The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin by Steven Lee Myers (PDF)

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As the world struggles to confront a bolder Russia, the importance of understanding the formidable and ambitious Vladimir Putin has never been greater. This gripping narrative of Putin’s rise to power recounts Putin’s origins—from his childhood of abject poverty in Leningrad to his ascent through the ranks of the KGB, and his eventual consolidation of rule in the Kremlin. On the one hand, Putin’s many domestic reforms—from tax cuts to an expansion of property rights—have helped reshape the potential of millions of Russians whose only experience of democracy had been crime, poverty, and instability after the fall of the Soviet Union. On the other, Putin has ushered in a new authoritarianism—unyielding in its brutal repression of dissent and newly assertive politically and militarily in regions like Crimea and the Middle East. The New Tsar is a staggering achievement, a deeply researched and essential biography of one of the most important and destabilizing world leaders in recent history, a man whose merciless rule has become inextricably bound to Russia’s forseeable future.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Steven Lee Myers’s The New Tsar is not the first biography of Putin, but it is the strongest to date. Judicious and comprehensive, it pulls back the veil… from one of the world’s most secretive leaders. What is most striking, given the aura of steely consistency that Putin cultivates, is how he has changed over the years…. The great strength of Myers’s book is the way it shows how chance events and Putin’s own degeneration gradually cleared the path to the Ukraine crisis… Putin emerges as neither a KGB automaton, nor the embodiment of Russian historical traditions, nor an innocent victim of Western provocations and NATO’s hubris, but rather as a flawed individual who made his own choices at crucial moments and thereby shaped history.” —Daniel Treisman, The Washington Post “What Steven Lee Myers gets so right in The New Tsar, his comprehensive new biography — the most informative and extensive so far in English — is that at bottom Putin simply feels that he’s the last one standing between order and chaos… What Myers offers is the portrait of a man swinging from crisis to crisis with one goal: projecting strength… A knowledgeable and thorough biography… Putin himself now represents the chaos he so abhors — the chaos that will surely come in his wake.” —Gal Beckerman, The New York Times Book Review “Steven Lee Myers coherently, comprehensively, and evenhandedly tells the story not only of Putin’s glory years, but also of his hardscrabble childhood in Leningrad, his checkered academic career, his undistinguished work as a KGB agent in East Germany, his remarkably loyal service to the mayor of post-Soviet St. Petersburg, and his reluctant but speedy climb through President Yeltin’s ministries in the late 1990s.”— Bob Blaisdell, The Christian Science Monitor“Combining skilled story telling, psychological examination and political investigation, Steven Lee Myers succeeds brilliantly in this biography of Vladimir Putin. Explaining the dangers that Putin’s Russia may and does pose, Myers effortlessly and expertly guides the reader through the complexities of the Russian Byzantine governing style and the country’s politics and identity. In the end, the book provides one of the most comprehensive answers to a puzzling question: Despite all the changes that Russia has gone through during communism and post-communism, why is it still an empire of the tsar?” —Nina Khrushcheva“Such an understanding of Putin’s early life and the evolution of his leadership is lacking. [Myers’s] methodology is sound and, I believe, the only way to capture such an intimate understanding of Russia’s iron man.” —Ian Bremmer, author of Superpower “Personalities determine history as much as geography, and there is no personality who has had such a pivotal effect on 21st century Europe as much as Vladimir Putin. The New Tsar is a riveting, immensely detailed biography of Putin that explains in full-bodied, almost Shakespearean fashion why he acts the way he does.” –Robert D. Kaplan “The reptilian, poker-faced former KGB agent, now Russian president seemingly for life, earns a fair, engaging treatment in the hands of New York Times journalist Myers… [who] clearly knows his material and primary subject… Putin used the perks of power to create a complex system of cronyism and nepotism. Myers shows how Putin convinced everyone that this way of operating was part of the Russian soul and how he perpetuated it through an archaic form of Russian corruption… Myers astutely notes how Putin’s speeches increasingly harkened back to the worst period of the Cold War era’s dictates by Soviet strongmen… A highly effective portrait of a frighteningly powerful autocrat.” –Kirkus (starred review)“What could be more timely and relevant than a new, thorough biography of Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, from a writer who was The New York Times correspondent in Moscow for seven years of the Russian chief’s reign?