The Roots of Perestroika: The Soviet Breakdown in Historical Context Book

It is common now to ask whether American Presidential candidates can "handle Putin and the Chinese", so it is of the greatest interest to see the mutual compliments given each other by the Master Negotiator and the Russian potentate. After all, Putin expressed admiration for Trump and since that is all that matters in his view, Trump returned the compliment. Which reminds me of the last time an American politician and Putin slapped each other on the back, when then-President Bush saw into the Russian's soul, calling him "an honest, straightforward man" in public and "one cool dude" in private, as Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reveal in "Kremlin Rising". Baker and Glasser implicitly make the case that Putin sized up and manipulated the American President by wearing a cross that he said was preserved when the Russian's dacha burned to the ground. That of course was well before the Ukraine and Syria, but not before Putin's tendencies toward authoritarian tendencies began to show, not to mention the disregard for the fate of individual Russians, foreshadowed by his initial indifference to the sinking of the submarine Kursk and later bungled rescue of its sailors. Baker and Glasser weave back and forth between Putin's Moscow-centered construction of what was early on called "managed democracy" (an oxymoron worthy of standing beside the Marxist "centralized democracy", perhaps as offspring) and the individual citizens failing to reform the judiciary or the army, attempting to teach young students, or even just trying to survive economically in a nation where businesses need "protection". The overall impression is that what Putin has sold the Russian people is a bargain in which they cede their rights (which never took root during the corrupt Yeltsin years anyway) for the "protection" that the strong man offers. Yet, in key moments that protective element has failed, not just with the submarine, but in the government's approach to terrorist attacks on a theater in Moscow and a school in Beslan; it seems like the least that a people could ask of its government is not to respond to dire emergencies in a way that causes even more bloodshed. And by any measure of the effort to create a modern nation--a functioning democracy, an independent judiciary , media that is not an arm of the governing faction, armed forces that don't brutalize their recruits almost as much as the enemy, a public health system that actually seeks to prevent citizens from becoming ill and cares for them when they do--the protection trade-off has failed. Not that the Yeltsin decade was much better; if anything, the failure of that regime to replace the Soviets with anything better than violence, chaos, and corruption is in some ways the best argument for Putin. Baker and Glasser try to be fair; they are skeptical of the oligarch and latter-day democrat Mikhail Khodorkovsky and of the Yeltsin circle in general, and note Putin's tentative nods and eventual retreats from judicial and army reform. But the overall impression is of darkness gathering, inventing as it goes along means of leashing the media, rigging the electoral system, rewarding friends and punishing enemies, a graceless but increasingly forceful show of strength in a world where that is the greatest value. This is an image from after "Kremlin Rising" was published but I remember the long opening sequence of the Olympics, which treated hammer and sickle as just another historical era, praising Russia's industrialization. There was also a plea that Russians reverse their long demographic shrinkage (Lenin noted that the Russian soldiers of the First World War I voted with their feet; evidently, their descendants are voting with their rates of reproduction and emigration). And the Games took place in Sochi, the resort at which Putin could not be bothered to cut short his vacation during the Kursk crisis. All that said, the endurance of the Putin regime cannot be ascribed to manipulation; the oil economy that has aided regimes from Chavez' Venezuela to the Gulf states has given Putin both an argument for staying in power and a weapon against European states reliant on Russian gas. That power-for-growth equation has been altered, one would think for the worse, by the current oil glut. Thus in part, the Ukraine and Syria.