Former BBC correspondent Philip Short’s Putin: His life and times “concludes by blaming Putinism on everyone but [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and his enablers,” Gregory Feifer (Russia, 2000-2002) writes in a review for the Times Literary Supplement. “’When the pot calls the kettle black,’ [Short] writes of Putin’s Western critics, ‘it is not because either is white but because both are noxious.’ In fact,” Feifer concludes, “there can be no moral equivalence.”
Unlike Short, the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s new book, The Russia Conundrum, How the West Fell for Putin’s Power Gambit – and How to Fix it “describes a tyrant who set about consolidating control over politics and the economy from the start.”
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Photo: Putin meeting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the Kremlin, February 15, 2022 (Presidential Executive Office of Russia)