… Russia has lived through numerous prime ministers, a stock market crash, a debt default, moments of paralysis, wrenching warfare in Chechnya, brutal murders and good and crooked elections, all recounted succinctly by Mr. Myers… Putin’s and Russia’s relations with the United States are dealt with candidly.” —Dan Simpson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette About the Author STEVEN LEE MYERS has worked at The New York Times for twenty-six years, seven of them in Russia during the period when Putin consolidated his power. He spent two years as bureau chief in Baghdad, covering the winding down of the American war in Iraq, and now covers national security issues. He lives in Washington, D.C. This is his first book. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1 Homo Sovieticus Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin edged forward through the cratered bat­tlefield beside the Neva River, roughly thirty miles from Leningrad. His orders seemed suicidal. He was to reconnoiter the German positions and, if possible, capture a “tongue,” slang for a soldier to interrogate. It was November 17, 1941,1 already bitterly cold, and the Soviet Union’s humiliated army was now desperately fighting to avoid its complete destruction at the hands of Nazi Germany. The last tanks in reserve in the city had crossed the Neva a week before, and Putin’s commanders now had orders to break through heavily reinforced positions defended by 54,000 German infantrymen. There was no choice but to obey. He and another soldier approached a foxhole along a dug-in front, carved with trenches, pocked with shell craters, stained with blood. A German suddenly rose, surprising all three of them. For a frozen moment, noth­ing happened. The German reacted first, unpinned a grenade and tossed it. It landed near Putin, killing his comrade and riddling his own legs with shrapnel. The German soldier escaped, leaving Putin for dead. “Life is such a simple thing, really,” a man who retold the story decades later would say, with a characteristic fatalism. Putin, then thirty years old, lay wounded on a bridgehead on the east bank of the Neva. The Red Army’s commanders had poured troops across the river in hopes of breaking the encirclement of Leningrad that had begun two months earlier when the Germans captured Shlisselburg, an ancient fortress at the mouth of the Neva, but the effort failed. The Germans laid a siege that would last 872 days and kill a million civil­ians by bombardment, starvation, or disease. “The Führer has decided to wipe the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth,” a secret Ger­man order declared on September 29. Surrender would not be accepted. Air and artillery bombardment would be the instrument of the city’s destruction, and hunger would be its accomplice, since “feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us.” Never before had a modern city endured a siege like it. “Is this the end of your losses?” Joseph Stalin furiously cabled the city’s defenders the day after the siege began. “Perhaps you have already decided to give up Leningrad?” The telegram was signed by the entire Soviet leadership, including Vyacheslav Molotov, who in 1939 had signed the notorious nonaggression pact with his Nazi counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, which was now betrayed. It was by no means the end of the losses. The fall of Shlisselburg coincided with ferocious air raids in Leningrad itself, including one that ignited the city’s main food warehouse. The Soviet forces defending the city were in disarray, as they were everywhere in the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion that began on June 22, 1941, had crushed Soviet defenses along a thousand-mile front, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Even Moscow seemed in danger of falling. Stalin never considered surrendering Leningrad, and he dispatched the chief of the general staff, Georgy Zhukov, to shore up the city’s defenses, which he did with great brutality. On the night of September 19, on Zhukov’s orders, Soviet forces mounted the first assault 600 meters across the Neva to break the siege, but it was repulsed by overwhelming German firepower. In October, they tried again, hurling forth the 86th Division, which included Putin’s unit, the 330th Rifle Regiment. The bridgehead those troops managed to create on the eastern bank of the Neva became known, because of its size, as the Nevsky Pyatachok, from the word for a five-kopek coin or a small patch. At its greatest expanse the battlefield was barely a mile wide, less than half a mile deep. For the soldiers fated to fight there, it was a brutal, senseless death trap. Putin was an uneducated laborer, one of four sons of Spiridon Putin, a chef who once worked in the city’s famed pre-revolutionary Astoria Hotel. Spiridon, though a supporter of the Bolsheviks, fled the impe­rial capital during the civil war and famine that followed the October Revolution in 1917. He settled in his ancestral village, Pominovo, in the rolling hills west of Moscow, and later moved to the city itself, where he cooked for Vladimir Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, at her official Soviet dacha in the Gorky district on the edge of Moscow. After her death in 1939, he worked in the retreat of Moscow’s Communist Party Committee. He was said to have cooked once for Grigory Rasputin at the Astoria and on occasion for Stalin when he visited Lenin’s widow, beginning a family tradition of servitude to the political elite. Proxim­ity to power did nothing to protect his sons from the Nazis; the entire nation was fighting for survival. Vladimir