Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution [Hardcover]

Peter Baker (Author), Susan Glasser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 2005

In the tradition of Hedrick Smith's The Russians, Robert G. Kaiser's Russia: The People and the Power, and David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb comes an eloquent and eye-opening chronicle of Vladimir Putin's Russia, from this generation's leading Moscow correspondents.

With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia launched itself on a fitful transition to Western-style democracy. But a decade later, Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, a childhood hooligan turned KGB officer who rose from nowhere determined to restore the order of the Soviet past, resolved to bring an end to the revolution. Kremlin Rising goes behind the scenes of contemporary Russia to reveal the culmination of Project Putin, the secret plot to reconsolidate power in the Kremlin.

During their four years as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser witnessed firsthand the methodical campaign to reverse the post-Soviet revolution and transform Russia back into an authoritarian state. Their gripping narrative moves from the unlikely rise of Putin through the key moments of his tenure that re-centralized power into his hands, from his decision to take over Russia's only independent television network to the Moscow theater siege of 2002 to the "managed democracy" elections of 2003 and 2004 to the horrific slaughter of Beslan's schoolchildren in 2004, recounting a four-year period that has changed the direction of modern Russia.

But the authors also go beyond the politics to draw a moving and vivid portrait of the Russian people they encountered -- both those who have prospered and those barely surviving -- and show how the political flux has shaped individual lives. Opening a window to a country on the brink, where behind the gleaming new shopping malls all things Soviet are chic again and even high school students wonder if Lenin was right after all, Kremlin Rising features the personal stories of Russians at all levels of society, including frightened army deserters, an imprisoned oil billionaire, Chechen villagers, a trendy Moscow restaurant king, a reluctant underwear salesman, and anguished AIDS patients in Siberia.

With shrewd reporting and unprecedented access to Putin's insiders, Kremlin Rising offers both unsettling new revelations about Russia's leader and a compelling inside look at life in the land that he is building. As the first major book on Russia in years, it is an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the country and promises to shape the debate about Russia, its uncertain future, and its relationship with the United States.

Editorial Reviews

From Bookmarks Magazine

This portrait of "the fishy-eyed, single-minded man at the top" (New York Times) takes a thematic approach to Putin’s political leadership. Baker and Glasser, husband-and-wife Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post from 2001 to 2004, scrutinize events from Putin’s arms and oil deals with Iraq to the school siege in Beslan and find that the former KGB functionary has impeded late 20th-century Russia’s democratic progress. If the book veers toward being too black and white, overemphasizing Putin’s role as a strong man, it does so with a backbone of clear prose and solid research (over 200 additional interviews were conducted for the book). The New York Times Book Review claims that Kremlin Rising is "the official record of the Putin era, or as close to one as Western readers are likely to get."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist

With the attention of Americans understandably fixated on Iraq, North Korea, and Iran, recent developments in Russia often fly beneath our radar. Baker and Glasser, Moscow bureau chiefs for the Washington Post from January 2001 to November 2004, have written a cautionary tale that asserts that Russia, under Putin, has reversed course and is plunging headlong back into a highly authoritarian state. Of course, Putin's efforts to rein in some of the more chaotic elements in this vast country have been well publicized, but Baker and Glasser go much further, and they paint a disturbing, if somewhat overwrought, portrait. They suggest that Putin is little more than a KGB thug, with little competence beyond accumulating power. Their blow-by-blow description of the slaughter of children during the Beslan hostage crisis is shocking and infuriating, and they offer a gloomy assessment of the war in Chechnya. But they ignore how far Russia has come in the past 15 years in terms of personal freedoms and the creation of independent institutions. Still, a useful and informative work. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Edition edition (May 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743264312
• ISBN-13: 978-0743264310
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #707,554 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Catching up with Russia..., December 16, 2005

By 

Pen ID "reviewer" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution (Hardcover)

As the title may suggest, my purpose in reading this book was to get a general update on the status of Russia. Specifically, I wanted a closer look at the status of its political system, the economy and what challenges Russians face today.

Baker and Glasser succeed in delivering a well researched, documented and written account about Russia (w/ focus on the years 2000-2005 a sort of a pyatiletka history review).

Any reader exercising his or her reason will detect a "less-than-favorable" view which the authors hold of president Putin. This should not be grounds for dismissing "Kremlin Rising" as an inaccurate-ideological book. Whatever benefits brought to Russia by Putin and his cronies, a plausible if not credible argument can be made (is made by Baker and Glasser) that the incompetency, corruption and other "costs" outweigh the benefits.

