‘ Putin’ offers down- low on autocrat’s dilemma

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., out of four). With its predictive subtitle, His Downfall and Russia’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 chaotic turn from communism to free- booting markets — 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 oldschool imperial ambitions.

Ultimately, it’s not a big enough book. Lourie’s 200- pages gloss over the geopolitical complexities of Russia, Ukraine and China. But it’s also a 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.