Donald Rayfield
All the President’s Murderers
Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West
By Catherine Belton
William Collins 624pp £25 order from our bookshop
Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem, and Russia’s Remaking of the West
By Luke Harding
Guardian Faber 324pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia
By Joshua Yaffa
Granta Books 356pp £20 order from our bookshop
So many competent, sometimes excellent exposés of Vladimir Putin’s crimes and misdemeanours have appeared in English over the last ten years that he himself might consider hiring a ghostwriter to produce a retaliatory diatribe. Catherine Belton’s, Luke Harding’s and Joshua Yaffa’s books share the same view of contemporary Russia, more or less accepting that the country is in the autocratic grip of a mercenary, vindictive, secretive and remorseless dictator, transported like Cinderella from a communal flat with only two hours’ access to a kitchen per day to a palace the previous tenants of which have included Grand Duke Sergei and his wife, one blown up by a socialist revolutionary in 1905, the other buried alive by Bolsheviks in a mine shaft. The three books are complementary, taking different approaches, though there is some overlap: all of them catalogue Putin’s ‘kills’, Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
Belton’s work is exceptionally detailed and complex: as befits a Financial Times journalist, she has a forensic accountant’s ability to follow the thirty-year money trail, showing how, following the collapse of the USSR, the Communist Party’s hard-currency funds were appropriated by entrepreneurs and fraudsters, whose ‘banks’ funded Boris Yeltsin’s regime
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