Putin's Labyrinth: Spies, Murder, and the Dark Heart of the New Russia (2008)

Author: Steve LeVine
Title: Putin's Labyrinth: Spies, Murder, and the Dark Heart of the New Russia
Pub Date: July 2008
Genre: Current Affairs

What it's about: Foreign correspondent LeVine spent much of the 1990s and 2000s in Moscow, where he witnessed the rise of Vladimir Putin in the wake of the post-Soviet chaos of the Boris Yeltsin years. The premise of the book is that Russia under Putin has a "culture of death," where political murder and the loss of ordinary Russian lives are routine events and of little note.  As evidence of this culture, LeVine cites the overwhelming viciousness of the two wars in Chechnya, the murders of Russian journalists, such as Anna Politkovskaya, the murder-by-nuclear-isotope of exiled dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, and the curious willingness of the Kremlin to allow ordinary Russians to die in stand-offs with terrorists, such as occurred in a Moscow theater in 2002 and at a school in Beslan in 2004. In both the Moscow theater and Beslan incidents, the government focused more on killing the terrorists than in rescuing its citizens. 

Why the book is worth reading: Other books have dealt with the growing autocracy of Vladimir Putin.  LeVine also outlines the shrinking of democracy in Russia, but spends more time on the troubling question of why a G8 nation allows and approves, tacitly or overtly, the deaths of so many people, dissidents and ordinary people alike.  As of August 2008, when Russian troops are deep within neighboring Georgia, this book is extraordinarily timely and deeply troubling. 

Similar books available through the Library on present-day Russia:
The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea  by Steve LeVine
The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West by Edward Lucas
A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia by Anna Politkovskaya
Kremlin Rising: Vladimir's Putin Russia and the End of Revolution by Peter Baker