Peterhof, then a small garrison town that had grown up around Peter the Great’s seafront palace on the Gulf of Finland, 20 miles west of Leningrad, where Maria’s elder brother, Pyotr, who had wed Vladimir’s younger sister, was living. At first the two couples shared a single room. But in 1934, after Vladimir had completed his military service as a submariner in the Baltic Fleet, he and Maria finally obtained a room of their own. Two children were born: Albert, who died of whooping cough in infancy, and Viktor, who succumbed to diphtheria when he was about two years old during the blockade of Leningrad in March 1942.

Viktor’s death has given rise to many unanswered questions.

As the Germans advanced on Peterhof at the end of August 1941, Maria and her baby son were alone: her husband was with the Red Army, no one knew where or even whether he was still alive. Another of her brothers, Ivan, a naval liaison officer attached to the Communist Party’s Regional Committee, brought her to Leningrad and found her a place to stay with relatives. But the city was already in the grip of famine and as a refugee from the suburbs, she had no ration book and no way of obtaining food for herself and her small son. At first Ivan shared his own rations with them, but after he was transferred away from the city, their situation became desperate.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. Putin remembered his parents saying that the authorities took his brother away, against his mother’s wishes, and placed him in an orphanage on the grounds that he would have a better chance of surviving the winter there than if he stayed with her. Another version, which may have come from Putin’s mother herself, recounts that one day, when she was too weak to move, ‘two young women came to her door. She asked them, “Take my son. Save him.” And they took the boy away. A few days later she learnt that he had died.’

Neither version is credible.

The city’s orphanages did not accept children under three years old, and Viktor was not yet two. The 30,000 or so orphans rescued from the streets or from empty, freezing apartments in the winter of 1941–2, when the city was blockaded by the Germans and starvation was at its height, were all from families where the adults had died and there was no one left to take care of them. At least as many others were left to fend for themselves because there were not enough places. Moreover conditions in the shelters were often appalling. The staff stole the children’s food; the dormitories were unheated; in some establishments, one child in six died in the first weeks after admission. Even in Moscow, which was far better provided for than Leningrad, the orphanages had a dreadful reputation. One mother, who had been warned by a friend that she would be well advised to bring her daughter home, found when she went to fetch her that the children’s stomachs were swollen with hunger and they were all covered in lice.

The story of the two mysterious young women is even less believable. At a time when the whole city – apart from the Party elite, which was well fed throughout the war – was maddened by hunger and everyone knew that there were cases of cannibalism, no parent, however desperate, would surrender their child to strangers.

One may legitimately wonder whether, behind Viktor’s death, there lurked a family tragedy which no one would ever discuss. Putin himself did not learn until long afterwards that his brother had been buried in a mass grave in the Piskaryovskoe Cemetery, with some 470,000 others who had died during the blockade.

Excerpted from 'Putin' by Philip Short, published by Henry Holt and Company July 26 2022. Copyright © 2022 by Philip Short. All rights reserved.

This segment aired on July 26, 2022.

Scott Tong Co-Host, Here & Now Scott Tong joined Here & Now as a co-host in July 2021 after spending 16 years at Marketplace as Shanghai bureau chief and senior correspondent.

Emiko Tamagawa Senior Producer, Here & Now Emiko Tamagawa produces arts and culture segments for Here & Now.

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What Putin's renewed 6-year term means for Ukraine and the West

Scott Simon

NPR's Scott Simon talks with Yale historian Timothy Snyder about what another 6-year presidential term for Russian leader Vladimir Putin might mean for Ukraine and the West.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Over 100 people have died in the attack at a concert hall near Moscow last night. Russian authorities say the gunmen are in custody, and elsewhere on our program, NPR's Charles Maynes reports from Moscow on the very latest. This deadly assault comes the same week that Russian President Vladimir Putin was elected to a fifth term. It will put him on a track to rule Russia longer than Joseph Stalin. What might his rule portend for the United States and Europe? We reached out earlier in the week to Timothy Snyder. He's a professor of history at Yale University, author of the book "On Tyranny" and head of a new Ukrainian Global History Initiative. Does Vladimir Putin's election to a fifth term just mean that most Russians support him? Isn't that democracy?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I guess I'd stop right there on the word election. The word election suggests that people have a choice and that their choice matters. And I think in the case of Russia, that's deeply misleading. What we have in Russia is more of a kind of acclimation procedure where the central authorities instruct the regional and local authorities that they're to come up with a certain percentage of apparent votes. So it's not even really a question, as Jake Sullivan says, as to whether this is free or fair, because it's not even really an election.

SIMON: You've been especially outspoken in behalf of Ukraine and what you see as the need of the West to support Ukraine against Russian invasion. Why?