I would recommend the following 5 chapers (out of 18) as the chapters which in my opinion discuss flaws that Russia needs to address if only to retain her position in the world:

Ch.9) Sick Man of Europe: decline of population, HIV, reasons why this is so and what is being done to "heal"
Ch.8) Fifty-seven Hours in Moscow: Nord-Ost seige, a vivid account
Ch.18) Lenin Was Right After All: the teaching of Russian history; a new generation longing for Stalin/Soviet Union
Ch.10) Runaway Army: problems with the military, conscripts and their treatment
Ch.1) Fifty-two Hours in Beslan: Beslan handling, another vivid account of how crisis is dealt with in Russia

Well, I hope this helps.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Empire Falls 101, July 9, 2006

By 

Em Bee - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution (Hardcover)

I was a little skeptical of this book when I first picked it up, expecting it to be one of those typical occidental treatises on "them quirky Soviets" and about how Russia and her new chief were going to be ruined because of the clear disdain for democracy.

On the one hand, Kremlin Rising is exactly that: the book makes no attempt to veil its contempt for Putin on all subjects from A to Z. It's as if the man invented the bubonic plague, and had the authors been charged with writing a history book, I'm sure they would've included that detail.

On the other hand, Kremlin Rising is something quite unprecedented, a broad-spectrum analysis of what's wrong with Russia today and why. The chapters on Beslan and Nord-ost were especially arresting, craftily written but without much pomp or sap. The bulk of this book is factual information, introduced to us by various "characters" the authors met in their tenures at the Washington Post in Russia. Everything from Chechnya to the crippled Red Army to the adolescent zeitgeist to the radio revolution is covered, and that's extremely impressive for two American journalists for whom the peculiarities of Russian culture may have been a little difficult to grasp.

My main complaint with this book is the overwhelming bias that sometimes resulted in the omission of certain truths, just to emphasize how much of a beast VVP really is. For example, even though Baker & Glasser go to great lengths to talk about Yeltsin's alcoholic incompetence, they portray the years under him as some kind of democratic paradise, a decade of unregulated freedom with few tangible consequences. While television wasn't state-owned - that much I'll hand to old Boris - those nine years of the true perestroika were a textbook case of rampant chaos, starting with the free-for-alls of privatization schemes to the alarming crime waves. Yet none of this is covered, to add contrast to Russia today. Only about a sentence is dedicated to the fact that crime diminished (just a little, I know, but in a nation where it was so popular, a little means a lot), and nowhere is it talked about that perhaps Russians have a valid excuse to "fear" democracy.

The second thing that irritated me about B&G's account was how much they strove to portray Khodorkovsky as the boy wonder of democratic reform. They talked about his privatization deals under the umbrella term "shady" and mentioned his boasting to buy parliament in '03, yet at the end of the chapters, sympathy toward a man who basically dug his own grave resonated throughout the concluding paragraphs. When a guy goes around talking about how he's going to purchase a deliberative body and then lecture a president about corruption - I'm sorry, but that paradox doesn't merit the kind of pity that was relegated to him by Kremlin Rising.

Lastly, the relentless underlining of Putin's past as a KGB agent seemed hypocritical at best. It's well known that it's now a big part of who he is as a political leader, but the analogous situation of Bush, Sr., a former head of the CIA, is not treated. The CIA is responsible for numerous attempted and perpetrated coups. Why are we not outraged by erstwhile directors becoming presidents? Why is the guy who never even made colonel portrayed as the next coming of Dzerzhinski? It's ridiculous and unnecessary, at least until the authors begin to talk about how his KGB past has influenced his decisions in the present, such as to increase the hiring of former operatives in the Kremlin network.

Overall, the book was fascinating and rarely boring. It's a great piece of work for someone who wants to get a thorough introduction to what Russia is, how she thinks and why, and what the future holds for the largest country in the world. Highly recommended.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Putin 101, June 23, 2005

By 

Cubs69 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution (Hardcover)

One of the best books I have read on the New Russia--which, after reading the book, you see may not be so "new" after all. This excellent study of present-day Russia and its leader is concise, interesting, well-written, informative, and not just a little bit scary. After the Wild Wild West-ness of the Yeltsin years it was inevitable that a Sheriff would ride into Moscow and reign in the party. Vladimir Putin is that Sheriff, a man of (very) few words who prefers to let his actions speak for him. Anyone with even a passing interest in where Russia is today, where it might be headed, and the implication for the rest of the world will find this book well worth their time.