Putin was already a veteran when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. He had served as a submariner in the 1930s before settling down not far from Leningrad, in the village of Petrodvorets, where Peter the Great had built his palace on the Gulf of Finland. In the chaotic days that followed the invasion, he, like many citizens, had rushed to volunteer to defend the nation and was initially assigned to a special demolitions detachment of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, the dreaded secret police agency that would later become the KGB. The NKVD created 2,222 of these detachments to harass the Nazis behind the front, which was then rapidly advanc­ing. One of Putin’s first missions in the war was a disaster. He and twenty-seven other partisan fighters parachuted behind the Germans advancing on Leningrad, near the town of Kingisepp. It was close to the border with Estonia, which the Soviet Union had occupied the year before, along with Latvia and Lithuania, as part of the notorious pre­war pact with Hitler. Putin’s detachment managed to blow up one arms depot, as the story went, but quickly ran out of ammunition and rations. Local residents, Estonians, brought them food but also betrayed them to the Germans, whom many in the Baltic nations welcomed, at least at first, as liberators from Soviet occupation. German troops closed in on the unit, firing on them as they raced along a road back to the Soviet lines. Putin split off, chased by Germans with dogs, and hid in a marsh, submerging himself and breathing through a reed until the patrol moved on.8 How exactly he made it back is lost to the fog of history, but only he and three others of the detachment survived the raid. The NKVD interrogated him after his escape, but he managed to avoid suspicion of desertion or cowardice and was soon sent back to the front. It might have been courage alone that drove Putin, or it might have been fear. Stalin’s Order No. 270, issued on August 16, had threatened soldiers who deserted with execution and their family members with arrest. Inside Leningrad conditions deteriorated rapidly, despite efforts by the authorities to maintain a sense of normality. Schools opened, as always, on September 1, but three days later the first German shells landed inside the city. With the blockade completed and the city now under regu­lar assault from above, the authorities intensified the rationing of food. Rations would gradually decline, leading to desperation, despair, and finally death. As Vladimir Putin fought outside the city, his wife, Maria, and their infant son were trapped inside. Vladimir and Maria, both born in 1911, were children of Russia’s turbulent twentieth century, buffeted by World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, and the civil war that followed. They met in Pominovo, where his father had moved after the revolution, and married in 1928, when they were only sev­enteen. They moved back to Leningrad as newlyweds, settling back in Petrodvorets with her relatives in 1932. After Putin’s conscription in the navy, they had a boy named Oleg, who died in infancy. A year before the war started, they had a second son, Viktor. Maria and Viktor only narrowly avoided occupation in Nazi-held ter­ritories. She had refused at first to leave Petrodvorets, but as the Germans closed in, her brother, Ivan Shelomov, forced her to evacuate. He served as a first captain in the Baltic Fleet’s headquarters and thus had military authority and what privileges still existed in a city under siege. Captain Shelomov retrieved them “under gunfire and bombs” and settled them into a city whose fate was precarious. Conditions became dire as the winter arrived, the cold that year even more bitter than usual. Maria and Viktor moved into one of dozens of shelters the authorities opened to house refugees pouring in from the occupied outskirts. Her brother helped her with his own rations, but her health faded nevertheless. One day—exactly when is unknown—she passed out and passersby laid her body out with the frozen corpses that had begun to pile up on the street for collection, left for dead, as her husband had been on the front. She was discovered, somehow, in this open-air morgue, her moans attracting attention. Vladimir’s survival seemed no less improbable. He lay wounded beside the Neva for several hours before other Soviet troops found him and carried him back toward the regiment’s redoubt on the bank. He might have died, one of more than 300,000 soldiers who lost their lives on the Pyatachok, except that an old neighbor found him on a litter at a primitive field hospital. He slung Putin over his shoulder and carried him across the frozen river to a hospital on the other side. As it turned out, Putin’s injury almost certainly saved his life. His unit, the 330th Rifle Regiment, fought on the bridgehead throughout the winter of 1941–1942. The battle, in scale and carnage, foreshadowed the terrible siege of Stalingrad the next year, a “monstrous meatgrinder,” it was called. The forces there endured relentless shelling by the Ger­mans. The forested riverbank became a churned, lifeless landscape where nothing would grow for years. New recruits crossed the Neva to replace those killed or wounded at a staggering rate of hundreds a day until the spring of 1942, when the bridgehead collapsed and the Germans regained the ground on April 27. The 330th Rifle Regiment