Andrew Cowley

Who Is Putin?

Putin's Progress: A Biography of Russia's Enigmatic President, Vladimir Putin

By

Simon & Schuster 370pp £17.99 order from our bookshop

Inside Putin's Russia

By

Granta Books 350pp £20 order from our bookshop

Black Earth: Russia After The Fall

By

Harper Collins 511pp £25 order from our bookshop

PART OF THE Russian genius is the love of simplifying the complex. Sergei Roy – the grandfather of The Moscow News, Moscow’s oldest liberal paper – likes to squeeze most of twentieth-century Russian history into a ‘fourstage arrangement’. Beginning with the death of Lenin in 1924 and ending with the death of Stalin in 1953 was the period of Stalinisation. De-Stalinisation began under Khrushchev from 1953 to 1964. His successors up to 1985 – Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko – presided over ‘vegetarian’ Stalinism. The final demolition of Stalinism took place under Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter