Putin And The Rise Of Russia [Hardcover]

This is a good biography. It is a fair biography. And the fact that it is written by someone connected with an anti-Putin institution like Harvard University is even more remarkable. Fair analyses on Putin are hard to come by. Most of the West, be it neo-conservatives or neo-liberals, believe Putin is Satan incarnate. His Russian nationalist admirers believe he is King Arthur resurrected. So which is it?

Stuermer is an economically-oriented German political scientist. Technically, he is anti-Putin, but he also understands the moves Putin makes. As a German, he knows that his country can't openly oppose Putin's Russia. He knows that to best work with Putin, one must understand him and to a degree, sympathize with him.

Yes, it is true that Putin is former KGB, but there is more to the story. Most of the KGB officers weren't the bad guys from James Bond films. Nor where they the Gestapo-like men who would drag innocent children away from Church. Yes, that happened but that's not the whole story. In any case, that's not what Putin did. Putin worked with Securities in East Germany. He became a Colonel in the KGB because he thought he could protect Russian from future threats. He didn't work to "spread the gospel of Marx."

Putin's position gave him a good view of how Soviet economics was collapsing, and if the situation allowed, how to rebuilld Russia.

Stuermer's analysis of Putin's Russia is mainly focused on the triumph and difficulties of Petrodollars, with a minor emphasis on PetroPolitics. After Putin stabilized Russia in the early 2000's, he tapped into arguably the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world. Russia became rich overnight. The problem, though, is that while Russia has political leverage with oil, other countries have to want to buy from Russia. And if other countries don't/won't buy from Russia, her oil becomes useless. This forces Putin to look for a more science-based economy in the future.

Putin's most important moment was a speech in 2007. He warned the West that NATO's days of playing God are over. The West cannot give international law the middle finger anymore. The unlawful bombing of Serbia will have consequences. If the West can defy international law, so Putin argues, who is the West to criticize Putin's Russia on "human rights" violations? Stuermer, a Westerner, realizes the challenge and concedes the point to Putin.

Stuermer makes some interesting observations. While Russia lost millions of citizens and key military hardware in the breakup of the Soviet Union, it had the positive effect of removing a lot of potentially dangerous Muslim radicals from Russian territory.

Cons with the book:
Like any modern-day political biography, this book became dated in about 6 months. In our society events happen to quickly. A lot of Stuermer's observation, therefore, are either wrong or irrelevant. Russia's birthrate is not as drastic as it was 5 years ago. That tired old canard simply won't work anymore. Russia was able to ride the recent economic crisis fairly smoothly. Stuermer criticized Russia for having troops in hot places like Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia, but doesn't NATO and the US have troops in every country in the world? This criticism is unfair.

All in all, this is a good and fair book.

Many books on the subject of Russia try to scare and shock the public (shocking revelations being a mainstay of the investigating reporting). This one was a pleasant exception - the book by the German author is actually a nuanced book, free of the lift-wing moral superiority and the right-wing paranoia. May be it is a confirmation that the Germans understand Russians best. I think Stuermer got many things right, for example, the nature of the Putin-Medvedev tandem, the rocky EU-Russia relationships, and the wide-ranging (though invisible) political ripple effect of the Kursk disaster in 2000. The Postscript about the brief Russo-Georgian war of 2008 is brief but perceptive. I think finally the public has got something approaching a balanced account. I have only a couple of minor criticisms. Number one, the perennial quotes from the Marquis de Custine's book published in 1839 "Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia" are seems to me a unnecessary requirement for all English-language books about Russia. Does the author really need this moth-eaten account to prove any of his points? As a German, he could have been less unoriginal quoting Baron Munchausen. De Custine mocked Russia - obviously the peevish French aristocrat didn't get his café crème and croissant when he stayed in the Russian inn house in Yaroslavl. Second criticism - the book lacks cultural references. Yet the culture, on occasion, could be more helpful in understanding Russia than the oil pipelines. Any intelligent foreign visitor, who sees the giant and somewhat grotesque statue of Peter the Great created by Tseretelli in the center of Moscow, would immediately understand Russia even without reading ANY books. The Communists' favorite Tsar (although not the Putin's favorite) is famous for building the blue-water fleet, founding of the magnificent city of Saint Petersburg, as well as his top-down "Westernization", which had created the Russian Empire and yet psychologically devastated the old Russia. He has been called "the first Bolshevik" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He could have been called "the first Capitalist" given the nature of the latest version of (non-Western) capitalism emerging form Singapore to Shanghai to Saint Petersburg. And that would be my last criticism - the author's reluctance to dwell on how the modus operandi of Russian capitalism differs from the West's. The book deserves four solid stars for its conclusions - Russia is not threatening the West, it's not out there to dominate the World though ideology as before. It has emerged as a (still fragile) nation state, which wants its national interests be understood and respected.

Michael Stuermer's acquaintance with Vladimir Putin gives a sense of the man that's missing from other Putin books. Although comfortable writing in English, he is steeped in the German assiduous observations of Russia, their enormous near neighbor. At a 1992 business conference in Europe the author noticed the "remarkably good German" of an unknown translator and assistant to St. Petersburg's mayor. At subsequent meetings every year or two, Stuermer observed Putin's rise to foreign investment coordinator for his city, and then, for the Kremlin. Putin demonstrated a command of business facts and figures, answering questions from foreign entrepreneurs for several hours without once referring to notes and "with disarming openness." He continued this practice after his sudden appointment as Acting President. "Unlike ...Soviet time, no question had to be submitted in writing. Everyone was free to ask whatever they pleased, most questions being rather on the tough side. But Putin seemed to like a sporting event."

Having seen Soviet oil revenues plummet when a flood of Saudi oil reduced the barrel price to $10 and Nazarbaev's canny use of Kazakh energy resources as well as learning from his decade arranging international business investments in Russia, as President, Putin effectively deployed Russian energy to achieve domestic and geopolitical goals. In a clever strategic play Russia manipulated the gas crisis with Ukraine to sideline the EU's Nabucco pipeline project. (Yet even Putin can be tripped up by the wily President-for-Life of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, as evidenced by the current Russia-Belarus media war over Russian gas.)

The milieu of the author's encounters with Putin changed from European chateaux and conference centers to the grand halls and Presidential office in the Kremlin. When still in the Kremlin, Putin furnished his Presidential office with a pair of French 18th century armchairs and the statues of Peter the Great, Catherine II, Nicholas I and Alexander II in the four corners. This confusing selection of pre-Revolutionary rulers may shed light on the man's czarist impulses. What Putin calls sovereign democracy, the author labels authoritarianism combined with popular acclaim and state capitalism. Dismantling Khordorkovsky's Yukos for nonpayment of taxes allowed the birth of Rosneft with funds from Western banks. Boris Berezovsky was much luckier, escaping to London with his billions, acquired as a powerful crony of the Yeltsin family. Only months after Putin was elected President, Berezovsky was calling for and paying for his overthrow though he had deployed his vast media empire in support of votes for Putin.

Following Putin's deft footwork and promotions by Chubais, Chernomyrdin, Kiriyenko, Stepashin and Primakov, the wild series of Russian Prime Ministers in the last two years of Yeltsin's Presidency, demonstrates his bureaucratic survival skills.

If you want a sense of the man who is, once again, Russia's Prime Minister following two terms as President, this is the book to read.