was entirely destroyed except for a major from its command staff, Aleksandr Sokolov, who managed to swim to safety, despite serious wounds.15 It was one of the deadliest single battles of the entire war, and for the Soviet mili­tary command, a folly that squandered tens of thousands of soldiers and probably prolonged the siege instead of shortening it.Putin spent months in a military hospital, recovering in a city that was dying around him. By the time the last road out of the city was cut, three million civilians and soldiers remained besieged. Maria, who refused to be evacuated when it was still possible, ultimately found her husband in the hospital. Against the rules, he shared his own hospital rations with her, hiding food from the nurses until a doctor noticed and halted Maria’s daily visits for a time. The city’s initial resilience succumbed to devastation, starvation, and worse. Essential services deteriorated along with the food supply. Corpses lay uncollected in mounds on the streets. In January and February 1942, more than 100,000 people died each month. The only connection to unoccupied territory was the make­shift “Road of Life,” a series of precarious routes over the frozen waters of Lake Ladoga. They provided minimal relief to the city, and the siege ground on until January 1943, when the Soviet army broke through the encirclement to the east. It took another year to fully free the city from the Nazi grip and begin the relentless, ruthless Soviet march to Berlin. Vladimir and Maria somehow survived, though his injuries caused him to limp in pain for the rest of his life. In April 1942, he was released from the hospital and sent to work at a weapons factory that turned out artillery shells and antitank mines. Their son, Viktor, did not survive. He died of diphtheria in June 1942 and was buried in a mass grave at Piskaryovskoye Cemetery along with 470,000 other civilians and sol­diers. Neither Vladimir nor Maria knew where exactly and evidently made little effort to learn. Nor did they ever talk about it in detail later. The war’s toll was devastatingly personal. Maria’s mother, Elizabeta Shelomova, died on the front lines west of Moscow in October 1941, though it was never clear whether it was a Soviet or a German shell that killed her; Maria’s brother Ivan survived, but another brother, Pyotr, was condemned by a military tribunal at the front in the earliest days of the war, evidently for some dereliction of duty, and his ultimate fate was never known, and certainly not mentioned. Two of Vladimir’s brothers also died during the war: Mikhail in July 1942, also in circumstances lost to history; and Aleksei on the Voronezh front in February 1943.These were the stories of the Great Patriotic War—tales of heroism and suffering—that Vladimir and Maria’s third son would grow up hear­ing and that would leave an indelible impression on him throughout his life. From “some snatches, some fragments” of conversations overheard at the kitchen table in a crowded communal flat in a still-devastated Len­ingrad, he created his family narrative, one reshaped by time and mem­ory, one that might have been apocryphal in places and was certainly far from complete. The Putins were simple people, unlikely to know much of the darker aspects of the war: Stalin’s paranoid purges in the Great Terror that had decimated the army before the war; the connivance with Hitler’s plans to conquer Europe; the partitioning of Poland in 1939; the forceful annexation of the Baltic nations; the chaotic defense once the Nazis invaded; the official malfeasance that contributed to the starvation in Leningrad; the vengeful atrocities committed by Soviet troops as they marched to Berlin. Even then, after Stalin’s death in 1953, it remained dangerous to speak poorly of the state in anything above a whisper. The victory—and the Putins’ small part in it—was an inexhaustible fountain of pride. What else could it be? One did not think of the mistakes that were made, the young boy would say later; one thought only of winning. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A good book to get up to speed on Putin and the recent history of Russia.The book is written quite objectively carefully documenting what is clearly established versus what is speculation. For example- In the case of Putin’s alleged amassing of a fortune as a corrupt bureaucrat in St Petersburg, something which is essentially presented as fact by no less a journalistic luminary than Frontline, the book provides convincing evidence that the speculation is false.- In the case of the apartment bombings, in which Putin’s engineering of it all is taken as fact by Frontline, the book presents the cases both for and against.