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

~ (Author), Susan Glasser (Author)
Key Phrases: Soviet Union, United States, Vladimir Putin (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

In 1931, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gave a speech explaining that his country needed to industrialize rapidly to avoid repeating an old pattern: Russia being beaten because of its backwardness. He walked his audience through a litany of invaders: Mongol khans, Turkish beys, Swedish feudal lords, Polish and Lithuanian gentry, British and French capitalists, Japanese barons. "They beat her," he concluded, "because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity."

In their brilliant study of Vladimir Putin's rule over contemporary Russia, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser come back again and again to the current Russian president's eerily Stalinist rhetoric about the need to avoid looking weak so as not to be beaten (whether by oligarchs or Chechen rebels) and his resulting Bolshevik-like obsession with control. Putin's aim has been to pursue economic growth and re-create a strong state in order to rebuild Russia's place in the world.

Baker and Glasser, whose nearly four years as The Washington Post's correspondents in Moscow coincided with most of Putin's first term as president, provide an extraordinarily comprehensive account of Russian politics and society, illuminating everything from the machinations in the Kremlin's inner corridors to life in the provinces. The picture they paint is not a pretty one. They chronicle not only government lies and incompetence but the overwhelming problems of AIDS, alcohol, military hazing and environmental degradation.

At the heart of this tale is "Project Putin," the president's crusade to remove all challenges to his authority. It includes the elimination of independent television networks and elections for regional governors, as well as the jailing of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the destruction of his private company, Yukos. To get a sense of how obsessive Putin can be, consider his behavior in the run-up to his reelection in 2004. After he ensured that he faced no serious opposition, Putin's only fear was that turnout might be below the 50-percent threshold required to validate the results -- which would trigger a new election, making Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who had served as Boris Yeltsin's finance minister, acting president in the interim. So Putin fired Kasyanov and gave the job to Mikhail Fradkov, who was unknown and unthreatening.

Ironically, despite his periodic denunciations of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a national tragedy (a collapse that brought freedom to millions), Putin would not be where he is today absent those historic events. During the Soviet period, he seemed destined to remain a mid-level KGB functionary. But after the collapse, he used connections built while working for his former law professor, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, to begin his rise. Putin became head of the FSB (the KGB's domestic successor) in 1998, prime minister in 1999 and Yeltsin's chosen successor as president in 2000.

During the Yeltsin years, Russia had experienced a traumatic decline in its economic, political and military stature and fallen from the front rank of great powers. Despite both Russian and Western efforts to help build democracy in the aftermath of Soviet rule, the average Russian citizen equated the 1990s less with freedom than with chaos. While Putin's popularity at home (and for a while, abroad) stemmed from the stability he brought to Russian life, that stability has come at a steep price.

Encapsulating much of Baker and Glasser's views of modern Russia is the gut-wrenching story of the events of Sept. 1, 2004, in School No. 1 in Beslan, when militants held hostage an estimated 1,200 schoolchildren and adults; the official death toll exceeded 300. We see the bravery of the hostages, including 15-year-old Kazbek Dzaragasov, who escaped at the start only to go back in to try to save his 8-year-old sister, Agunda. But we also see the callousness of the captors, the incompetence of the security forces and, above all, the dishonesty of the government. Putin's behavior in this crisis, write Baker and Glasser, was typical: "long silence followed by a brief, heavily staged appearance shown over and over on television, a pattern of official deception by his government, and finally a lengthy if overdue presidential speech filled with tough talk about hunting down the perpetrators even if it required more trade-offs of Russia's already fragile freedoms."

Methodical in its approach, as riveting as a novel in its depiction of modern Russian life, Kremlin Rising is a powerful indictment of Putin's years as president. In his obsessive quest for control and a stronger Russian state, Putin is undermining Russia's long-term future just as Soviet leaders did in their own repressive days. Given how often President Bush has spoken of Putin's commitment to democracy, one can only hope that this book is on the must-read list for those vacationing in Crawford, Tex., this summer.

Reviewed by James M. Goldgeier
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (May 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743264312
• ISBN-13: 978-0743264310
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #654,101 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	M. Bunenko (Alameda, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 11 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

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.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Cubs69 - See all my reviews

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.