Review: Putin: His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash [old]

What better way to commemorate the President of Russia’s 65th birthday than by reviewing a book about his imminent downfall? HAPPY BIRTHDAY VLADDERS!

Disclaimer: Uncharacteristically high salt content in this review.

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Do we really need another Putin biography?

Yes, we do – but only if it meets certain conditions. Putin is still alive and shaping modern Russian politics, so there’s that, but there’s also a glut in the market for Putin biographies*. His story has been told and retold and distorted so many times that any newcomer book must bring something fresh to market – be it new information or, more often than not, a new interpretation.

When you’ve read as many Putin biographies as I have, reviewing them becomes less about finding nuggets of information and more about narrative. Unless the archives open up or Putin pens a second book, most bios will more or less use the same biographical information. It’s the interpretation of Putin’s story that changes from book to book. Some versions are more thoughtful than others, but each is educational in some way.

After reading this particular biography, however, I think it’s time to revise my thesis.

Putin: His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash by historian and novelist Richard Lourie is a disjointed book, but gradually a general portrait of the Russian president emerges: he’s a bad man who cannot be trusted. Putin is solely responsible for making Russia the aberration of and threat to Western Values™ it is today. Putin’s dictatorial rule has brought Russia nothing but hardship, and it will eventually lead to his – and the country’s – downfall. To accompany apocalyptic claims like these, one would want research cogently organized and interspersed with measured commentary – i.e. a convincing argument. But no, the main points of this 224-page book can be summarized by writing them down on a napkin, or by flipping on CNN. PHD is a tired retread gilded in stylistic flourish bent more on selling an idea than telling a story, and I can find no reason to recommend it.

The phrase of the day is “pattern recognition”, i.e. something I should’ve heeded when cracking open a Putin bio subtitled “His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash”. One can peg many of the issues bedeviling PHD in its preface, “Putin Trumps America”: appeal to age-old cliches [1], sensational writing [2], blatant bias [3], vague language [4], poor organization [5], Kremlinology [6], cherry-picked quotes [7], lazy research [8], and generalization [9]. A preface with this many recognizable problems doesn’t inspire much confidence in the work’s quality as a whole, and as I moved into the biographical part, my suspicions were confirmed.

Lourie’s telling of the Putin story is a rehash of other Putin stories, updated to make Putin look as sinister as possible. It’s not quite on the level of Man Without a Face, though…more Like Man Without a Face Lite. Straightaway from the opening of Chapter 2, we learn that “any portrait of Putin must necessarily be streaky and ambiguous […] his KGB training made him duplicitous and poker-faced […] besides, Russian psychology and behavior always tend to baffle Westerners.” (p. 15) While much of this seems like an excuse for painting in broad strokes, Lourie raises a good point. There are many gaps in Putin’s story, especially regarding childhood and KGB service, and naturally people will want to fill in those holes. But we’re not writing fiction – we’re writing a biography, so we need to draw clear distinction between historical fact and our speculation.

Lourie makes no such attempt. Where other biographies note that Putin’s grandfather worked as a cook for Stalin and leave it at that, Lourie writes that the Putin family had “strong personal connections” to Stalin. Young Putin was “hell-bent for a life of street fights and petty crime” and “street fights were his passion” (p. 19). Absolutely no support is provided for these statements – no source, no footnote, no elaboration. Fights we know about – earlier biographies (including От первого лицо) note that Putin was physically small and easily victimized, and that he got into fights to defend himself. What I don’t recall is evidence that Putin was some kind of brawl enthusiast. The “petty crime” line seems to have been pulled out of thin air too. Why does Lourie make Putin into the aggressor? Because, well, we need an easy explanation for Russia’s aggressive behavior in Ukraine and Syria. This might seem like nitpicking to you, but as a person whose every day involves use and misuse of various natural and artificial languages, I know the importance of diction to writing. A single word or group of words can change the entire meaning of a line. I’m no biographer, but I’d think that when we chronicle others’ lives, we should control our language so as to remain as close to fact as possible. Or at the very least if you’re going to use sensational language, you should tell readers that it’s your interpretation.

