The New Tsar
Authors: Steven Lee Myers
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2015 by Steven Lee Myers
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group, for permission to reprint excerpts from
First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President
by Vladimir Putin, et al., copyright © 2000 by Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov; and
Midnight Diaries
by Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, copyright © 2000 by Boris Yeltsin. Reproduced with permission of PublicAffairs via Copyright Clearance Center.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Myers, Steven Lee.
The new tsar : the rise and reign of Vladimir Putin / Steven Lee Myers. —
First American edition.
pages cm
“A Borzoi book”—Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-307-96161-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-307-96162-4 (eBook)
1. Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1952– 2. Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1952—Political and social views. 3. Presidents—Russia (Federation)—Biography. 4. Soviet Union. Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti—Biography. 5. Political leadership—Russia (Federation) 6. Power (Social sciences)—Russia (Federation) 7. Russia (Federation)—Politics and government—1991– I. Title.
DK510.766.P87M93 2015
947.086’2092—dc23
[B] 2015010720
eBook ISBN 9780307961624
Cover photograph by Platon / Trunk Archive
Cover design by Peter Mendelsund
Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.
v4.1_r1
a
For Margaret, Emma, and Madeline
And in memory of my mother, Nita Louise Myers
Oh, he understood very well that for the meek soul of a simple Russian, exhausted by grief and hardship and, above all, by constant injustice and sin, his own or the world’s, there was no stronger need than to find a holy shrine or a saint to prostrate himself before and to worship.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps
The Soviet Union Before 1991
Russia After 1991
CHAPTER 1 Homo Sovieticus
CHAPTER 2 A Warm Heart, a Cool Head, and Clean Hands
CHAPTER 3 The Devoted Officer of a Dying Empire
CHAPTER 4 Democracy Faces a Hungry Winter
CHAPTER 5 The Spies Come In from the Cold
CHAPTER 6 Mismanaged Democracy
CHAPTER 7 An Unexpected Path to Power
CHAPTER 8 Swimming in the Same River Twice
CHAPTER 9
Kompromat
CHAPTER 10 In the Outhouse
CHAPTER 11 Becoming Portugal
CHAPTER 12 Putin’s Soul
CHAPTER 13 The Gods Slept on Their Heads
CHAPTER 14 Annus Horribilis
CHAPTER 15 The Orange Contagion
CHAPTER 16 Kremlin, Inc.
CHAPTER 17 Poison
CHAPTER 18 The 2008 Problem
CHAPTER 19 The Regency
CHAPTER 20 Action Man
CHAPTER 21 The Return
CHAPTER 22 The Restoration
CHAPTER 23 Alone on Olympus
CHAPTER 24 Putingrad
CHAPTER 25 Our Russia
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
A Note About the Author
Illustrations
PART ONE
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