- In cases where the evidence is clearer, for example, election rigging in 2012 the author is willing to put his foot down that it clearly did happen.Although Putin definitely emerges as a bad guy overall for building a kleptocracy and smashing all but token opposition the book also documents positive changes he enacted: For example something of a move toward a market economy and the building of a rainy day fund which the author believes allowed Russia to survive the global financial crisis.Putin’s life before becoming Prime Minister and then President is not glorified. The author points out his recklessness such as street brawling while a KGB agent and his indifference to family life. On the other hand, he is not demonized. The author points out that Putin had gained a reputation as being loyal, even when coming at the cost of personal risk and being seen as above corruption prior to becoming Prime Minister. Indeed the author points out that Yeltsin appointed him precisely for these characteristics. It is remarkable that the book is engaging enough to get you through Putin’s rather boring life pre-1998 without giving up on it all!Although the book presents a decent amount of detail on Putin’s personal life and habits, he ultimately remains a rather mysterious figure. I felt this was one weakness of the book. It does discuss Putin’s hostility toward the west somewhat: for example his feeling that the west is imperialistic, ultimately intent on crushing Russia, arrogant and corrupting of family and religious values. It seemed that the author had just touched on the tip of the iceberg, however, and, perhaps, with more exposition of Putin’s he would seem less mysterious.Another weakness of the book is its rather brief coverage of the events of 2014 in Ukraine. The events are sketched out but there is not enough detailed investigation to have a good sense as to whose version of events is more likely to be true. For example, to what extent was it far right Ukrainian nationalists behind it all versus a truly populist uprising? Who was responsible for things turning violent?Like most Russian history, things are rather dreary and after reading the book my main sense was being lucky to live in the west and how important it is to keep corruption out of government.

⭐‘The New Tsar’ is a fine example of Lord Acton’s quote, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” No one can say Vladimir Putin is a lazy oaf. The dude’s certainly a workaholic. ‘The New Tsar’ shows the evolution of the Russian president through his career. This is no mean feat to accomplish when you consider Putin is a notoriously private taciturn person. Mr. Myers brings together a story of a man obsessed with helping to maintain order under whatever ideology is in fashion at the time. His hard-driving work ethic took precedent even over his family. Initially, he was not a political animal and never had dreams of becoming president of Russia, but when he did get thrust into the position, boy oh boy, the paper pusher sure took to it with ruthless gusto.The story is gripping from page one with an explanation of Putin’s father and mother surviving the Nazi’s assault on Leningrad. His humble background and almost serendipitous ascension through the tumultuous years of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the chaos that ensued show a low-level administrator who always kept his eye on the tasks he was given. His competency, loyalty, and lack of any political aspirations helped him to avoid the surfeit of political backstabbing, graft, and a target of the highly dysfunctional judicial system. Mr. Myers repeatedly shows that corruption and cronyism are baked into the bread of Russian politics. Putin’s very blandness was a huge asset. Political leaders viewed his competency and loyalty a unique quality not found in most self-serving Russian bureaucrats. It helped him to leapfrog over many people who had years more experience than him in whatever department he was assigned. Mercy, you have to be hard as nails and lucky to survive Russia’s toxic mixture of political assassinations, powerful oligarchs, and notoriously vicious organized crime groups. Mr. Myers also explains the evolution of the Soviet’s feared KGB, where Putin began his career, and how the large security force reoriented into the newly formed FSB. The author shows how Putin consolidated power by cracking down on media outlets; revamping the military; faking democratic elections; possibly implementing or encouraging political assassinations or chucking critics into prison; and basically converting Russia back into an Orwellian landscape. I didn’t realize until reading ‘The New Tsar’ how big the problem of terrorism plays in Russia and the high level of enmity that Putin has towards NATO. Mr. Myers states, “Step by step, Putin erased the legacy of his predecessor, as surely as Stalin had Lenin’s, as Khrushchev had Stalin’s, as Brezhnev had Khrushchev’s, and as Yeltsin had Gorbachev’s.” He surrounds himself with old loyal cronies and gives them immense power over various government departments despite their complete lack of experience in the respective fields. Putin handles criticism about as well as Looney Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil. In Mr. Myers’s book, Ukraine plays a prominent role in the despot’s paranoia. The book includes eight pages of black-and-white photos. ‘The New Tsar’ effectively shows the evolution of Putin’s personality in his efforts on bringing back Russia’s reputation as a superpower that must be respected and feared both in the political and business world. The book was published in 2015, so it does not address Putin’s cyberattacks on other countries’ elections or infrastructure, and fomenting political unrest through Internet propaganda. Of course, President Trump’s baffling toady actions towards Putin are also not addressed. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall during those closed meetings between the vain Russian Hobbit and our egomaniacal President Foghorn Leghorn. Mr. Myers has written a highly informative engaging biography that makes me damned glad that NATO exists.