(PHD further blurs the line between fact and comment through the use of vague phrases “some say”, “experts say”, “most certainly”, “probably”, and “no doubt”. The book has no problem with slipping into Putin’s head to tell readers What Putin Wants, and unsurprisingly, he always wants the first, most cartoonishly evil thing that comes to mind. Readers can also rest assured that whenever something negative happens in the Putin story, when there is ambiguity over whether Putin was involved or responsible, when each theory has equally scant evidence supporting it, Lourie will promote whichever one casts Putin in the worst light. But hey, as far as I know, that’s not the exception in Western okoloputinskaya literatura, it’s the rule.)

According to Lourie, the most important influence on Putin was (surprise, surprise) the KGB, with all its sinister connotation. Not a humble Leningrad upbringing, not judo philosophy, not Soviet patriotic education, not a combination of the four. After all, why bother creating a more well-thought-out version of the Putin story when you can appeal to popular conceptions and fears? The author then must establish the KGB’s – and by extension Putin’s – evilness by bringing up its complicity in Stalin’s crimes, and how ex-KGB agents see themselves as victors/victims/inadvertent villains but not oppressors. Because we need an enemy, dammit!

Included are several tangential stories about the KGB and events not directly connected to or influencing Putin. They are either here to further illustrate the KGB’s villainy or to contextualize Putin’s rise in KGB history. If it’s the latter, the connection remains tenuous at best. Lourie claims Putin might’ve worked in the 5th Directorate (responsible for suppressing dissent) (p. 30), and got his “unorthodox ideas” from confiscated dissident literature. Then he says it’s not important – “no matter what private sentiments he had, Putin would not have deviated an iota from KGB policy.” The reader is left in the dark as to why – was Putin a patriot? A careerist? Naive? Or was he really that “evil”?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that some parts of the biography were handled well – in particular, the section on Putin’s KGB training and work with Directorate S in Dresden is an interesting read, and Lourie seems to have turned down the sensational writing and psychobabble. PHD also deserves credit for detailing the hardships experienced by the average Russian in the 1990s without frills. Still, things occasionally get partisan: Lourie quotes liberally from memoirs by defected ex-KGB officers when describing secret training and how mediocre of a spy Putin was, but when Sergei Usoltsev describes Putin favorably in Сослуживец, “the book … must be taken with several grains of salt, since KGB agents … are liars by trade.”

In the end, though, those segments are merely two grains of interest in a sea (well, 75 pages) of chaff covered more adequately (or at least covered) in other Putin biographies. Even the narrative feels worn – as I mentioned before, PHD’s anti-Putin take is similar to the one pushed in Man Without a Face and Fragile Empire, only without the bats**t insanity of the former or the heavy cynicism of the latter. This biography of Putin is a quick read, with colorful, lively prose, but it’s hollow, hollow, hollow.

In between Putin and his downfall lie six chapters concerning various topics in Russian politics. They are self-contained and read like essays grafted into PHD with minimal edits. None of these chapters tackles its topic in depth, but in fairness, each topic is so complex that it requires a full book on its own – space not even a strong Putin biography could provide. They are mostly here to set up the “crussialism” argument advertised in the title. A more logical use of this space would’ve examined Putin’s terms or style of governance in historical perspective instead of skimming off whatever appeared in the newsfeed that morning. I have no substantive commentary to make on these chapters, so I’ll breeze through them and let quotations do most of the talking.

The Russia Putin Inherited and Its Spiritual Ills. This chapter describes the losses incurred after the Soviet Union’s collapse: in territory, people, economic heft, resources, and identity. According to Lourie, Russia’s existence is always at stake: “it is the default position of the Russian mind.” Some selective quoting from former legislator Vladimir Rhyzkov, an anonymous journalist, and an anonymous museum curator: “under Putin’s police state we are headed for another Time of Troubles, or state disintegration”, “unless Russia creates a harmonious society within five generations, Russia will perish”, “will Russia survive until 2024?” (p. 83). The chapter closes by saying that Russia currently has no icons (values, images, ideas) that had in the past helped it overcome invasions/revolutions/its own tyrants and reinvent itself.

Oil: A Wasting Asset. A rushed history of Putin v. Khodorkovsky. Description of the perils of a resource-based economy. Lourie says the ideal moment for Putin to have begun diversifying the economy was around 2004, “after the country had been stabilized and the economy revitalized […] plus, his domestic rivals had been safely disposed of by this point” (p. 121). As of 2013, the state depends on gas and oil sale for 41% of its revenue. Putin had his chance and blew it.

