It’s easy to forget that a little over five years ago U.S. schools were closed, public events were canceled, dining inside restaurants was illegal, the operation of all manner of businesses was deemed illegal, socializing among humans was demonized as the sign of a “super spreader” of the novel coronavirus, and Americans were broadly confined to their homes since contact with others was presumed dangerous, and possibly lethal by the experts. Some (including your reviewer) pushed back against this hideous taking of freedom, economic viability, and yes, suffocation of useful knowledge for how to deal with a virus, but for the most part Americans accepted their new, locked down to varying degrees existence.
To this day it’s a mystery why so many Americans so willingly gave up their freedom. In a country founded on liberty as the foremost ideal, how did so many so blithely give up what is precious? It’s a question that people are still trying to answer today, and that historians will arguably study for centuries to come.
These questions and memories of 2020 came up a lot while reading Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s (at the time both were with the Washington Post) excellent 2005 book, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution. The questions came up because so much of their book is about Russians who, upon achieving the freedom long denied them, quickly revealed an eagerness to give it back.
While Baker and Glasser’s book is very much about the politics of the new Russia, it’s as they say at the outset about so much more. It provides readers with “a sense of place,” which is yet again why this review begins with memories of the U.S. just five years ago. The “place” Baker and Glasser reported on was largely populated by people who weren’t too hot for freedom or the fruits of it. The authors reported that a “majority” of the population was already ignoring the past “follies of communist central planning” given their view that “all chaos, crises, bank collapses, crazy corruption and crony capitalism” were an effect of the “tragic sundering of the Soviet empire.”
The perhaps not unreasonable expectation of Americans about a Russia not very distant from the horrors of life without freedom to think, speak, and produce is that the people would be celebrating the end of an impoverishing, at times murderous, and surely authoritarian ideology. Except that they weren’t. In once again providing readers with a “a sense of place,” Baker and Glasser revealed a Russian people not just uncomfortable with freedom, but yearning for the past, including dictators like Joseph Stalin.
What’s important is that the authors were seemingly as surprised as the typical reader might be by how Russians viewed the past and present. Baker and Glasser give the impression that they expected to find a Russia populated by individuals who were largely celebrating their long-denied freedoms. Instead, they witnessed a nation in “the throes of a nationalist reawakening.” U.S.S.R. t-shirts were “all the rage.”
As the subhead of Kremlin Rising indicates, Vladimir Putin was (and still is) the face of the “counterrevolution” response to the post-U.S.S.R., allegedly Boris Yeltsin-authored “chaos” of the 1990s. And Putin’s rising popularity was an effect of the electorate’s desire not for frequently overrated democracy or the vastly underrated genius of individual freedom borne of small r republicanism in the U.S., but for reversion to an “authoritarian course.”
The “onetime nobody” in Putin, who toiled in the much-disdained East German backwaters of the KGB, was tapped to fill freedom fighter Yeltsin’s shoes as a continuation of Yeltsin’s efforts to kill off communism, but much more importantly, as protection for Yeltsin and his cronies. Instead, Putin discovered within himself a facility for control and a deep belief in reviving various forms of control that had defined life in the Soviet Union of old.
As one voter interviewed by Baker and Glasser explained to them, “He [Putin] knows what order is.” In the words of the authors, Putin “came into office speaking of democracy while preparing to dismantle democratic institutions.” By the book’s end, the authors report that the three main television networks were all run by the state, Russia’s richest man (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) was in jail after getting on the wrong side of Putin, and Putin himself had ceased talking about democracy at all.
A big reason for reading a twenty-year-old had to do with the excellent one the authors published in 2020 about James Baker, The Man Who Ran Washington (review here). A bigger impetus was the desire to learn more about Putin. How did Baker and Glasser see him then? Of note, as the book came to a close the authors wrote that “Russian politics seemed to come down to just one question: Would Putin leave office in 2008, as the Russian constitution decreed, or would he find a way to hold on to past his two terms?” In asking the question, it seemed like Baker and Glasser were intimating they knew the answer, that Putin would be around for a while.
Which was why in reading the book, it was easy to yearn for a follow-up from the authors about the Russia of the present. How would they see it today? What would they say about Putin, and the invasion of Ukraine. The book is as mentioned twenty years old, but it has present qualities because Putin and Russia are very much a present story.
