This book is a great antidote to the Karen Dawisha/Frontline hysteria that’s been making the rounds.

If you want to know more of my thoughts on the Dawisha and Frontline issues, please see:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Frontline-Slings-Mud-at-Pu-by-Natylie-Baldwin-International_Other_Propaganda_Putin-150205-114.html

I use Lynch’s book, among other sources, to buttress some of my critique of Dawisha and the Frontline program, “Putin’s Way,” which violated several of Frontline’s own stated journalistic guidelines.

Lynch’s political biography of Putin is a sober and scholarly analysis of Putin the man, the current political conditions of the Russian Federation and the relationship between the two.

Lynch’s assessment of Putin is that, in addition to having conservative views on honor and loyalty, he is extremely intelligent and recognizes (and is even open to) many aspects of western democracy on an intellectual level; but Putin also has certain psychological facets to his personality that make him lean toward control, particularly in times of crisis.

I think this is a reasonable assessment. Putin is indeed preoccupied with stability. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and subsequent chaos that enveloped Russia during the 1990’s made an indelible impression on Putin, as it did on most Russians.

I also think it would be fair to say that most leaders would have some of those same tendencies if faced with the challenges that Russia has had in the past two decades, including a lone superpower overrun by neo-Wilsonian and neoconservative thinking that continues to move a hostile military alliance right up to Russia’s borders, funnels money to opposition figures that want to topple the Russian government – even going so far as having an ambassador (Michael McFaul) that actively supported the opposition in violation of diplomatic protocol, and an oligarchy inherited from the previous leadership – some of whom bristled at having any constraints placed on their behavior and continued to collude with hostile powers to cause trouble (Khodorkovsky and the late Berezovsky).

What also has to be kept in mind is that Russia is trying to find its way in the midst of many challenges with no historical experience with democratic institutions prior to Gorbachev’s brief rule.

Contrary to Dawisha’s mishmash of unverified sources and discredited theories, Lynch describes Putin’s relative honesty when he was working as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 90’s:

“For much of this time, given (mayor Anatoliy) Sobchak’s frequent and protracted absences and his preoccupation with national affairs, Putin assumed the functions of acting mayor. He supervised the drafting and implementation of countless international business deals and policy reforms. These transactions did not always go according to plan, and no doubt many profited handsomely from Putin’s admitted inexperience in these matters. During his attempt to establish municipal oversight over a series of casinos, for example, the city was cheated. In another case, the city was fleeced for $120 million for two shipments of cooking oil. Although during this period his mother bought a choice apartment at an exceptionally low price at a city auction, Putin didn’t seem to enrich himself personally. In the one specific public charge of corruption that was brought against him, Putin sued in court for slander and won….”

This assessment is confirmed by other sources as noted in my article on Dawisha and Frontline.

Lynch also details Putin’s career in the KGB and how his actual job, throughout most of it, was as a low-level analyst in Dresden. Disenchanted with the agency, Putin voluntarily quit the KGB in the early 1990’s, not long after passing up a potential promotion to “the headquarters of the KGB’s foreign intelligence operations,” opting to keep his family in St. Petersburg where they had secure housing, which would have been difficult to obtain in Moscow.

In the latter chapters, Lynch sums up that, contrary to the hysterical and propagandistic statements thrown around by many western politicians and pundits, Russia is not presently a dictatorship or an autocracy, but that the governance in that vast country is far more nuanced and complex:

“For all the impressive aura of authority surrounding his presidency, Putin was no dictator. Nor was his affinity for authoritarian rule similar to the unbridled totalitarianism of Soviet days. Substantial sectors of the economy remained in private hands, including scores of billions of dollars in liquid capital in private banks abroad. A considerable public forum existed for debate on public issues, though much more so in the press than on television. Furthermore, Russians had the right to travel abroad pretty much as they pleased; availability of funds, not political considerations, was their main constraint. Religious adherents of Russia’s historical religions of Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism were free to practice their faith more or less as they pleased. Putin’s Russia, measured by any Cold War standard, represented impressive progress from the Soviet period. (p. 88)

….In foreign affairs, Russia has no ideologically based conflicts with the outside world and has pursued a mainly pragmatic diplomacy, not always successful, aimed at maximizing Russian revenues and minimizing Russia’s enemies.” (p. 133)

In terms of the legal system, Lynch confirms what I’ve heard from other credible sources – that there is a dual track in some limited circumstances:

“In the overwhelming majority of the millions of legal cases that are handled in Russia each year, the outcomes are decided on the basis of codified law as interpreted by judges and without political pressure.  This situation changes, however, when the political and economic interests of the Kremlin are involved. ” (p. 84)

I do have a couple of quibbles with the book which prevented me from giving it 5 starts. The first is that it would have been useful for Lynch to have provided some analysis and discussion of two historical Russian figures that are known to be influential to Putin’s political thinking: Ivan Ilyn (1) and Pyotr Stolypin (2). Both were anti-Revolutionary reformers and/or political philosophers who were interested in advancing Russia toward a developed nation based on the rule of law via gradual and thoughtful reform.