[…] transform Russia from a petrostate into a sleeker, smarter 21st century economy, one that was knowledge-based. Such an economy would have required a more highly educated people and would have created greater wealth among a greater number. And that dynamic combination of conditions – education, wealth, the sense of being a stakeholder – could have been the matrix out of which, by its own mysterious laws of development, a new sense of national identity could have emerged, delivering Russia from the zombie-like state it has been in since the fall of the USSR. (p. 124)

Putin didn’t do that because the transition from petrostate to modern market economy would’ve cost him his power (p. 124).

The Heart of the Matter: Ukraine. The purpose of this chapter is to set up Russia as an imperialist, expansionist nation.

The Mongols left the Russians with a culture of invasion. The driving force of Russian civilization became the avoidance of and preparation for the next invasion. This has induced suspicion and conservatism, xenophobia, paranoia, and an imperialism that seeks to buffer the heartland with as much territory as possible. (p. 131)

Ukraine is just one such imperial adventure.

The lasting consequence of the Ukrainian adventure was the revelation that Russia is a Darwinian society that will not play by the West’s rules because, by its very nature, it cannot. (p. 148)

Russia’s Mecca: The Arctic. The Arctic is rich in raw materials, and Russia’s trying to claim it. Be afraid.

And what if the U.N. rejects Russia’s claim? Then, given the right desperate economic conditions, it will quickly become apparent that for Russia the Arctic is not so much a Mecca as an undersea Crimea that must be seized and annexed in defiance of all law, even at the risk of war. (p. 169)

Manifesting Destiny: Asia. Putin is lying when he says the Sino-Russian relationship has “not a single irritating element”. Demographobia in the Far East, Russian brain drain to China. Lourie says both Russia and China are content with the current arrangement but then hints that China may one day begin aiding the Siberian equivalent of Donetsk People’s Republic. Russia doesn’t have the economy to support a sustained presence in Asia (p. 177). Putin said “The Kazakhs never had any statehood” in 2014 (p. 177) – just like he said Ukraine wasn’t a real country! Be afraid!!! Then, an exercise in fearmongering as Lourie delineates Russian plans to annex parts of Kazakhstan (p. 188) and become part of a Triumvirate ruling the world (U.S., China, Russia) – without any evidence that such plans exist.

How Vladimir Putin Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet. Putin hates the Internet because it is so hard to control, but he’s learning how to use it to further his own ends via surveillance laws at home and trolls and hackers abroad.

By its very nature, the Internet is everything Putin dislikes. […] The Internet decentralizes, Putin recentralizes. The Internet eludes control and so Putin prefers television, which is easy to manipulate. […] Television is real, large, physical, the Internet insubstantial, somehow gay. (p. 193)

Putin thinks the internet is gay. You heard it here first, folks.

In the final fourteen pages of PHD, a chapter titled “Russia Without Putin, Putin Without Russia”, readers get many things: An ominous Kasparov quote about how “Putin will die in the Kremlin, but when and how nobody knows”. Idle speculation about why Putin disappeared in March of 2015. Opinion as to why Putin hasn’t groomed a successor yet (“he would have considered that both premature and dangerous. […] He would of course have gathered or fabricated kompromat on all his potential successors.” (p. 215)) Who the likely candidates are: Khodorkovsky and Navalny – not because they have much influence or support in Russia among the voting-age population, but because they are the West’s preferred choices. (Oh, and Sergei Ivanov – that doesn’t date this book at all.) Speculation about the source of Putin’s immense wealth (of course taking Putin’s $200bil fortune as a given, despite lack of solid evidence that it even exists). How Putin’s successor might try him as a criminal. Where Putin might go if he had to leave the country.

What readers don’t get is an explanation of how his downfall and Russia’s collapse will come about.

This book doesn’t even deliver on its main selling point!