SNYDER: Well, there's a connection here to the election, or nonelection, which I want to point out. We haven't actually done anything for Ukraine for the last six months. And some people have said if you cut off aid to Ukraine, then Russia will seek negotiations or peace. And Mr. Putin's speech right after this electoral farce tells us exactly the opposite. He said that the main priority in his next term is going to be to conquer Ukraine. And I think that's something we should take seriously. As far as why I support Ukraine - because it's the right thing to do, because we have an international order of laws, because we should try to prevent the horrors that have happened to Ukrainians, but also because it's in America's interest. Ukraine is doing the work of fighting the war in Europe that we've been trying to prevent for 75 years. They're doing the work of deterring the Chinese by showing how hard these kinds of wars are. They're doing the work of protecting the reality and the idea of democracy at essentially zero cost for us.

SIMON: Did the West provoke Vladimir Putin by expanding NATO to Russia's borders?

SNYDER: No, of course not. NATO did nothing to provoke Putin. Putin is not afraid of NATO. The Russians say again and again at the highest levels - the level of the president himself, the level of the former president, and also in their propaganda every evening - that their goal is to destroy the Ukrainian state and to destroy the Ukrainian nation. That doesn't have anything to do with NATO.

SIMON: Do you believe that the West support should include, at some point, if necessary, the commitment of air power and even troops?

SNYDER: Let me put it this way. It's a horrible war in which millions and millions and millions of Ukrainians have lost their homes, in which tens of thousands of Ukrainians have lost their lives. It's a war with tremendous risks for the United States, for Europe and for the world. The best thing that one could do would be to end this war. And the only way to end it is by the Ukrainians winning it. So one has to start the calculation about ending this war by thinking of what a Ukrainian victory would look like. Too much of our thinking about this war has had to do with trying to feel good about ourselves, virtue signaling, delivering systems that, you know, Americans feel are OK for Americans to deliver. I think it's better to think in terms of what the Ukrainians would actually need to destroy Russian logistics and get the Russians out of their country.

SIMON: But what kind of equipment are you talking about that we've withheld?

SNYDER: First of all, in terms of numbers, Americans, you know, cross certain thresholds which they think are important, like armored fighting vehicles or tanks. But the numbers of things we deliver are basically insignificant. And then in terms of the logistics, it's long-range stuff. It's strategically silly for there to be a bridge running from Russia to Ukraine right now. That bridge has to come down, which means that people have to be calm about delivering long-range weapons. Beyond that, though, the basic thing that Ukrainians need is artillery. This is an old-fashioned war fought by artillery. It's embarrassing that the United States is being outproduced by one German company.

SIMON: I come back to a question I tried previously. If the goal of a free and independent Ukraine that can resist Russian invasion is that important, would you contemplate the commitment of American troops and air power, NATO troops and air power?

SNYDER: Well, NATO, no, but I mean, it's - people talk about NATO a lot. NATO actually plays a pretty insignificant role in this conflict. It's mostly there in Russian propaganda. It's the European Union, the European Commission, which has actually been supporting Ukraine, which is very interesting, and separately, European member states of the European Union, but not NATO itself. I don't think there's any reason to think that American troops would ever be necessary. It would be perfectly reasonable, though, as President Macron and other European leaders have proposed, to have European troops in Ukraine to cover, for example, Ukraine's border with Belarus, or to serve as peacekeeping troops in areas that are under Ukrainian control. That would be totally normal in this situation. There's no reason why it's normal for there to be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Russian troops destroying Ukraine and killing people, and it's somehow unthinkable that anybody else would do something normal to support the parts of Ukraine that are under Ukrainian control at the moment.

SIMON: What might you say to those Americans who just don't feel - you know, it's on the other side of the world. It's a long way away. It's got nothing to do with us.

SNYDER: It's got everything to do with us. Democracy is a matter of morale, and democracy has been collapsing around the world for the last 15 years. We've reached the point where an autocratic regime is trying to destroy a democracy by force. That doesn't happen historically, very often. And even if you don't care about democracy, which I like to think people do, it's a big mistake to let a conventional power lose a war to a country which is threatening with nuclear weapons. The consequence of that, of allowing nuclear blackmail to prevail, is that lots of other countries will build nuclear weapons. And the entire international order, the thing that brings us prosperity, the thing that allows our market economy to work, is based on not allowing countries to invade other countries. If this is allowed to succeed, then we're going to have much more chaos in the world in general, and that's going to affect the United States profoundly.

I would switch it around. Things have gotten better in this country for the last couple of years, in large measure, thanks to the Ukrainians doing a disproportionate share of the work. It speaks really badly of us when we can't recognize that other people are doing things for us, and we should be pitching in to do the little bit that we need to to help those other people who are keeping the world order much safer for us than it otherwise would be.

SIMON: Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University, thanks so much for being with us, sir.

SNYDER: It's been my great pleasure. Thank you very much.

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