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3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
The negative reviews I saw on Goodreads criticized this book for not being an objective biography of Putin. And it is not.
This book is a careful explanation (I presume to an American or other westerner) of how Putin came to be in Russia, how he rules in Russia, and why it is bad. Gessen sometimes writes with positive disdain, albeit a well-written and engaging disdain. For this American, whose contemporary Russian history could use some help, it was enlightening.
This book is a careful explanation (I presume to an American or other westerner) of how Putin came to be in Russia, how he rules in Russia, and why it is bad. Gessen sometimes writes with positive disdain, albeit a well-written and engaging disdain. For this American, whose contemporary Russian history could use some help, it was enlightening.
challenging
dark
informative
medium-paced
Outstanding. Masha Gessen does a superlative job of researching and then explaining, methodically and in depth but in a way that is hard to put down nonetheless, the intertwined histories of the nation and culture of Russia and of Vladimir Putin, from his childhood to the time she finished the book in 2012.
The effect is ultimately deeply sad, grieving over not only the individual casualties of Putin's ruthlessly sociopathic climb to absolute power and the enshrinement of the anti-LGBTQ hate movement as a core of Russian society, but also over the loss of the Russia that could have been. For a brief time after the end of the USSR, there was a real possibility Russia could flower into a free society. Putin and his allies utterly crushed that possibility to create a mafia state that is more oppressive than anything that country has endured since Stalin.
Unlike its glamorous portrayals in fictional characters like Milton's Satan, Hannibal Lecter, and Dexter, real evil is not clever and tragically self-aware. It's shallow, oblivious, petty, pointlessly vicious, devoid of introspection, and empty. Gessen shows that Putin is such a person.
President Biden reportedly told Putin recently (as of this writing in March 2021) that he, Biden, didn't believe Putin had a soul.
I have not met Putin, nor gazed into his eyes a la Bush 43 and thought I was gauging his true nature. But working in mental health with adult prison inmates and adolescent gang members, I got to know a number of people who were just that type - shallow, oblivious, petty, pointlessly vicious, devoid of introspection, and empty. I'm not qualified to diagnose possession of a soul, but I surely didn't see evidence of any in a lot of those people. Putin belongs in prison rather than in the position of controlling a nation of millions.
The effect is ultimately deeply sad, grieving over not only the individual casualties of Putin's ruthlessly sociopathic climb to absolute power and the enshrinement of the anti-LGBTQ hate movement as a core of Russian society, but also over the loss of the Russia that could have been. For a brief time after the end of the USSR, there was a real possibility Russia could flower into a free society. Putin and his allies utterly crushed that possibility to create a mafia state that is more oppressive than anything that country has endured since Stalin.
Unlike its glamorous portrayals in fictional characters like Milton's Satan, Hannibal Lecter, and Dexter, real evil is not clever and tragically self-aware. It's shallow, oblivious, petty, pointlessly vicious, devoid of introspection, and empty. Gessen shows that Putin is such a person.
President Biden reportedly told Putin recently (as of this writing in March 2021) that he, Biden, didn't believe Putin had a soul.
I have not met Putin, nor gazed into his eyes a la Bush 43 and thought I was gauging his true nature. But working in mental health with adult prison inmates and adolescent gang members, I got to know a number of people who were just that type - shallow, oblivious, petty, pointlessly vicious, devoid of introspection, and empty. I'm not qualified to diagnose possession of a soul, but I surely didn't see evidence of any in a lot of those people. Putin belongs in prison rather than in the position of controlling a nation of millions.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Very informative book about a very dangerous man. The world had better keep a close eye on this creature.
As flawed as American institutions are, I am so glad we aren't Putinist Russia. The stories laid out here are haunting. I am feeling extra grateful that, after last week's election, American democracy isn't completely dead (yet).
There's no doubt that I don't know a lot about Russia. I do enough to know that this is an incisive read into how Putin changed Russia, for the worst and how we all missed it.
Read this with more than a pinch of salt. Yet, knowing this man's history, this is at times quite a chilling read for the methodic way in which has taken down anyone who has been even a minor thorn in his path. Masha Gessen, LGBT activist and The New Yorker staff writer, sometimes takes leaps of imagination too.
