Hill, Fiona and Gaddy, Clifford G. Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 580 invitation for additional analyses, either in the form of other balanced memoirs or well-sustained scholarly contributions. School of Social Sciences Branislav Radeljić University of East London Hill, Fiona and Gaddy, Clifford G. Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. New and expanded edition. Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 2015. x + 533 pp. Chronology. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $32.00 (paperback). Vladimir Putin has been the dominant politician in Russia for over a decade and half, yet he remains an enigma. People project on to him their aspirations and hopes, and increasingly when it comes to Western commentators, their fears as well. How to make sense of a leader who is in his distinctive way a man for all seasons, someone who senses a situation and who works intuitively, yet who is guided by some powerful convictions and compulsions? Hill and Gaddy answer many of these questions, with a sure-footed agility to avoid being trapped into stereotypes while avoiding getting dragged into polemics. This achievement is all the more remarkable given the way that Putin has been demonized in the two years since the first version of the book came out in 2013. The controversial events in Ukraine, accompanied by the transfer of Crimea to Russian jurisdiction, have changed the terms of discussion — Putin has been transformed from an enigma into a monster. This edition of the book came out too soon to capture the debate over Russian intervention in Syria, yet it provides a solid framework to understand the emotions and imperatives that drove Russia to enter the bombing campaign on 30 September 2015. Much of the new material in the expanded edition, which has grown in volume by about 140 pages, is devoted to foreign policy and the various forms of Putin’s engagement with international issues. The core of the first part of the book remains on what the first edition had done so brilliantly, that is to outline Putin’s various personae. The book has lost Strobe Talbott’s rather controversial Foreword to the first version, and instead we are now plunged straight into ‘Putinworld’, with the first chapter returning to the eternal question: ‘who is Mr Putin?’. Hill and Gaddy give many examples where information is spun ‘in a confusing manner so that it can be interpreted in multiple ways’ (p. 13). It is this protean quality to the man and his age that is captured so well in this book. After a concise discussion of Boris El´tsin’s 1990s and what the authors call ‘the time of troubles’, we enter fully into the world of Putin. REVIEWS 581 This is a multi-faceted experience, in which the authors explore what they identify as the six constitutive facets of his political character. As a statist, Putin believes that the country in the late Soviet period and during the ‘transition’ in the 1990s became prey to disintegrative tendencies, and for him the state is the only instrument that can restore coherence and direction to the polity. There is interesting discussion of the various antecedents of Putin’s statism, notably in the works of the constitutional lawyer Boris Chicherin and Valery Zorkin, still head of the Constitutional Court after a career spanning Russia’s entire post-Communist years. The history man gives greater depth to examination of Putin’s statism, with the discussion in this case focusing on Imperial Russia’s great statesman and advocate of ‘authoritarian modernization’, Petr Stolypin, who Putin has quoted on more than one occasion. Putin remains fascinated by history, and takes a close interest in Russian historiography. Despite some controversial remarks about Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Putin is too good a historian to be trapped into any simplistic and dogmatic understanding of Russia’s past. Putin the survivalist draws on his precarious family background, with his father and mother enduring the 900-day siege of Leningrad and the death of their first child. The street-fighting years of Putin’s boyhood and youth in the mean streets of St Petersburg are well-brought out as shaping his character today. Putin’s involvement in the various scandals during his employment in the mayor’s...