About Putin the person, Baker and Glasser’s reporting was eye-opening. Expecting to read about a not-so-tall person whose diminutive stature was belied by room-filling charisma, the authors report that Putin “was hardly a dominating figure in any room,” and that “the oligarchs and operatives around Yeltsin virtually invented Putin.” He was there to look after them, and to protect them, not dominate or jail them.
Regarding Putin’s background, to read about his parents and the two brothers he never knew was to feel sympathy for an individual whom the authors plainly view as bad, ruthless, and all manner of other pejoratives. But still?
Underlying “but still” is that Putin’s mother and brothers lived in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), which endured “an epic nine hundred days in a blockade that left hundreds of thousands dead.” It brought to mind Anya Gillinson’s 2024 memoir, Dreaming In Russian (review here), in which she wrote about a grandmother who was part of the Leningrad elite, but who like most everyone else, wasn’t spared abject hunger. Gillinson wrote of how her grandmother would cry whenever eating, so vivid were her memories of not being able to eat during the war.
The intense hunger hit Putin’s family up close. Baker and Glasser report that Putin’s mother “was so stricken by hunger that she fell into a comatose state and was taken for dead.” Eventually Putin’s father’s military rations saved the mother, but not their two sons. Putin’s father was nearly killed twice by the Germans in battle, but survived the first time “by hiding underwater in a swamp breathing through a hollow reed.” Another time a grenade nearly ended him.
The Leningrad that Putin was born into in 1952 was a wreck. In the authors’ words, “The Germans had wiped out almost everything – including 526 schools, 101 museums, 840 factories, 71 bridges, and the home of 716, 000 Leningraders.”
All of this is mentioned as a way of at least asking readers to think about why Putin reacted as a he perhaps did to discussions about Ukraine joining NATO. It doesn’t take an isolationist or a Putin apologist to ask people to contemplate how Putin’s upbringing, what his parents endured, and the state of Leningrad overall as he grew up color his view of the world now. While Americans rightly chant “never forget” about the horrors of 9/11 and the thousands of lives lost, the Soviets lost 28 million people during WWII. Is it any wonder that Putin would be alarmed by Ukraine potentially joining a military alliance that includes the U.S.?
Putting it in reverse, a not insignificant number of American politicians are losing it over Americans using TikTok, which is but an app. Yet Putin and the Russians are supposed to be calm about a country on their border allying with NATO? With TikTok in mind and the political class’s shameful freakout about it top of mind, how would these same individuals react to Putin forging a military alliance with Mexico and Claudia Sheinbaum, or Xi Jinping and China joining forces with Mexico and its new president?
None of this is to defend Putin, the person. To read about his ruthless, murderous stance toward Chechnya, the bombing of Grozny in a way not seen since WWII, and the “cleansing operations on men from teen to retirement” in Chechnya, was to be horrified by the lengths Putin was willing to go to bolster Russian pride. The stories of Russian excesses under Putin were awful, and documented by Baker and Glasser: innocent Chechen Elsa Kungayeva being raped, sodomized and bludgeoned to death by a Russian colonel, a woman over one hundred years old whose chest was “raked by automatic rifle fire,” and a father having to suffer the horrors of discovering “his son’s headless body.”
Still, it’s not difficult to say that while Putin is a bad guy, he and the Russians have a right to defend themselves. More than a right, any leader of a country that’s lost so many people in war simply must be vigilant about defending his people. To this day Donald Trump is ridiculed for saying that the Ukrainians started the war with Russia, but the speculation here (one that would be interesting to try out on the authors) is that what Trump meant is that absent the NATO provocation, Russia’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine would have been much less likely. Again, Americans rightly won’t forget 9/11 but somehow we expect the Russians to forget WWII? Something’s wrong here.
Speaking of 9/11, Baker and Glasser indicate that Putin was very much shaken by it, and felt kinship (the authors didn’t buy the correlation) with the U.S. based on Russia’s history with majority Muslim Chechnya. They report that Putin asked his aides, “What can we do to help them now?”