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
In the current political climate with all the Russian allegations of interference and collusion in the US election, it seemed as good of time as any to read up on the Russian man behind the curtain, Vladimir Putin. The life of the childhood thug, turned KGB agent (once a spy always a spy), turned Prime Minister and then President seemingly over night is full of sneaky scandals, both covert and overt that makes this book seem more like a novel than a non-fiction historical account. Is there speculation mixed with the facts? Perhaps. Tho it seems more of the "where there's smoke there's fire" kind.
Putin's childhood, having grown up shortly after the Siege of Leningrad, while the city was still smoldering, seemingly tells a lot about how he became who he was. It was a time of only the strong survive, and any little perceived slight (even in the schoolyard or apartment courtyard) was met with violence. Putin embodied this, supposedly taking on older children and even gang members while growing up.
This attitude of "you pinch me, I'll punch you" has carried through to this day, and has arguably even festered to the point of no return. As one other reviewer said, "The explosion of the Kursk, the hostage situations in Beslan and the Moscow theatre, the killings of Politkovkaya and Litvinenko, the arrest of Russian entrepeneurs and the destruction of Kasparov's campaign all point to a pretty corrupt Russia." If they don't directly point to, they at least angle powerfully in the direction of a pretty evil Putin, or at least a man that "plays the democrat, when he is really a demagogue". The treatment of Chechnya during his reign has some even putting him in the war criminal/genocide category.
The U.S. embassy and political factions don't exactly have angelic reputations, but after having read this I can't help but be grateful that we haven't (yet) reached this level of scariness and corruption, tho we could be considered to be in the beginning stages. Yikes!
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The following snippets are little blips that I managed to bookmark during my audio listening of the book that hopefully help to understand my review, so please ignore my horrible spelling of Russian names. Here's some snippets:
"The war in Chechnya had never really ended...the arrangement amounted to a cease-fire. Russians were very much a nation at war, and like all nations at war, they believed the enemy to be less than human, and capable of inflicting unimaginable horror .... Russian law forbids the use of regular troops within the country's borders .... Putin issued his own order, authorizing Russian troops to engage in combat in Chechnya. This time the order was not classified, tho Russian law in fact gives the Prime Minister no authority over the military. The same day, Putin made one of his first television appearances. 'We will hunt them down', he said of the terrorists. 'Wherever we find them, we will destroy them. Even if we find them in the toilet, we will rub them out in the outhouse'"
"On January 26th, 2000, exactly two months before the election, the moderator of a Russia panel at the annual world economic panel in Davos, Switzerland, asked 'Who is Mr. Putin? (the man holding the microphone) fidgeted and looked questioningly at a former Russian Prime Minister sitting to his right. The former minister, too, was unwilling to respond. The panel's four members, started looking back and forth at each other anxiously. After half a minute of this, the room exploded in laughter. The world's largest land mass, a land of oil, gas, and nuclear arms, had a new leader. And it's business and political elites had no idea who he was. Very funny indeed. One week later (several journalists were commissioned to write Putin's life story)"
"I got the sense he like to talk, and he liked to talk about himself. I've certainly spoken to many people who were more interesting. I had spent five years writing about the KGB. He was no better or worse than the rest of them. He was smarter than some, and more cunning than some."
"A conspiracy of bleeding heart democrats had forced Putin to compromise. He had successfully beaten these kind of people back in Leningrad, and he would do it again now.'The Bavitsky (sp?) story made my life easier .... I realized that this was how his f$cking brain worked. So I had no illusions. I knew this was how he understood the word 'patriotism'. Just the way he'd been taught in all those KGB schools, the country is as great as the fear it inspires, and the media should be loyal.'"
"He has been able to exercise greater control about what is known about him than almost any other modern politician, certainly more than any modern western politician. He has created his own mythology. This is a good thing, because to a far greater extent than is usually possible for any man, Vladimir Putin has communicated to the world directly what he would like to be known about him, and how he would like to be seen. What has emerged, is very much the mythology of a child of post-siege Leningrad. A mean, hungry, impoverished place, that bread mean, hungry, ferocious children. At least, they were the ones that survived."