I suspect the reason that this was not done was due to the tendency to view and judge both Putin and Russia through a Western lens with the implicit assumption that the way the West does things represents the supreme way of doing things, best summed up by Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that “There is no alternative (TINA).”

This attitude was even more prominent in Angus Roxburgh’s The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia, in which Roxburgh’s Western bias at times bordered on the patronizing. However, he was more even-handed than many others and provided much valuable behind-the-scenes insight of Russia’s relations with the West from 2000 to 2012. I recommend that book, along with this one, for those interested in serious political biographies of Putin.

The other quibble with Lynch’s book was the occasional use of non-credible sources like Freedom House which gets 80% of its funding from the US government via the National Endowment for Democracy and, as I have written elsewhere, has a tendency to assess a country’s level of freedom, not based on consistent and objective criteria, but based on whether the country is an ally of the US and/or receptive to US corporate interests.

1)Ivan Ilyn:

https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/against-russia/#more-434

2) Pyotr Stolypin:

http:/russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/politics-and-society/pyotr-stolypin/

Karen Dawisha is not the most credible source on Russia or its president. Making a documentary program with no other academic or journalistic experts on Russia, government officials or business people is short sighted. Not performing due diligence as to the dubious claims she and the handful of others on Frontline make smacks of propaganda.

For full article, go to:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Frontline-Slings-Mud-at-Pu-by-Natylie-Baldwin-International_Other_Propaganda_Putin-150205-114.html

Note:  I have emailed a copy of the full article to Frontline.   Will update with any response I receive.

I have admittedly not yet read Karen Dawisha’s new book, Putin’s Kleptocracy; however, a few things about the author, including her own words written recently in attempts to plug the book, raise some red flags and make me wonder if it would be worth my time – or anyone’s – to read it.

On December 4^th, Dawisha wrote a piece for the International edition of the New York Times called “Bad Mannered Russians in the West.” It essentially argues, as does her book presumably, that Russia is a hopelessly brutal and corrupt nation and that it really got this way under Putin’s leadership. It also accuses Putin himself of being very corrupt.

The first red flag I noticed was during a basic background search on Ms. Dawisha. A previous work of hers was touted by pathological Russia-hater Zbigniew Brzezinski in a review published at Foreign Affairs. If Zbig thinks Dawisha’s work, which focuses on Eastern European studies, is good, then this tells you something about Dawisha’s tone and attitude in her writing. Not one positive word will be uttered about any Russian government that attempts to be independent of Washington or Zbig’s Grand Imperial Strategy as outlined in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard.   And certainly, nothing remotely positive will be contemplated about Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the warped Brzezinski/Neocon/Mainstream Media world, if Putin were to pull an old lady who was about to get hit by a bus to safety, it would be spun as attempted murder by that sinister ex-KGB agent with the steely blue eyes. Any observation to the contrary would be met with “who are you going to be believe, us or your eyes?” And if one were to have the audacity to believe their own eyes, then they would simply be accused of being paid by the Kremlin or of being one of Putin’s many bedmates when he isn’t rolling in the hay with that famous Olympic gymnast during his numerous hours of free time. After all, it doesn’t take much time and energy to run that vast nation that bridges Europe and Asia.

But I digress…

There were indeed a few other causes for concern related to Ms. Dawisha’s overall credibility when I read her NYT piece. For example, in the fourth paragraph she states:

The market increasingly recognizes the risk of dealing with Russian companies, the largest of which is Gazprom. Despite having the world’s largest net profits, Gazprom was trading at one-third the stock market valuation of Exxon Mobil, due to what is widely regarded as rampant and Kremlin-directed corruption.

This allegation is particularly interesting when one considers that Transparency International’s most recent report states that Russian companies, Gazprom and Rosneft, scored higher than Exxon Mobil as well as Apple and Google, which are notorious for having poor scores. Furthermore, the report recognized a consistent upward trend in transparency and good corporate governance for the two Russian state-run fossil fuel companies.   Is Transparency International a tool of the Kremlin now, Ms. Dawisha?

In the seventh paragraph, the author says:

Mr. Putin has said he wants an end to corruption and bureaucratic bullying. If he is serious, this would be good news for Russia, as it might show that he is actually willing to lay down laws that everyone will have to abide by. But thus far he has only increased the power of the state at home, while treating the West like an a la carte menu – with public goods of his own choosing to be freely consumed. What he doesn’t understand, however, is that “the West” is a prix fixe menu: Its values and obligations must be consumed along with its pleasures.