Quite a bit more interesting and fascinating is what followed. When the U.S. decided that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were going to have to pay for what happened on 9/11, Putin was skeptical and worried. Economically, he didn’t want the U.S. warring with Iraq because Russian energy giant Lukoil had a $20 billion extraction deal in Iraq, and then Iraq’s ambassador to Russia indicated to the authors that “Almost all Russian companies work with us.” Which is the point, or should be. Economic interconnectedness is always and everywhere a good thing because it makes war frightfully expensive. Would it that conservatives would grasp this in the present as they mindlessly try to neuter TikTok, while calling for decoupling from China more broadly. Applied to Russia, conservatives agreeably chant the Milton Frieman mantra about corporations focusing on profits without regard to politics out of one side of the mouth, but out of the other they demand that U.S. companies exit Russia as a way of protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
What’s fascinating about what followed is that considering his desire to avoid a U.S. invasion of Iraq (Putin didn’t support it, but also didn’t condemn it), Putin sent Yevgeny Primakov to Baghdad to request that Saddam Hussein resign in the hope that doing so would spare Iraq the war. Hussein rejected the request, but it’s hard not to wonder what might have been had Hussein done as Putin wisely suggested.
Notable about Colin Powell’s UN speech during which he made the U.S.’s case for invasion of Iraq, Putin’s foreign minister (Igor Ivanov) told Powell that his arguments were “unpersuasive.” Powell’s response was to not respond, which Ivanov took as evidence that Powell agreed the case was weak. It’s sickening to think about. When the invasion of Iraq began, Putin was the first world leader to call Bush.
Considering the Bush administration’s relationship with Putin, it’s perhaps easy to forget its friendly qualities. Early on, Condoleeza Rice conveyed to him through an intermediary that “we will be great friends.” In 9/11’s aftermath, Rice observed that “Russia has been one of our best allies.” In September of 2003, George W. Bush described Russia as “a country at peace within its borders, with its neighbors, a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive.” These are mentioned mainly because President Trump (fear not, readers, he has myriad warts too that can be found in my economic commentary with great frequency) is routinely pilloried for speaking well of Putin and other world leaders. About it, is it possible Trump is being diplomatic? Is it possible Bush and Ruce were being diplomatic?
Whatever the answer, Trump is not the first president to try and make nice with Putin. This has to be better than the alternative. One of Trump’s merits is that he seems to hate war. If only he would recognize that trade wars make wars of the shooting kind less expensive…
Speaking of Putin’s war now, how interesting it would be to read the authors’ analysis in the present. The interest lies in their proclamation that the “the Russian military” is “the most visibly unreconstructed Soviet institution in Russian life.” At least as of 2003-4, the authors were describing the Russian army as basically the Soviet one, only “smaller, far more corrupt, and with no empire to patrol.” The recruits are described as “desperately poor and uneducated young men,” which fits Holman Jenkins’s observation that so many of the Russian soldiers dying in Urkaine are the “disposables” in the eyes of Putin.
Reading about the military and its decrepit state, it was hard not to wonder if Baker and Glasser saw ahead of time that the invasion of Ukraine would not go particularly well. Or has the military been enhanced since then? It’s difficult to know from the book since it was published in 2005.
At the same time, it brings up its own discussion of Putin, Bush, and oil. In an American Way interview after he left the White House, Bush noted that the Putin he initially met was different. In his own words, “Putin changed when I was president. Early on, Russia was broke and he wanted help, and I thought he was going to promote a civil society that enabled people to have a big say in their government. When the price of oil went up, Putin began to change.” Well, yes.
What Bush left out because he still doesn’t grasp it was that it was his Treasury’s favorable view of a weak dollar that saved Putin. Oil is priced in dollars, which means it frequently goes up in dollars when the dollar is in decline. This very subject is the one that would be most interesting to discuss with the authors. Do they or did they see the correlation? Do they even agree with it?
It rates asking because Baker and Glasser were stationed in Moscow for the Washington Post right as the dollar began to fall and oil began to rise. They observed about a Russian economic boom most felt in Moscow that “the boom was made of oil,” and that “this place reminds me of Houston” (oil executive Robert Dudley). Well yes, again. It wasn’t just dumb luck that oil was cheap during the Reagan ‘80s and Clinton ‘90s. The cheap, at times single digit oil prices were an effect of policy in favor of a strong dollar under Reagan and Clinton, the very policies that reduced Putin’s Russia to beggar status.
