Putin's Kleptocracy

It’s all about the money. Behind the nationalist bluster, the Putin regime is made up of a collection of crooks and cronies embezzling, taking bribes and demanding payoffs with enthusiastic greed. Although one can question her assumption that this was the plan from the beginning – Putin is more an opportunist than a planner – it’s a meticulous and scholarly exploration of how a country can be stolen from under the noses of its own people.

If an international criminal court ever decides to throw the book at Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, then Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy is the book the prosecutor would pick up. Dawisha has followed up every trace of Putin’s activity since the KGB was officially dissolved and given, with varying certainty and assurance, the dates, the locations, associates, and outcomes of some twenty years of criminal activity — hit-and-run car accidents, fraud, misappropriation of national and international funds, chicanery, grand larceny, false accusation, torture, murder, war crimes, terrorism. The British reader could not for some years buy Dawisha’s book; in the UK it… show more.