Putin’s Kleptocracy:  Who Owns Russia?, by Karen Dawisha

The short answer to the titular question of this book’s subtitle is that Putin and his KGB and Petersburg cronies own much of Russia and have converted Russia into a kleptocratic state where a well-educated populace struggles to support a bloated bureaucracy that is among the most corrupt in the whole of a corrupt world.  It is rather telling that this book, which takes a hard anti-Putin line and is meticulously sourced with various dissident writings that have largely “disappeared” in Russia itself, has not been published in the UK so as to avoid the stringent anti-libel laws there.  The reader is left to understand that the author is making the worst case scenario for Putin’s corruption that goes beyond provable fact and wishes to make sure this book is published in a place where the author’s anti-Russian perspective will be much better received, as seems likely to be the case.  In this book, we have a clear example of a case where an author has an ax to grind, but where at least a great deal of what is written rests on solid evidence that presents Russia as a classic klepocratic state where the state has been captured for the interests of a corrupt elite.  How corrupt they are is the question in dispute.

This book is about 350 pages or so and contains seven chapters.  The author begins with an introduction and then looks at the USSR at the moment of collapse as setting up the situation where Putin and his associates were able to appeal for the restoration of Russian strength and prestige (1).  After that the author examines the way that the author made money and power as a KGB agent in East Germany and then St. Petersburg from 1985-1996 (2).  The author then points out the accusations that Putin and his boss faced during their time in the mayoral office in St. Petersburg (3) as well as the eventful time that Putin spent in Moscow rising up the ladder of those loyal to Yelstin and looking to ensure a position in power for the court party there (4).  The author spends a chapter examining Putin’s transition from Prime Minister to Acting President (5) and the way that electoral fraud may have paved the way for Putin’s victory in the 2000 election there (6).  Finally, the book concludes with a look at Russia, Putin, and the future of the Russian kleptocratic state (7) as well as acknowledgements, a selected bibliography, notes, and an index.

When dealing with a book like this one has a basic question to answer, and that is the extent to which one believes the worst case presented here.  Does the author’s approach of presenting Putin in the worst possible light amount to an overreach or is it possible to accept that there may be some exaggeration here about Putin’s conduct, some interpretation that may be fanciful (but which may be largely correct) but where the essential of the book holds true?  I tend to think that the second is possible, but not everyone will decide the same way.  This is a book that is a compelling read, and a somewhat terrifying one, but also one that tends to point out the ways that the systems of authority in the world as a whole are easily corrupted and that one of the reasons why certain elites wish for power to be centralized is because it allows for state capture by those corrupt elements who can then siphon a society’s benefits to themselves, even as others oppose that because they wish to protect smaller or local protection rackets of the same kind.  We are thus faced frequently in politics with the false dilemma between tyranny and anarchy that is not only a problem in Russia, but in many other areas as well.