I recently finished Karen Dawisha’s remarkable new book Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (Simon and Schuster, 2014), a deeply researched book on the power circle that congealed around Putin in St Petersburg and moved with him to Moscow, eventually assuming power in mid-1999 and the Presidency in 2000. The book is not a Domhoff style ‘power structure’ analysis for Russia so much as it is an ‘inner circle’ analysis, focused on key figures rather than institutions. It revisits many well known episodes in Putin’s career rise — covered already in English by Martha Gessen and Hill & Gaddy — and provides even greater depth of analysis without ever being strident. In broad institutional terms the power nexus that Putin is at the center features the siloviki, corrupt politicians, and enterprising businessmen, those connected to organized crime and those with relationships to it. The lines blur here considerably as it is broadly alleged the FSB largely controlled organized crime, and it had telling relationships to certain oligarchs and politicians. Needless to say, the book presents a dark and disturbing look at the group of people who were empowered as Putin transitioned to power in Russia. It is the portrait of a kleptocratic elite, and a Putin system that Dawisha terms an “authoritarian kleptocracy.”
See Dawisha discuss the book here and here. As one respondent at the Wilson Center presentation remarked Russian Studies becomes Criminology Studies with this book.
The book’s website with many documents and resources, including a useful chronology of events in Russian politics, is here.
Most of Dawisha’s book is taken up with the rise of Putin and his first 100 days. Towards the end there is a discussion of foreign policy, with the theme of capital accumulation opportunities and dynamics to the fore. This aspect I found inadequate (in her defense this was the conclusion to the book). Thus, for example, the August War is read in terms of South Ossetia as a criminal outpost, not a territory but a counterfeiting hub for the siloviki. The Crimean annexation is read within the terms of discussion about desired and owned property on the Crimean coast. The foreign policy of an ‘authoritarian kleptocracy’ in other words is a patrimonial geopolitics, with the national interest indistinguishable from the personal property interests and desires of Putin. This does not convince.
A more compelling theme is the centrality of geopolitical spectacles to regime legitimacy from the very outset of Putin’s rule. Dawisha argues that the Dagestani raid by Basayev was a ‘false flag’ operation, initiated by his FSB handlers. She also is convinced the summer 1999 apartment bombings in Russia were the work of the FSB. Thus, the argument goes, the regime was born kleptocracic and anti-democratic and used from the very outset ‘active measures’ to create spectacles of violent crises in order to shore up its power. In this sense, then, Crimea and Eastern Ukraine do not represent a break in Russian foreign policy but continuity with the past. Yet, this line of argument misses much also.
Because she brings academic training and real depth of research to bear, I think Dawisha’s book is more formidable than the other works that have investigated this topic in English so far: Lucas, etc. Yet, the prosecutorial tone of investigative journalism throughout the book makes it different from ‘academic’ work. This is a book that deserves to be debated seriously, and separated out from the strident anti-Russian posture of many journalists and some politicians today. That it agrees with most of their truthy contentions is, however, a point that must be conceded. Whether it will be processed as a demonstration of Tilly’s old claim — the state as organized crime — or as an affirmation of the need for civilizational struggle against Putin and Russia (a dangerous conceit, in my view, given Londongrad, Berlusconi, etc) is something that is worth watching.