It’s hard to know where to even begin with this one.   First of all, being treated like an a la carte menu – with public goods of one’s own choosing to be freely consumed — sounds like an awful good description of how the West, particularly the US, viewed Russia’s resources during the 1990’s when Jeffrey Sachs and his cabal of neo-liberal carpetbaggers from the Harvard School of Economics colluded with a few Russian predators to plunder Russia’s assets, the proceeds of which were funneled out of Russia and into foreign banks by the new crop of oligarchs, while the Russian people were left with an inflation rate of 2500% at its height, loss of life savings, food deprivation and mass poverty. Millions of Russians simply did not survive the decade as alcoholism and violent crime skyrocketed.

While Russia is not yet Utopia, under Putin’s governance, the oligarchs were brought to heel, made to pay taxes and actually contribute something to Russia, there are budget surpluses, no IMF debt, low unemployment, massive investments in infrastructure, a poverty rate cut in half and wages that have quintupled. Is it any wonder that he is so popular among the Russian people?

One of the things Putin did in order to facilitate this set of reforms and improvements to the lives of many Russians was taking the fire sale sign down from Russia. The elites of the West, especially the US and Britain, have never forgiven him for this. No longer able to penetrate Russia at will, the western elites have bided their time, waiting to exact revenge and have their way once again with that beautiful resource-rich nation.

But in Dawisha’s NYT narrative, the horrible conditions of the 1990’s are not mentioned. I guess she’d like everyone to implicitly believe that the decade of Yeltsin’s rule represented a paragon of democracy with all Russians dancing and singing along to REM’s “Shiny Happy People.” And then Vladimir “Satan” Putin came along and installed the oligarch system himself, personally stole everything in sight and made all Russians cower in a dark corner, deprived of the profound political and cultural insights of Pussy Riot.

As for the assertion that Putin has done little to nothing about corruption, the author clearly doesn’t keep up with current Russian politics or is intentionally withholding pertinent facts. In the past year, an official portal or registry of all government inspections has been implemented where the public can look up all relevant details with respect to inspections on businesses.   If one is informed about the nature of corruption in Russia, they will know that 90% of corruption occurs at the local level and has a history all the way back to the Czarist era when local officials were paid tribute in exchange for getting things done. Time will tell how this policy works out.

As for Putin’s personal integrity, I admittedly don’t have access to his personal bank accounts, but a credible source has told me that, during a meeting with the then unknown bureaucrat named Vladimir Putin from whom she needed approval for a business development proposal in the early 1990’s, Putin made a lasting impression due to the fact that he was one of the few Russian bureaucrats that she’d encountered who did not ask for a bribe or any other kind of favor during the interaction. This fact was confirmed by many other people she came to know in St. Petersburg who had to register a business during his time there. If Putin wasn’t on the take while he was relatively poor and living in a small apartment with his wife, two daughters and mother, why would he be on the take now when he has a much higher salary?

The point here is that, just from the bits and pieces I’m getting about Dawisha’s work, I’m deeply skeptical of her claims. Much of what is offered as her strongest points are highly questionable. In a predictably glowing review of Dawisha’s book by none other than paid hack and Russophobe Anne Applebaum in the New York Review of Books, it is conceded in the 8^th paragraph:

To tell this story, Dawisha uses many sources, including the evidence presented in several major court cases, a number of which fizzled out for political reasons; material collected by Russian and European investigative reporters, some of which has now vanished from the Web; and Russian legal journals, many of which are now out of print.

Well, gee, isn’t it convenient that this information is not available to be verified? Continuing on:

As noted, some of what she digs up has already been described elsewhere, not only in Masha Gessen’s emotive account of Putin’s rise to power, The Man Without a Face (2012), but also in Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill’s Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s Kremlin Rising (2005).

Masha Gessen writes for the Moscow Times, and for any other outlet that will publish her drivel. Her stock in trade is her passionate hatred of Putin and anything that is not represented by the Liberals who don’t have much traction among the Russian population. I have written elsewhere about Peter Baker’s attitude toward Russia and Putin. So Dawisha’s work ultimately sounds like a lot of innuendo along with rehashed chaff that’s already been published.

It should also be noted that Dawisha’s book was ultimately dropped by its original British publisher due to concerns over libel laws. Considering the fact that Britain isn’t exactly fond of Putin and his government and has repeated – like a good little doggie – the worst of Washington’s unsubstantiated and reckless claims about the Ukraine crisis, why wouldn’t they just go ahead and publish it? Unless, of course, there were real concerns about the credibility of the claims?

