Kremlin rising: updated edition

Kremlin Rising

Baker, Peter & Susan Glasser. Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution. Scribner, 2005.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, despite Russia's long-standing totalitarian past, hopes were high that the new government would be democratic in nature. Today, the headlines are gripped with the realities of Russia, that Putin has a stronghold on power, dissent is stifled, and yet the Russian, capitalist leader seems to be wildly popular amongst his people. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, authors of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution, explicitly call Putin a threat to future democracy in the region, and express their frustrations with the failure of democracy to take hold in modern Russia, despite the fact that the economy has prospered after the death of communism.

Baker and Glasser admit that during Yeltsin's more open reign, the post-communist economy was in chaos. Then, Yeltsin appointed the former KGB official as his successor, and Vladimir Putin began to consolidate his hold upon power with a ruthlessness that befitted his earlier position. Putin got rid of Russia's only real national television station, ruthlessly dispatched the Chechnya separatists, and after a terrorist attack in 2004 Putin justified as a "counter-terrorist" measure necessary for national security the cancellation of elections and fully proportional parliamentary representation. Worst of all, according to Baker and Glasser, Russians seemed willing to trade their political freedom for greater order, security, and financial prosperity. However, the authors regard this as a kind of devil's bargain, calling Putin's managed democracy merely another form of dictatorship that will inevitably result in bloody repression. Moreover, they point to the fact that things are not all sunny in post-Soviet Russia -- the numbers of the population affected with AIDS, the inhumane conditions in the army, and other institutionalized failures to deal with the problems of modernity are still rife. Their book begins and ends with the story of a woman who left her provincial home to come to Moscow. She is doing better financially, but her family back home, like so many Russians, not part of the relatively narrow sector enjoying Putin prosperity and is still living under relatively similar conditions as in the late 1990s.