⭐I have read this book immediately after reading “The Putin Interviews” (which is transcript of Oliver’s Stone documentary) and I think these two books complement each other perfectly.While “Putin Interviews” is enlightening about Mr. Putin’s views on foreign politics but seems much less open on Russia’s internal affairs this book (“The New Tsar”) is its opposite. It presents (in my view) fairly objective and truthful (as far as the truth can be obtained from publicly available sources) view on what was happening in Russia since 1991 but shows (again, in my opinion) some definite bias when talks about Russia’s interaction with, using Putin’s favorite expression, “western partners”.The part about Putin’s family history is breathtaking and this book is worth reading just for this section alone. At the very least it shows how extremely tough life in USSR was during and after WWII for ordinary people.The information in the book is mostly from publicly available sources, however, as author clearly process a great amount of it, the picture I have got is considerably broader that I myself perceived while living day to day during that period.Author points to (often quite rightly) the flaws and limitations of Putin’s character and way of thinking. However, when comparing with other western leaders I suspect that many of them share similar character flaws — results are different mostly because they were brought up and currently act in different political context.Where bias is clearly shown is (in my view) in author’s description of events in Ukraine. For example, author tells us that Mr. Yanukovich, after signing an agreement with opposition, suddenly got scared and left the country without a real reason. No mentioning of opposition’s militant factions rejecting the signed agreement and storming the government buildings. By the way, in “Putin Interviews” Mr. Putin claimed that Mr. Yanukovich did not run away, but just left the capital for the conference in Donetsk — even more ridiculous claim.Also, although (in my view) reasonably accurately describing the Odessa’s tragedy (clashes between anti- and pro-Maidan activists, the latter, as more numerous, forced their opponents into the building, it caught fire and some in pro-Maidan crowd were preventing people in the building from escaping, more then 40 casualties as a result), author does not mention the aftermath of the events. Namely, those allegedly responsible for the death of people, were apprehended by police but then later released by the mob and never faced any charges.Nevertheless, in general, in my opinion, author tried to remain objective through the book and material presented allows reader to reach his/her own conclusion, not necessarily coinciding with author’s view. I think, this is a sign of a really good journalism.So, to summarize — I definitely recommend this book, if you want to learn about Putin and post-Soviet Russia. I also suggest you to read/watch “Putin Interview” by Oliver Stone.

⭐Really useful coverage of the last few decades of Russian history for someone wishing to catch up a bit. A good read and at times quite scary in terms of the implications. One minor comment said that the author says that in the 1970’s the KGB was at war with no-one but itself. He may want to check on what they were up to in South Africa, Angola, etc. There is a useful report by the US Senate on the the Role of the Soviet Union and its surrogates (East Germany, Cuba) on fomenting terrorism in Southern Africa then. The number of T54 and T55 tanks and the occasional Mig lying rusting in the Angolan bush from the 1980’s might also give him some hints (they did not suddenly appear out of the blue). There are some that argue that the robust defense put up against Soviet and East German led troops and Cuban generals and troops by South Africans and Namibians (many of whom were not professional soldiers but doing their national service) helped convince Gorbachev that the time had come for the Soviet Union to change and hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall. SWAPO / Plan comrades falsely imprisoned tortured and tortured by their comrades that ended up wearing only worn out Russian blue shorts and shorts in the Lubango pits might also suggest that the KGB was playing a role in the region (Oiva Angula).But overall a really useful and readable book – at least for a non-expert like myself I suppose.

⭐we know his name and what he looks like, but who is Putin and how did he rise from obscurity to being the most powerful man in Europe?. This excellent biography tells you the whole story from his birth to 2015. It details the people and events that set him on his path to power, and tells you how he has used and is using his power to rule Russia like a Tzar. It essential reading if you want to understand the Russia of today and why things have turned out this way. Great value for money

⭐I always had a nagging feeling that I wanted to know more about Putin and several other world leaders so purchased this book. Very interesting, well written and fair in its outlook. This book goes through his life and explains the mixture of luck, hard work and circumstances which have created the modern Russian state which Putin oversees. Very glad I read this and he is perhaps not all bad. But not all good either.

⭐I bought this out of curiosity and I am glad I did. I knew pretty much nothing about Putin and Russia before reading this book and I found it informative.

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