This is New York Times authored. The same people that brought you four years of “orange man bad”, “Russia, Russia, Russia”, critical race theory and other such nonsense tell you what to think about Putin. Since you seemingly cannot find any neutral books on Audible about him, you have to take the bad with the good and accept what’s available.
First off, I am shocked that there is actually A LOT of good. I expected this entire book to be trash and it wasn’t. The first 12 hours were incredibly interesting, very informative and consistently neutral. The first eight hours is Putin’s heritage, his rise through the ranks of the intelligence service and how he became involved with Boris Yeltsin. Hours 8-12 are the first few years of his presidency and his difficulties in Chechnya.
At hour 12, it’s like The New York Times fired the author, threw away the rest of his manuscript and filled in 12 hours of orange man bad written by activists, only substituting Putin for Trump. It’s absolute garbage.
Thinking I could still learn something & desperately wanted to, I powered through it regardless. Much of this is about Putin persecuting “innocent” victims. I’m talking about innocent victims such as… pro-Democracy NGOs (who involve themselves in other countries’ elections and one is modelled on a George Sros group), “peaceful” protesters (aiming to overthrow governments and the author admits incidents of throwing chunks of asphalt at police), news corporations (doing divisive antagonistic coverage ala CNN), oligarchs (with left-wing agendas given REPEATED warnings to stay with business and not get involved in politics) and Pssy Riot (those ski-mask wearing girls who stormed an Orthox church in order to blast the attendants with Putin-hating Punk music). These are the author’s “victims”. Putin got laws passed, jailed many of these people and he also engaged in lawfare to sue these people very badly. Listening to the author, you’d think you were hearing of Stalin putting millions of people on trains, shipping them off to the Gulag and starving them to death. Putin is actually very restrained in comparison to the dictators he supposedly resembles.
Another part of this is the whining about Putin being autocratic. This country did in fact experiment with democracy and an amazing degree of openness through Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The author does admit this was indeed a catastrophic disaster that tore the nation apart, led to extreme political chaos, an economy in shambles and had the government’s assets sold off to oligarchs for pennies on the dollar. Putin reversed this, saving the country and the economy with political stability and wealth. We have constant cries of bloody murder from the author that Putin went back on democracy & openness… yet it was clearly what saved his country.
This book shoved tons of theories & dogmas down my throat so I’m going to share the one I got out of this book. I got the distinct impression that the left doesn’t want democracy in Russia, they simply want the constraints on Putin’s leadership that would come with democracy. They are viewing political & economic openess as a Trojan horse that would allow them to exploit any constraints on Putin. After a group stays for awhile, it can become the equivalent of say… the mass media, or the US school system, or Hollywood, or silicon valley.
It seems they are trying hard and it sounds like Putin is very effective in stopping this as an autocrat. That’s why you constantly hear complaints that he’s too much of a dictator. You hear from the author that Putin talks plenty about western interference & subversion from such groups. But the author wastes no opportunity in calling that a far-fetched conspiracy theory and these groups are nothing but benevolent. Yeah, I’m sure. Nothing but sunshine and rainbows if Putin turns to democracy and submits himself to the liberal agenda. I actually think he is very smart to stay autocratic under these circumstances.
There was one particular point that amazed me was when the author dismissively references Putin raising GDP per Capita from $1000/yr to $10,000 per year (it was $1772 in 2000 when Putin took office to a high point in 2013 at $15,975 and has since went down to about $10,000). But several sentences later he goes into a long disparaging rant about Russian citizens having to pay officials bribes and how it makes the country so horribly intolerable to live in. Anybody else see the contradiction here?
A final thing the author biases is Chechnya. Extremists went directly to Moscow and started blowing up apartment buildings, taking hostages, using suicide bombers, killing hundreds and threatening thousands of innocent people. The author cries in despair that we couldn’t mediate peaceful resolution afterward. This was Russia’s 9/11. Putin feels just as strongly about Islamic terrorism & extremism as people in the US do. The author mentions all this and then acts like it’s simply unreasonable & bloodthirsty to wage war against those responsible.
Anyway, this second half was just biased in every possible way and absolute torture to get myself through. It took me perhaps a month when the first half took me a couple days. I would not recommend most people trying to trudge through that. If you’re wondering whether to spend a credit, completely disregard that a second half of this book even exists. There’s 12 good hours in the first half and it covers a period up to Putin’s early presidency. If that sounds like a good deal to you, than go for it. The first half will be a good listen.