*Update:  In late 2015, John Batchelor interviewed Ms. Dawisha on his radio program.  While airing her claims, Dawisha used so many qualifiers and weasel words as to render what she was saying completely meaningless.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the interview:

*Dawisha’s claim (approx. 5 minutes, 15 seconds):  Putin came to the attention of higher up KGB officials due to his performance.  This is contradicted by Allen Lynch’s political biography where he states that officials higher up in the KGB did not seem to be aware of Putin and characterized his time in E. Germany as being a mid-level analyst.  Dawisha: “I think he probably was involved in…” Probably?

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/bad-mannered-russians-in-the-west.html?_r=0

2. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/18/how-he-and-his-cronies-stole-russia/

3. http://rbth.com/business/2014/11/11/rosneft_and_gazprom_overtake_google_and_apple_in_corporate_transpare_41307.html

In the past month, comedienne Chelsea Handler – a supporter and friend of Hillary Clinton – engaged in a cheap publicity stunt by posting a photo of herself topless astride a horse in a spoof of Vladimir Putin.

Citing the “sexism” of Putin, Handler is admittedly pimping for her friend Hillary, whom Putin referred to as “weak” in an interview with French journalists earlier this year. Putin’s insult was downright mild compared to Hillary’s earlier comparisons of Putin to Hitler – a ludicrous and pernicious comment due to the fact that over 25 million Russians perished, including Putin’s older brother who fell ill and died during the siege of Leningrad, in beating back the real Hitler’s fighters in WWII.

But in supporting Clinton, Handler is also giving her support to all the death and destruction that Clinton’s policies have contributed to in Iraq (Hillary still defends her vote for this illegal war based on lies), Libya (Hillary was caught on camera gloating at the news of Qaddafi’s torture and murder by rebel forces – another war that was based on lies according to the Belfer Center) among other unapologetically militarist policies.

Furthermore, when it comes to hurling accusations of sexism, perhaps it would do Ms. Handler well to actually inform herself of the country that the leader she is criticizing presides over and the conditions for women in that country.  As two examples, women hold more management positions in Russia than in any other nation — far more than any western nation;  they also receive 78 weeks of paid family leave.  Meanwhile, in the US, women get zip.

At the end of the day in Ms. Handler’s bizarre and ill-informed world, Putin riding shirtless on a horse and casting aspersions upon her hawkish chum is more offensive than the death, torture, maiming, terror and destabilization that Hillary Clinton’s policies have actually wrought on hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people.

I think this tells us all we need to know about Ms. Handler.

1)  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2841754/Chelsea-Handler-compares-chest-Vladimir-Putin-s-tells-Today-host-Karl-Stefanovic-bigger-perkier.html

2)  http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23387/lessons_from_libya.html

3)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y

4)  http://mic.com/articles/84601/the-countries-with-the-highest-number-of-female-executives-are-not-the-ones-you-d-expect

5)  http://www.buzzfeed.com/laraparker/this-is-what-paid-maternity-leave-looks-like-around-the-worl

For years, the western corporate media has engaged in a propaganda campaign to poison people’s minds about who Vladimir Putin is, what he says and what he does.   For example, the often trotted out quote about the fall of the Soviet Union representing the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century is a deliberate misquote.   If one reads the English transcript of his “state of the union” speech in 2005 (available at http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2005/04/25/2031_type70029type82912_87086.shtml), one can see for oneself that what he actually said and what Western media and politicians claim he said are night and day.

While conducting research on a book about the Ukraine crisis, I have read countless speeches and interview transcripts of Putin in their entirety and can honestly say that the level of distortion and misinformation leveled against him in the West is breathtaking.

When I began this research, I did not have a solid opinion either way about Putin, other than heightened curiosity after his diplomatic judo in helping to prevent the illegal “shock and awe” of another sovereign nation, this time against Syria, by the American juggernaut.

My conclusion about Putin’s thinking after reviewing and analyzing his words and actions, included in my manuscript, was the following:

For any intellectually honest and independent analyst who has studied Putin’s words and actions over the course of years, it is apparent that he is attempting to gradually and methodically raise the standard of living for the Russian people. It is also apparent that he views stability, both within Russia and in the outside world that Russia must co-exist in, as crucial and that the most reliable way to achieve and maintain stability is through a multi-polar world, international law with a strengthened UN as the arbiter, and more equitable development.

Putin’s most recent speech at the annual Valdai gathering in Sochi, hailed by many independent analysts and commentators (by independent I mean those without an axe to grind and not being paid to tow some party line), including Mikhail Gorbachev, as his best speech ever, has only confirmed my own analysis.

Here is a link to the transcript of his speech followed by the Q&A afterward, which was also quite good, provided by The Vineyard of the Saker blog — a very informative independent blog that I recommend taking a cruise around:

http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/10/putins-speech-at-valdai-club-full.html

-Natylie