Putin's People by Catherine Belton

[lightreads]

Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

3/5. Recounting of the infiltration of the security services (so, by definition, organized crime) into control of the Russian state and economy over thirty years. The sheer scale of the looting of assets is stunning, and that's not even to mention the evidence this book lays out suggesting various governmental figures orchestrated mass civilian casualties for their own political ends. For all that, this book is really boring? It's stylistically dry and more inclined to spend its time on talking about money than people. It's also not really about Putin who, to be fair, is a cipher in a lot of important ways, so much so that her guess as to his thoughts and motivations is probably little better than anyone else's, even though she clearly did years of research.

Anyway, that is a kleptocratic autocracy; the candyass crap Trump pulled is a pale imitation.

Comments

[jadelennox]

Do you read Masha Gessen? Her The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia really helped me understand what happened there while being conceivable for me mostly because it was told through the stories of individuals, in that classic nonfiction narrative way. She wrote it in the years immediately after she and her family left Russia because they had credible fear that Putin was going to take away gay peoples' kids, and her furious grief comes through pretty palpably, if subtly.

I read it at the same time as I was reading Tim Wu's The Master Switch 4 years ago, and it was remarkably soothing, in a vaguely nihilistic way, to see different stories of the consolidation of corruption and power playing out in such overwhelmingly different venues. Reading them together kicked me a little bit out of my endpoint-of-history fallacies.

[paserbyp]

Well said about Putin and Trump!