Imagine if Bush had maintained the dollar stance of the Reagan and Clinton. If so, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that Putin is no longer in power, and that there’s never an invasion of Ukraine. It’s easy to make the previous case because rising oil prices no doubt did empower Putin. The authors report that they positioned him to draw up “a new taxation scheme in which 90 percent of all oil revenue over $25 a barrel went straight into state coffers.” How much? Baker and Glasser write that “the Russian government was taking in about $200 million extra every day, money it was using to in part to boost spending on its decrepit military.” Few are willing to tie policies in favor of a weak dollar to the empowerment of strong men in oil-rich nations, but it’s real. And it’s tragic. Sadly, the importance of the dollar and its global implications is something that the warring ideologies aren’t interested in, don’t understand, or both.
About what’s written above, that’s what would once again be most interesting to ask the authors about. Precisely because they’re so familiar with James Baker’s time as Treasury secretary, they’re familiar with Treasury as the mouthpiece of the dollar. Baker similarly did a lot of reporting on the Clinton administration, and as such was no doubt familiar with Treasury secretary Robert Rubin’s regularly repeated mantra about the importance of a strong dollar. This all changed with George W. Bush’s presidency. It had long-lasting and very global implications. The challenge has been convincing writers and policymakers of the substance of them. The effort to open minds goes on!
As discussed early on, Baker and Glasser’s book is about more than politics, and specifically it aims to provide readers with “a sense of place.” The authors do provide it, but this reader wanted even more. The desire is a compliment to the authors. They made an interesting book even more interesting with the regular people they brought into their account of the new Russia. There’s Arkady Novikov, a grad of a Soviet cooking school who was famously turned down for a job at the first McDonald’s in Moscow. As is always the case with commerce, the present is a lousy predictor of the future.
The indefatigable Novikov saw around the proverbial corner to Moscow’s boom, and in 1992 borrowed $50,000 from a friend to start a seafood restaurant called Sirena. He eventually opened many, many more restaurants. Baker and Glasser describe him as Moscow’s “restaurant king.” Their discussion of Novikov rejected their assertion that money in the new Russia “came to the few who were lucky or tough enough to get it.” More realistically, communism is never natural as an economic state, only for the courageous to emerge in a Russia that had ceased to criminalize success.
We can see the above truth in the opening pages of Kremlin Rising as the authors ask Tatyana Shalimova why Russians enduring abject poverty don’t “change their lives?” Her response? “I did.”
At the same time, Shalimova’s answer presumably explains the less than majority support within the Russian population for the new, much more economically free Russia. With economic freedom to succeed comes freedom to fail. Trite as the latter sounds, it’s true. And it’s a source of discomfort that free thinkers like Ludwig von Mises understood well. Not everyone wants economic freedom simply because economic freedom exposes failure. Collectivism doesn’t. Everyone’s poor and in widespread poverty it’s evident some found comfort. Shalimova “did,” but so many didn’t.
Which brings us to arguably the most sympathetic person featured in Kremlin Rising, Irina Viktorovna. A teacher on the outskirts of Moscow, she was desperately trying to convince her students that Russia’s communist past was horrible, and cruel, and murderous, and impoverishing, and all sorts of other terrible things. Yet she wasn’t having much luck. Just ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union, nostalgia for it returned as previously mentioned along with the banning of history books by people like Igor Dolutsky. He aimed to provide an honest history of Russia, but ultimately admitted to the authors that “he had finally given up” and that he had “lost.” It was wrenching to read.
Seriously, how terrible for the freedom lovers in Russia to be experiencing the decline of freedom. But that’s seemingly the point? As the jailed billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky put it in a letter about the crisis of liberalism written from prison, “Putin is probably not a liberal or a democrat, but he is more liberal and more democratic than seventy percent of the population.” How terrible for Russia. A decade after regaining their freedom, the people were giving it back.
Also, how worrisome for the U.S. If it’s accepted wisdom that people get the government they want, what to make of Americans accepting lockdowns largely without protest? Is indifference to freedom a problem that extends beyond Russia? Read Baker and Glasser’s book to see what happened in Russia, and use the learning to think about what happened, or could happen here. The reading will be entertaining and sobering at the same time.
