Putin's People
How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West
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4.3 • 48 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller | A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Named a best book of the year by The Economist | Financial Times | New Statesman | The Telegraph
"[Putin's People] will surely now become the definitive account of the rise of Putin and Putinism." —Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic
"This riveting, immaculately researched book is arguably the best single volume written about Putin, the people around him and perhaps even about contemporary Russia itself in the past three decades." —Peter Frankopan, Financial Times
Interference in American elections. The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it?
In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche—a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad.
Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach—and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match—Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.
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The Soviet secret police reconstituted itself as the corrupt masters of post-communist Russia according to Belton's sprawling debut expos . A former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, Belton styles Putin's presidency as an assault on the new class of oligarchs who had privatized Russia's state-owned companies in the 1990s and foolishly supported his Machiavellian rise. Using bogus criminal prosecutions, Putin and his former KGB comrades stripped the oligarchs of their oil companies, banks, and media corporations; exiled or imprisoned them; and occasionally murdered people who got in the way. Putin's cronies then looted the businesses they appropriated to enrich themselves or fund Russia's military adventures in the Ukraine and subversion of foreign elections. Drawing on extensive interviews with Kremlin insiders and dispossessed oligarchs such as Sergei Pugachev and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Belton paints a richly detailed portrait of the Putin regime's tangled conspiracies and thefts. Sometimes her more explosive claims charges that Russia's FSB police agency was behind Chechen terrorist attacks, for instance cite dubious sources and insinuate more than they prove. Still, Belton gives a lucid, page-turning account of the sinister mix of authoritarian state power and gangster lawlessness that rules Russia.