"His father was, by all accounts, concerned primarily with discipline, not with the quality of schooling his son received. Nor was education part of the younger Putin's idea of success. He has placed a great emphasis on portraying himself as a thug, and in this, he has had the complete cooperation of his childhood friends. By far the largest amount of biographical information available about him, that is the bulk of the information made available to his biographers, concerns the many fist fights of his childhood and youth."
"'If anyone ever insulted him in any way', his friend recalled, 'he would immediately jump on the guy, scratch him, bite him, rip his hair out by the clump. Do anything at all never to allow anyone to humiliate him in anyway.' Putin brought his fighting ways to grade school with him, references to fist fights abound in the recollections of his former school mates."
"Few Russians ever learned that the terrorists, led by a 25 year old who had never before been outside Chechnya, had advanced demands that would have been almost laughably easy to fulfill. Possibly securing the release of all the hostages. They wanted President Putin publicly to declare that he wanted to end the war in Chechnya, and to demonstrate his goodwill be ordering troop withdrawal from any one district of the breakaway republic. But, for all the seeming simplicity of their demands, the terrorists were demanding that Putin act in a way that ran counter to his nature. The boy who could never end a fight, the one who had seemed to calm down only to flare up and attack again, now the president who had promised to 'rub them out in the outhouse' would certainly rather sacrifice 129 of his own citizens than publicly say that he wanted peace. He did not. Just two weeks after the theater siege, Putin was in Brussels for a European Union Russia summit, devoted principally to the discussion of the international Islamic terrorist threat. At a press conference after the meetings, a reporter for the French newspaper, Le Monde, asked a question about the use of heavy artillery against civilians in Chechnya. Putin, looking calm, and even smiling slightly with the corners of his mouth said 'If you are ready to become a radical adherent of Islam, and you are ready to be circumcised, I invite you to come to Moscow. We are a country of many faiths. We have specialists in this. I will recommend that the operation will be performed in such a way that nothing will ever grow there again.' The interpreter did not dare translate Putin's response in full, and it did not even make it into the following days edition of the New York Times. The paper demurely translated his last sentences as 'You are welcome. And everything and everyone is tolerated in Moscow'. But the video of him lashing out at the reporter, was still viral on RuTube, 9 years after Putin made his threat, and demonstrated his utter inability even to pretend to consider a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Chechnya."
"Putin's extraordinary relationship to material wealth was evident when he was a college student, if not earlier. When he accepted the car his parents won in a lottery, though the prize could have been used to greatly improve the family's living conditions, or when he spent almost all of the money he made over the summer to buy himself and outrageously expensive coat and bought a cake for his mother, he was acting in ways highly unusual, and borderline unacceptable, for a young man of his generation and social grope. Ostentatious displays of wealth could easily have derailed his plains for a KGB career, and he knew this .... For a man who had staked most of his social capital on conforming to the norm, this was particularly remarkable behavior. It seems he really could not help himself. The correct term is probably not the popularly known kleptomania, which refers to a pathological desire to possess things for one which has little use. But the more exotic, pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others. If Putin suffers this irrepressible urge, this helps explain his apparent split personality. He compensates for his compulsion by creating the identity of an honest and incorruptible civil servant."
"For the same reason that he abolished elections, or had Litvenyenko killed, in his continuing attempt to turn the country into a supersized model of the KGB, there can be no room for dissidence or even for independent actors. But then independent actors are inconvenient in part because they refuse to accept the rules of the mafia.... in seizing this opportunity, Putin, as usual failed to distinguish between himself and the state he ruled. Greed may not be his main instinct, but it is the one he can never resist."
"At the height of the protest movement, hundreds of thousands flooded the streets. Defying not only the police, but tanks. And yet it was impossible to tell whether their actions had direct consequences because, just as now, the people had no mechanisms for holding the government accountable. But one thing is clear in retrospect, once the process was under way, the regime was doomed, the more hot air it pumped into the bubble in which it lived, the more vulnerable it also became to growing pressure from the outside. That is exactly what is happening now. It may take months, or it may take a few years, but the Putin bubble will burst. What will happen next? The Kremlin seems to be flailing. Yesterday, tens of thousands of young people bused in from out of town were herded into the center of Moscow for a United Russia victory rally."