PHD tries to wrap things up in the final paragraph, saying “because it did not involve the people enough, the House of Putin will, like the House of the Tsars and the House of the Communists, sooner or later come crashing down. When and with how much suffering is anyone’s guess.” (p. 224) However, it makes little effort to tie together the various argumentative threads established in previous chapters. And because those arguments were built on such superficial grounds to begin with, the connection between Russia’s present condition and how it will lead to Putin and Russia’s demise remains vague. Not even Putin’s departure is thought-out. There’s discussion of some rumors and then, magically, he’s gone. Всё. And since he wasn’t poisoned on an official visit to the Bear Autonomous Oblast in 2014, as some more…esoteric retellings of the Putin story suggest [10], I’m forced to conclude that one day during some meeting, Minister X will notice that Putin’s trademark bored expression looks slightly more distant than usual; eyes less intense, but somehow colder, and then…

Perhaps this was intentional. Perhaps the conclusion was kept vague to provide Lourie an easy out if, for one reason or another, Russia doesn’t collapse, or Putin retires and lives out the rest of his days peacefully. Prognostication is a difficult business; that we know. But still, come on, you want to sell this crussialism narrative so badly that you put it in the subtitle of a Putin biography, but then barely address it in-text? There’s no excuse. That’s a bait-and-switch. PHD might as well have a one-sentence conclusion chapter: “Russia will collapse because…well, Putin’s a bad man, he’s run the country badly, and all bad things come to a violent end, right?” Because that’s the extent of the argument. It’s utterly unconvincing to an experienced reader who knows what to expect of good analytical material, and utterly unhelpful for newcomers to Russia-watching.

At the end of the day, that’s the takeaway from PHD: it’s an unhelpful, I daresay pointless read. Tangential, yet desperate to be topical. Specific in promise and vague in delivery. It presents old information and old narratives under a sheen of new words. It doesn’t deepen your understanding because that’s not its goal. Were I rating Putin: His Downfall on its ability to take advantage of the market demand for crussialism, then it would get the full five stars. But we’re talking about Putin biographies, and this is as shallow as it gets. I’m not sure whether to call it ‘Fragile Empire Lite’ or ‘Bait-and-Switch: The Book’, but regardless, Putin: His Downfall adds little to the existing body of literature on the Russian president.

Putin: His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash by Richard Lourie. Pub. 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books. Hardcover, 272pp. ISBN13: 9780312538088.

Footnotes

*A search on Goodreads using the keyword “Putin” turned up over 30 Putin biographies – that includes all books for which I could establish an ISBN or ASIN, including self-published Kindle books.

1 – “until quite recently Russia was an exotic country, distant, huge, both more brutal and cultured – Stalin at the Bolshoi…” (p. ix)

2 – Rather than a proper introduction to this Putin biography (or Putinism, or Putinology), the preface is dedicated to alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election – an event still unfolding and with an incomplete set of evidence.

3 – Lourie states with absolute certainty that the Russians interfered, despite scant and [IMHO] unconvincing public evidence.

4 – “probably”, “most certainly”, “some say”.

5 – This preface reads like an op-ed.

6 – Defined here as claiming intimate insider’s knowledge of the upper echelons of Russian power and/or presenting one’s interpretation of what goes on inside the Kremlin and Putin’s head as fact. “There are many reasons why America is constantly outwitted by Putin. American categories of thought about Russia are too neat and clean. To the American mind government, crime, business, and the secret police are four quite different things. In Russia they easily shade into one another and it could be argued that at various times, Putin has had his hand in all of the above. Another reason is that the U.S., for all its shortcomings, remains a country of laws while Russia is a more Darwinian society where the law of the jungle, or, as the Russians call it, the law of the wolf, tends to prevail.

For Putin the game of power has only three rules – attain, maintain, retain – and all the rest is nonsense and pretense. Putin views American lack of historical memory not only as the naivete of a young culture, but a convenient means for eluding responsibility […] In Putin’s KGB-conditioned worldview, there are very few spontaneous events and the few there are immediately coopted and exploited by the quickest afoot. Someone is always behind everything, every organization is a front.” (p. xi)

7 – Lourie selectively quotes Clinton partisans and the House Intelligence Committee speaking in support of the “Russian interference” theory.

8 – Defined here as basing one’s interpretation on someone else’s interpretation rather than on underlying hard evidence, data, etc.

9 – Simplifies Russia and the Russian government to Putin and ascribes its actions to him personally; equates dealing with any Russian millionaire to dealing with the Russian government.

10 – Don’t know what work I’m referencing? Good. That’s because I wrote it. (a comics script.)