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Mr. Putin

Written by: Fiona Hill, Clifford G. Gaddy
Narrated by: Ellen Archer
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Publisher's Summary

From the KGB to the Kremlin: a multidimensional portrait of the man at war with the West. Where do Vladimir Putin's ideas come from? How does he look at the outside world? What does he want, and how far is he willing to go?

The great lesson of the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was the danger of misreading the statements, actions, and intentions of the adversary. Today, Vladimir Putin has become the greatest challenge to European security and the global world order in decades. Russia's 8,000 nuclear weapons underscore the huge risks of not understanding who Putin is. Featuring five new chapters, this new edition dispels potentially dangerous misconceptions about Putin and offers a clear-eyed look at his objectives. It presents Putin as a reflection of deeply ingrained Russian ways of thinking as well as his unique personal background and experience.
©2015 Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy (P)2020 Random House Audio

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Profile Image for VS
  • VS
  • 2020-08-25

Well researched but hard to listen to

Clearly this is a well researched book. However it is hard to listen to. Partly because of the volume of information and how it is presented and in great part because of the reader. It became monotonous very quickly. And, for me the readers voice was almost headache inducing.
You can learn a lot from this book, but it is a hard slog.

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Profile Image for Vlad Levitsky

Biased and incomplete

I felt like it may be a little biased once she said that the annexation of Crimea had no precedent in Putin's presidency and that's why it's worth looking into. The annexation of Georgia in 2008 followed their attempt in joining NATO. Any objective political analyst would not be able to say that there is no precedent when the same president annexed a piece of a country only 6 years before that following similar events and using the same excuse (protecting Russians in Georgia).

The author also always just presents the narrative put out by Putin and the Kremlin and only briefly mentions opposing views, if ever, without adding facts to support them on top of it. She presents the alternative explanations of events in a way that says "and some folks believe this" as though there aren't actual facts to back those claims up and that it's a matter of Kremlin says and opponents say.
She also uses Putin's own rhetoric as a representation of what he believes. There are times where she says that Putin said X and continues as though it's an objective fact when Putin is notorious for lies, cover-ups and presenting a completely skewed version of events.

She also keeps saying words in Russian to give them more weight when often they aren't given much emphasis in Russian itself. It starts off with some words that have some useful distinctions and so worth using the untranslated version and the more the book progressive the more I cringe at the needless use of Russian words (the pronunciation of which is often quite bad). It seems like the author just sprinkled some Russian books all across the book as a crude tool to give her book more authority.

If there is a thing this book is good for is to give fairly detailed biography of Putin and express how Putin wants to be seen. If you want an objective analysis of his policies, his beliefs and the events in Russia in the last 20 years in general, this is not the book you're looking for.

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