"There comes a day when you turn on the television, and the very same goons who were spouting propaganda at you yesterday, sitting in the the very same studios against the very same backdrops, start speaking a human language."
Putin's childhood, having grown up shortly after the Siege of Leningrad, while the city was still smoldering, seemingly tells a lot about how he became who he was. It was a time of only the strong survive, and any little perceived slight (even in the schoolyard or apartment courtyard) was met with violence. Putin embodied this, supposedly taking on older children and even gang members while growing up.
This attitude of "you pinch me, I'll punch you" has carried through to this day, and has arguably even festered to the point of no return. As one other reviewer said, "The explosion of the Kursk, the hostage situations in Beslan and the Moscow theatre, the killings of Politkovkaya and Litvinenko, the arrest of Russian entrepeneurs and the destruction of Kasparov's campaign all point to a pretty corrupt Russia." If they don't directly point to, they at least angle powerfully in the direction of a pretty evil Putin, or at least a man that "plays the democrat, when he is really a demagogue". The treatment of Chechnya during his reign has some even putting him in the war criminal/genocide category.
The U.S. embassy and political factions don't exactly have angelic reputations, but after having read this I can't help but be grateful that we haven't (yet) reached this level of scariness and corruption, tho we could be considered to be in the beginning stages. Yikes!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following snippets are little blips that I managed to bookmark during my audio listening of the book that hopefully help to understand my review, so please ignore my horrible spelling of Russian names. Here's some snippets:
"The war in Chechnya had never really ended...the arrangement amounted to a cease-fire. Russians were very much a nation at war, and like all nations at war, they believed the enemy to be less than human, and capable of inflicting unimaginable horror .... Russian law forbids the use of regular troops within the country's borders .... Putin issued his own order, authorizing Russian troops to engage in combat in Chechnya. This time the order was not classified, tho Russian law in fact gives the Prime Minister no authority over the military. The same day, Putin made one of his first television appearances. 'We will hunt them down', he said of the terrorists. 'Wherever we find them, we will destroy them. Even if we find them in the toilet, we will rub them out in the outhouse'"
"On January 26th, 2000, exactly two months before the election, the moderator of a Russia panel at the annual world economic panel in Davos, Switzerland, asked 'Who is Mr. Putin? (the man holding the microphone) fidgeted and looked questioningly at a former Russian Prime Minister sitting to his right. The former minister, too, was unwilling to respond. The panel's four members, started looking back and forth at each other anxiously. After half a minute of this, the room exploded in laughter. The world's largest land mass, a land of oil, gas, and nuclear arms, had a new leader. And it's business and political elites had no idea who he was. Very funny indeed. One week later (several journalists were commissioned to write Putin's life story)"
"I got the sense he like to talk, and he liked to talk about himself. I've certainly spoken to many people who were more interesting. I had spent five years writing about the KGB. He was no better or worse than the rest of them. He was smarter than some, and more cunning than some."
"A conspiracy of bleeding heart democrats had forced Putin to compromise. He had successfully beaten these kind of people back in Leningrad, and he would do it again now.'The Bavitsky (sp?) story made my life easier .... I realized that this was how his f$cking brain worked. So I had no illusions. I knew this was how he understood the word 'patriotism'. Just the way he'd been taught in all those KGB schools, the country is as great as the fear it inspires, and the media should be loyal.'"
"He has been able to exercise greater control about what is known about him than almost any other modern politician, certainly more than any modern western politician. He has created his own mythology. This is a good thing, because to a far greater extent than is usually possible for any man, Vladimir Putin has communicated to the world directly what he would like to be known about him, and how he would like to be seen. What has emerged, is very much the mythology of a child of post-siege Leningrad. A mean, hungry, impoverished place, that bread mean, hungry, ferocious children. At least, they were the ones that survived."
"His father was, by all accounts, concerned primarily with discipline, not with the quality of schooling his son received. Nor was education part of the younger Putin's idea of success. He has placed a great emphasis on portraying himself as a thug, and in this, he has had the complete cooperation of his childhood friends. By far the largest amount of biographical information available about him, that is the bulk of the information made available to his biographers, concerns the many fist fights of his childhood and youth."
