Putin's People

May 1, 2020
Carefully detailed account of the rise of Vladimir Putin and the restoration of Russia to Soviet-era power. A Reuters correspondent and former Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, Belton recalls a time, 25-odd years ago, when it seemed possible that Russia might become a democracy with a thriving economy. Then came the era of the oligarchs, who, protected by Boris Yeltsin, cornered big pieces of the newly open market economy. It didn't last long. As Putin rose to power, he proceeded to "rein in the market freedoms of the Yeltsin era, and to launch a takeover by the state." That project involved neutralizing enemies--and then, writes Belton, turning on former allies, a process Americans have seen in the actions of the Trump administration. By the author's account, Trump's fortunes are bound up in Putin's, and both represent what one Putin associate exalts as a defeat of "the neocons who thought they controlled the whole world." According to Belton, while the extent of the connection will likely never be known, Trump has been the beneficiary of Russian cash since at least 1990, when Russian banks floated funds to extract his organization from bankruptcy. One Russian executive has claimed that Trump has received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian funders who will likely never see the money again, all in the interest of providing "an opportunity to further compromise the future president" and, as a larger goal, "to undermine and corrupt the institutions and democracies of the West." All that, of course, is straight out of the KGB playbook as enacted by Putin's lieutenants around the world, with the state's extensive financial resources at their disposal. Much of Belton's story has been related in earlier books, but none with so specific a focus on those shadowy aides and their actions. An eyebrow-raising book that, among other things, helps connect some of the dots of the Mueller Report.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 8, 2020
The Soviet secret police reconstituted itself as the corrupt masters of post-communist Russia according to Belton’s sprawling debut exposé. 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. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management.