‘Putin’ offers down-low on president’s downfall Matt Damsker
Russia expert lifts the veil on the former KGB spy
If there’s a news-dominating name that isn’t Trump, it’s Putin. But as much as we have come to know about America’s president, popular knowledge of Russia’s leader seems limited to a few snapshots of a strongman — bare-chested on a horse, or striding with dark purpose toward a podium. Yes, he used to be a KGB spy, but just who is this guy?
Enter Richard Lourie. Biographer of Stalin and Sakharov, former consultant on Russia to Hillary Clinton and Gorbachev’s translator for The New York Times, Lourie takes the autocrat’s measure in Putin (Thomas Dunne Books, 224 pp., eegE out of four). With its predictive subtitle, His Downfall and Rus
sia’s Coming Crash, Lourie also takes a leap of expert judgment.
His thesis is that Putin, who came to power in 2000, has squandered his opportunity. After the breakup of the Soviet Union and a sharp, chaotic turn from ossified communism to a free-booting market culture — with oligarchs skimming billions and former Soviet countries becoming Russia’s rivals — Putin has “reverted to the tried and true, in his case ‘the power vertical,’ ” Lourie concludes.
Rather than transform Russia into a broadly engaged, knowledge-based society that would mean more jobs and a more agile future, Lourie’s Putin relied on a house-of-cards economy based on Russia’s oil and gas bounty, and with old-school imperial ambitions.
Lourie begins in Leningrad, where Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin — “Volodya” — was born in 1952, kept his head down at KGB school, mastered sambo (a Russian form of judo) and got to
Moscow just in time to quietly rise to power while the old USSR was falling apart. Now, everywhere from the NATO countries, Ukraine and Crimea, to Kazakhstan and central Asia, Putin casts an opportunistic but less than visionary eye, Lourie tells us.
He believes it’s too late for the aging spymaster (he’s 64), as oil prices stagnate and authoritarianism breeds revolt. No wonder Putin signed into existence a personal army of 400,000 last April.
Still, Lourie concedes, “A man extremely favored by fortune in his rise to power, he could yet prove favored again.” Russia’s aggressive moves on the emerging resources of the warming Arctic could enrich it — and Putin — for another generation. “Or a military intervention in Kazakhstan might provide the Kremlin with leverage over China, thereby completing the task of restoring Russia’s greatness by restoring Russia’s power.” Big maybes.
And, ultimately, not a big enough book. Lourie’s 200-page gloss on the geopolitical complexities of Russia, Ukraine and China is well-sourced and deeply knowing. But it’s also a breathless, fact-crammed, highly speculative read, and for all its timeliness, there isn’t more than a page or so on Putin’s cyber meddling with the Trump-Clinton election.