BOOK NOTES: 'Kremlin Rising' provides account of Russia under Vladimir Putin (08/07/05)

BOOK NOTES

'Kremlin Rising' provides account of Russia under Vladimir Putin

"Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution," by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. New York: Lisa Drew/Scribner Publishers, 2005. 453 pp. $27.50

by Ihor Lysyj

"Kremlin Rising" is a major book about the latest period in Russian history that provides an eyewitness account of the tumultuous transition from the unsavory era of Boris Yeltsin's fake capitalism to the authoritarian "managed democracy" of Vladimir Putin. The facts presented are well documented and supported by 985 references. The book portrays the dark side of Mr. Putin's Russia objectively and in-depth.

A thoughtful reader can derive insight from the information presented in this book about why events happening in Russia did not happen in Ukraine.

The authors, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, are reporters for the Washington Post and have spent several years (2001-2004) in Moscow as bureau chiefs for the newspaper. They had unprecedented access to the highest levels of the Russian bureaucracy, political and economic insiders, as well as to the multiple layers of Russian society, from the glitzy Muscovites to the downtrodden drug addicts in Irkutsk near the Mongolian border in the vastness of Siberia.

What emerges from their account of Russia is a dysfunctional country, with the glitz and glamour of Moscow on one hand, and the unpaved muddy streets of the provinces on the other. The latter is where the majority of the Russian population lives on the edge of survival. And there is not much in between.

On the one hand we see the "New Russians" of Moscow who are preoccupied with vacations in London and Paris, mansions on Cyprus, yachts in Monte Carlo, and La Dolce Vita on beaches from Spain to Egypt. They debate pros and cons of boarding schools for their children in Switzerland and pay $1,000 for a single long-stem med rose, without blinking an eye. The tsarist aristocracy never had it so good.

On the other hand, there are unpaved streets in the rest of Russia, and houses without toilets, running water or telephones, a crumbling infrastructure and no jobs. Russia is a place where academicians and physicists sell underwear (imported from Turkey, since not much of quality is produced in Russia), and where a physician supplements her income with a night job as a cleaning lady. Life expectancy is lower then in Bangladesh. And that is the life of the more fortunate.

For the less fortunate life in Russia is a simmering pot of slop on the kitchen stove being prepared to feed a pig, whose pork might provide a margin for survival in the winter. It may come as a surprise to many, but according to the authors the great number of Russians, both old and young, yearn for a return to the old days of the Soviet Union. And who can blame them? Mr. Putin's Russia is a dark and forbidding place where few would care to live.

The authors document step by step President Putin's rise to power and the return to authoritarian rule in the country. What emerges from this eyewitness report is the picture of a country where media freedom no longer exists, voters' rights to elect regional leaders have been eliminated, and sham opposition parties are ordained into existence on orders from the Kremlin to provide an illusion of democracy. Russia is a country where rule of law exists only at the whim of the Kremlin "siloviki" and where fear permeates all levels of society, from the mighty oligarchs to lowly cleaning ladies.

For Ukrainian readers it is interesting to note that the principal strategists and architects of Mr. Putin's rise to power were and remain Marat Gelman, a self-proclaimed "spin-doctor," and Gleb Pavlovsky, a top Kremlin "consultant." This duo of "political technologs" is well-known to the readers of The Ukrainian Weekly - they figured prominently in Ukraine during the last presidential election as shadowy figures in the Yanukovych camp.

Write the authors of "Kremlin Rising:"

"Gleb Pavlovsky and his fellow consultant Marat Gelman and Sergei Markov signed on with Prime Minister Victor Yanukovych's campaign, urging the same recipe of heavy promotion on state-controlled television and use of administrative resources by the local authorities that worked so well for Project Putin.

"But Ukrainian democracy turned to be unmanageable. The street protests become a street revolution as swelling crowds wearing Yushchenko's trademark color of orange refused to accept the flawed results. By December, Yushchenko was president. Back in the Kremlin, Putin was reduced to denouncing the West for trying to create a 'system of permanent revolutions' on the Russian frontier."

Here again the book demonstrates that Ukraine is not Russia. While many Russians are ready to march into the past, Ukrainians are not. Quite to the contrary, they stood for weeks and months, day and night in the snow and sleet, ready to die, to make sure that a return to the Soviet Union would never happen. And, in spite of Mr. Putin's imperial dreams, the Ukrainian people will never accept his kind of governance. The chasm between the two cultures, Ukrainian and Russian, is simply too great to be bridged.

Ihor Lysyj is a freelance writer and consulting environmental engineer. In 1992 he spent some time on Sakhalin Island, working as a consultant to a U.S.-Japanese petroleum consortium. In the spring of this year he visited Vladivostok in the far eastern part of Russia.

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