"'If anyone ever insulted him in any way', his friend recalled, 'he would immediately jump on the guy, scratch him, bite him, rip his hair out by the clump. Do anything at all never to allow anyone to humiliate him in anyway.' Putin brought his fighting ways to grade school with him, references to fist fights abound in the recollections of his former school mates."
"Few Russians ever learned that the terrorists, led by a 25 year old who had never before been outside Chechnya, had advanced demands that would have been almost laughably easy to fulfill. Possibly securing the release of all the hostages. They wanted President Putin publicly to declare that he wanted to end the war in Chechnya, and to demonstrate his goodwill be ordering troop withdrawal from any one district of the breakaway republic. But, for all the seeming simplicity of their demands, the terrorists were demanding that Putin act in a way that ran counter to his nature. The boy who could never end a fight, the one who had seemed to calm down only to flare up and attack again, now the president who had promised to 'rub them out in the outhouse' would certainly rather sacrifice 129 of his own citizens than publicly say that he wanted peace. He did not. Just two weeks after the theater siege, Putin was in Brussels for a European Union Russia summit, devoted principally to the discussion of the international Islamic terrorist threat. At a press conference after the meetings, a reporter for the French newspaper, Le Monde, asked a question about the use of heavy artillery against civilians in Chechnya. Putin, looking calm, and even smiling slightly with the corners of his mouth said 'If you are ready to become a radical adherent of Islam, and you are ready to be circumcised, I invite you to come to Moscow. We are a country of many faiths. We have specialists in this. I will recommend that the operation will be performed in such a way that nothing will ever grow there again.' The interpreter did not dare translate Putin's response in full, and it did not even make it into the following days edition of the New York Times. The paper demurely translated his last sentences as 'You are welcome. And everything and everyone is tolerated in Moscow'. But the video of him lashing out at the reporter, was still viral on RuTube, 9 years after Putin made his threat, and demonstrated his utter inability even to pretend to consider a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Chechnya."
"Putin's extraordinary relationship to material wealth was evident when he was a college student, if not earlier. When he accepted the car his parents won in a lottery, though the prize could have been used to greatly improve the family's living conditions, or when he spent almost all of the money he made over the summer to buy himself and outrageously expensive coat and bought a cake for his mother, he was acting in ways highly unusual, and borderline unacceptable, for a young man of his generation and social grope. Ostentatious displays of wealth could easily have derailed his plains for a KGB career, and he knew this .... For a man who had staked most of his social capital on conforming to the norm, this was particularly remarkable behavior. It seems he really could not help himself. The correct term is probably not the popularly known kleptomania, which refers to a pathological desire to possess things for one which has little use. But the more exotic, pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others. If Putin suffers this irrepressible urge, this helps explain his apparent split personality. He compensates for his compulsion by creating the identity of an honest and incorruptible civil servant."
"For the same reason that he abolished elections, or had Litvenyenko killed, in his continuing attempt to turn the country into a supersized model of the KGB, there can be no room for dissidence or even for independent actors. But then independent actors are inconvenient in part because they refuse to accept the rules of the mafia.... in seizing this opportunity, Putin, as usual failed to distinguish between himself and the state he ruled. Greed may not be his main instinct, but it is the one he can never resist."
"At the height of the protest movement, hundreds of thousands flooded the streets. Defying not only the police, but tanks. And yet it was impossible to tell whether their actions had direct consequences because, just as now, the people had no mechanisms for holding the government accountable. But one thing is clear in retrospect, once the process was under way, the regime was doomed, the more hot air it pumped into the bubble in which it lived, the more vulnerable it also became to growing pressure from the outside. That is exactly what is happening now. It may take months, or it may take a few years, but the Putin bubble will burst. What will happen next? The Kremlin seems to be flailing. Yesterday, tens of thousands of young people bused in from out of town were herded into the center of Moscow for a United Russia victory rally."
"There comes a day when you turn on the television, and the very same goons who were spouting propaganda at you yesterday, sitting in the the very same studios against the very same backdrops, start speaking a human language."