My Amazon Review of Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy's " Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin"

Putin: The New Tsar

Former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill and Brookings foreign policy fellow Clifford Grady have written a deeply researched very important and very dense book profiling Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is America’s loss that Fiona Hill left the National Security Council only a few weeks ago. The one very critical lesson to be learned from this book is that Donald Trump should not be allowed to be alone in a room with Putin. Simply put, Trump is short-term and transactional while Putin is long-term and strategic.

The authors trace Putin’s life from growing up in the deprivation of postwar Leningrad to his rise to power in Moscow via his work as a KGB operative in East Germany. Putin comes into his own working for Anatoly Sobchak, a reform minded mayor of now Saint Petersburg in the early 1990s. From there he goes to Moscow where he has a ringside seat into the disintegration of the Yeltsin government and the economic failure of post-Soviet Russia. In succeeding Yeltsin Putin’s mandate is to restore order and to restore the economy.

Putin sees himself as the CEO of Russia and as an heir to the early 20^th Century Russian reformer Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. What they have in common is that they both viewed themselves as modernizers within the context of authoritarian capitalism. Although Putin may view himself as a free marketer, he really runs a crony capitalist society where he has leverage over the oligarchs by having the ability to throw them in jail for tax law violations.

Above all else Putin is a statist. Everything has to be done in service of the state. He is critical of the Bolsheviks in that they betrayed the Russian state by fomenting revolution while its soldiers were dying in World War I. As an heir to the Tsars Putin sees Russia as a bulwark against western liberalism and he has allied himself with the Russian Orthodox Church against the perceived licentiousness of the West.

In thinking strategically Putin first had to put Russia’s fiscal house in order. In doing that he was aided by one of his Leningrad buddies, Alexie Kudrin who served as his finance minister. Widely respected in the West, Kudrin paid off Russia’s foreign debt and thereby removed a major leverage point the West had over Russia. Putin learned that from the forced withdrawal of Russian troops from the Baltic States in 1994 when the West threatened to withhold funding for Yeltsin’s government. He learns from history.

With respect to foreign policy Putin’s goal is to restore Russian greatness and to gradually prevail in the independent states that were formed after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Hence that annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine.

The book ends in 2014 so there is no discussion of Russian involvement in our 2016 presidential election.  But is seems to me that involvement is part in parcel to the very patient long game that Putin is playing against the West and thus far he appears to be winning.

As I said at the outset this book is a hard read, but if you want to get great insights into how Putin thinks and Russia’s role in the world it is well worth the slog.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RL6SWVSWLS0GM/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Sean McMeekin's "The Russian Revolution: A New History"

Russia Turns Red

Historian Sean McMeekin has written a very readable revisionist history of the Russian Revolution.  The perspective of the book is to look at the revolution from outside in. Hence we learn more about the opposition to Lenin rather than an inside out view which would focus more on the Bolshevik leadership. According to his archival sources McMeekin clearly portrays Lenin as a German agent who brought the financial resources of Hohenzollern Germany with him to overwhelm both his critics on the left and the forces of the provisional government.

In McMeekin’s view both the Tsar and the Russian army were in far better shape than what other historians have argued. I think he stretches here, because if it were that strong the army would not have collapsed as fast as it did under the weight of the Leninist policy of turning an imperialist war into a civil war by subverting the Russian draftees.

He argues, I think correctly, that Lenin was blessed by his opponents. The liberals who brought on the February/March Revolution were inept and the Socialist Revolutionary government under Kerensky was perhaps even more inept. When the time came for Lenin to strike in October/November, the provisional government was a mere shell.  Thus the revolution was more a coup d’état than a real revolution. The revolution would come with the bloody civil war that followed the coup.

During the civil war period McMeekin highlights how split the opposition was and how unified the newly formed Red Army was under the leadership of Trotsky. Trotsky wisely utilized the officer corps of the defeated Tsarist army to build his new army and utilizing Russian gold reserves, Lenin was able to keep the army in the field. Nevertheless millions of lives were lost in the three year civil war as the country nearly starved to death and was saved by Herbert Hoover’s relief mission. One last note McMeekin tells us that the Cheka, the predecessor to the KGB, was founded to break the strike of banking, railroad and communication workers, so much for proletarian solidarity.

Therefore I highly recommend the ”The Russian Revolution” for history buffs like myself. 

The full Amazon URL is: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2D7LMPHM3B2T1/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Catherine Merridale's "Lenin on the Train"

Riding the Locomotive of History

One hundred years ago this month V.I. Lenin boarded a train in Zurich that would take him through Germany, Sweden and Finland to ultimately arrive at Finland Station, Saint Petersburg, Russia. As history professor Catherine Merridale describes, Lenin arrives in a city racked by three years of war and rapt in the chaos of a new revolutionary government struggling to govern and a Bolshevik Party torn between participating in governing and advocating another revolution.

Merridale vividly describes the collapse of the Czarist regime at home and on the war front and Lenin’s life in exile in Switzerland. It is the German government who seizes upon the idea of transporting Lenin into Russia with the goal of fomenting a revolution that would take that country out of the war. The plot succeeds brilliantly. The go between was a Bolshevik/ speculator Alexander Helphand also known as Parvus, who is quite a character. With the deal orchestrated Lenin and his entourage occupy three rail cars as they travel through Germany and beyond. Although it was known as a “sealed train” it was far from sealed and passengers actually disembarked on occasion. It was quite a menagerie and the passengers included such luminaries as Karl Radek, Grigory Sokolnikov and Grigory Zinoviev. All three would later die in the Stalin purges of the 1930s.

The interesting thing is that it was no secret. The Russian government knew, the British knew and the Bolsheviks knew that Lenin was coming. With his boisterous arrival he grabs the Bolshevik Party by the throat and with the force of his will he sets them on a revolutionary course. Lenin truly was the “plague bacillus” that Churchill described him as, because in his wake you can count the deaths in the tens of millions.

Although the book is slow going at times, Merridale tells the story with great verve and you get a sense of the drama building as the locomotive of history goes on its journey through northern Europe.

For the complete Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1O6LJHLGDE58V/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv