📚 Finished reading Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West by Catherine Belton.
This is an highly detailed, lengthy, prize-winning book on the rise of the current President of Russia, Vladimir Putin and the people around him. Given world events, we probably all have some sense of who Putin is and what he is like. But if you want some insight into how his background and how he got to such a position of (catastrophic) power, then this tome will surely fill your needs.
Right from the start, while the Communist Party was still in power, he and his KGB allies were consolidating wealth and power for the future by forming a kind of corrupt kleptocracy, leveraging a combination of the state, the intelligence services, corruptible big businesses and organised crime, to further their own interests.
That group eventually managed to seize power, install Putin as president (twice, so far), and replace the former ministers of state and other high-ups with their own loyal set of wealthy oligarchs who either did as they were told, or suffered greatly for not doing so .
Politics, business, crime and self-interest were intermixed. Political opposition, in practical terms, was outlawed. It seems likely that they went so far as to permit or even overtly stage deadly terrorist attacks - lives that were lost in order to consolidate yet more power for Putin & co.
As well as amassing their own personal fortunes, this gave Putin et al. the ability to control massive amounts of often corruptly sourced money that, between building various gold palaces for themselves and their friends, they went on to use to undermine, amongst other things, Western institutions and democracy. Cue the election meddling and foreign funding of extremist politics of today.
This included the exploitation of all-too-willing and greedy Western corporations who were happy to turn a blind eye to all sorts of criminal and unethical practices if they thought they could make a bit of money by doing so.
The last chapter ends with the curious overlap between a “network of Russian intelligence operatives, tycoons and organized-crime associates” and Donald Trump that’s been seen over the past few decades.
This will of course be fuel for anyone concerned about any links between the Russian authorities and the current US President - although the book does not set out to make a case for that within the political realm. But it does demonstrate that, at the very least, Trump owes the Russian oligarchs an awful lot of favours in terms of them constantly bailing him out of his failed businesses and their unmanageable debt, and was, in the very best case, unknowingly used as a means to launder their dirty money.
The book was written in 2020, and so doesn’t have anything on Putin’s latest war crimes and attempts to destabilise the planet. But we all know, and are living with, what happened next.
It is, especially in retrospect, hard not to agree with a reviewer of this book from the NYT who was wondering with concern five years ago whether:
…a cynicism has embedded itself so deeply into the Anglo-American political classes that even the incriminating information it documents won’t make an actionable difference
