Article, How He and His Cronies Stole Russia! By Anne Applebaum, December 18, 2014 Issue Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? By Karen Dawisha Simon and Schuster, 445 pp., $30.00 “PUTIN, thief! Putin, thief!” chanted the protesters who marched through Moscow as Vladimir Putin sought his third term as president. Since then the rallies have ended. Russia’s swift annexation of Crimea and its subsequent proxy-war in the south-east of Ukraine have turned Mr Putin into a national hero in the eyes of many Russians, including some former protesters. But they have also led to Western sanctions against Mr Putin’s cronies, and focused attention once more on the issue of theft and corruption, which is the subject of a new book by Karen Dawisha, a political scientist at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “Putin’s Kleptocracy” is a who’s who of the people on the sanctions lists drawn up by America and the EU. It is also a guide to the crony capitalism that grew out of the nexus of Mr Putin’s plutocratic interests, his shady past and authoritarian rule. In place of a genuine media and a real civil society, Putin and his inner circle slowly put into place a system for manufacturing disinformation and mobilizing support on a new and spectacular scale. Once the KGB had retaken the country, in other words, it began once again to act like the KGB—only now it was better funded and more sophisticated. Today’s Russian “political technologists” make use of their state-owned media, including English-language outlets such as the TV news channel Russia Today; armies of paid social media “trolls” who post on newspaper comment pages, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites; fake “experts” whose quotes can be presented with fake authority; and real experts to whom Putin’s officials have granted special access, or have simply paid. Former Western ambassadors to Moscow, businessmen who have been recruited to Russian company boards, European politicians as high-ranking as Schröder and Silvio Berlusconi—all have been well compensated, directly or indirectly, for offering their support. You can have look inside the book and read several reviews through the links provided below in comments section.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 05:39:25 +0000
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