In Putin’s Labyrinth, acclaimed journalist Steve LeVine, who lived in and reported from the former Soviet Union for more than a decade, provides a gripping account of modern Russia. President Dmitri Medvedev and the country’s real power, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, are posing a resolute challenge to the West. In a penetrating narrative that recounts the lives and deaths of six Russians, LeVine portrays the growth of a “culture of death”—from targeted assassinations of the state’s enemies to the Kremlin’s indifference when innocent hostages are slaughtered. Interviews with eyewitnesses and the families and friends of these victims reveal how Russians manage to negotiate their way around the ever-present danger of violence and the emotional toll that this lethal maze is exacting on ordinary people. The result is a fresh way of assessing the forces that are driving this major new confrontation with the West.
I am a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, and an adjunct professor of energy security at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. Previously, I was a foreign correspondent for 18 years -- in the former Soviet Union for 11 years, and before that three years in Pakistan writing about its politics and Afghanistan's wars, and I started out abroad in Manila. In various years, I wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Financial Times and Newsweek.
These were fantastic years to be abroad, stretching from the People Power revolution in the Philippines, through the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and Benazir Bhutto's first election to power in Pakistan, and on to the growing pains of the eight new countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus, and the struggle for influence and power between Moscow and Washington on the Caspian Sea.
The Oil and the Glory is the product of 12 years of research, including gestation while I lived and worked on the Caspian Sea, and more than two years of pure writing on leave at Stanford University. For Putin's Labyrinth, I followed the trail of murder to London (four trips) and Moscow (three trips) during a year of research and writing. I currently am writing a book for Viking about advanced batteries, tentatively to be published in 2013.
I am married to Nurilda Nurlybayeva and we have two girls.
