Best Book on "The Rape of Russia"?
There aren't very many. And I guess that's not surprising.
Yasha Levine
Sep 30
Since I've been writing more about Russia and the 1990s, people have been
asking me for recs about good history/journalism books in English that can
provide context to what happened there. Well, there aren't very many. And I
guess that's not surprising. What America did in Russia was a crime of
monster proportions - a crime that was at the time sold as a beneficial
humanitarian mission, and then erased from cultural memory when things went
wrong.
There is one book that does stand out, though. It was written by an American
journalist named Paul Klebnikov, an upper-class descendant of White Russian
emigres who had fled the Russian Revolution and eventually ended up in New
York.
Paul's great-grandfather was an admiral who was killed during a mutiny by
Bolshevik sailors, while an older ancestor of his was a famous young officer
who took part in the Decembrist Revolt, a failed liberal military coup
against Czar Nicholas I. And Paul himself came to a glorious end, too. He
was shot to death outside his apartment building in Moscow in 2004 - four
bullets to the chest. It looked like a professional hit. The murder was
never solved, although it was probably tied to a book he had just then
published in Russian about a Chechen warlord and mafia boss.
So the man had some guts and he came with a certificate of top-of-the-line
pedigree. And he also wrote a pretty damn good book.
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It's called Godfather of the Kremlin, a biography of Boris Berezovsky -
Russia's most powerful and most theatrical oligarch. Boris was a truly
impressive character. He was like someone out of Greek epic. He lived the
highs and the lows. He was favored by the gods and then abandoned by them.
He gambled everything and eventually lost big. He ended up hanging himself
in a bathroom in London, although some people are convinced Boris was
whacked.
Godfather of the Kremlin is about more than just Boris Berezovsky. It was
published in 2000, right as Putin was taking power, and it looks at Russia's
transformation from Mikhail Gorbachev's bungled presetroika and economic
liberalization, through the "authorized" plunder of the Yeltsin years. More
than anything it's about how the elite of the Soviet union joined hands with
the KGB, early organized crime syndicates, and western finance goons to
transform itself into the oligarchy of a new capitalist Russia.
The book gives a glimpse of how they did it, and it goes through many of the
main characters involved - the Russian mobsters, the Chechen gangs, the
beige communist academics who leveraged their insider access to redirect
vast amounts of Soviet wealth into their offshore bank accounts. Some of
these people are now dead or exiled, but a lot of them are still around
today as oligarchs - enjoying wealth and power under Putin. Some of them -
like the Pyotr Aven, a sleazy accountant crook - are respected as
philanthropists and art collectors.
Financial Times
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When Evgenia and I lived in Manhattan a few years back, we caught an exhibit
at the Neue Galerie, where Pyotr showcased his huge collection of early 20th
century German and Russian art. This was before Donald Trump won in 2016, so
he wasn't yet reviled as a dangerous Russian oligarch undermining western
democracy with art. He was celebrated in America as a "Russian collector"
bringing culture to the masses. And the art was great, but the collection
was obscene. It was all purchased with money stolen from the Soviet people -
a crime put on display for all to see in a gallery across the street from
the Central Park. Godfather of the Kremlin gives you a sense of where that
money came from.
Anyway, what's great about Paul's perspective is that it doesn't fit into
the normal American - or even Russian - liberal view of Russia at at the
time. He didn't do the usual cliches and platitudes about democracy and
liberation and freedom. And he had a lot of empathy for people who were
broken by the transition to a "free" Russia. Empathy for Russians? From a
journalist? You don't see that very often!
I'll quote a few pages:
The book's generally great, but it does have a some flaws: One is that it
gives almost no space to America's deep involvement in the Rape of Russia.
The other is that it has kinda comic antisemitic and Russian chauvinist
vibes. Both of these flaws are actually very instructive, betraying the
biases of Paul's elite American-White Russian background.
The fact that he had a giant blind spot for the malign effects of American
meddling is not surprising. He grew up in an upper-class Manhattan emigre
world of finance, spies, and American imperial management. His own
father-in-law was John Train - a spooky banker who helped set up the Paris
Review, funneled money to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and was involved in
all sorts of anti-communist CIA-linked propaganda and misinformation
campaigns, according to Joel Whitney's Finks. And some of Paul's closest
friends were involved as principal characters in the looting of Russia's
economy - including a fellow White Russian huckster by the name of Boris
Jordan, whose name now adorns NYU's "Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of
Russia."
Despite being critical of what happened in Russia, Paul clearly believed in
the beneficial powers of "free-markets" to create free and prosperous
societies. He was a huge fan of Pyotr Stolypin, the Pinochet of the late
Romanov Era. He thought that Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms would be similar to
what Stolypin tried to do. He thought that they'd unleash good market
forces, tap the energy of private enterprise, and ultimately lead to a
national economic and cultural revival. But he quickly realized the opposite
was happening: privatization and deregulation wasn't leading to increased
prosperity, but to criminality and looting and the destruction of Soviet
wealth on a vast scale.
The question is why did this happen? Why did "liberalization" fail?
It's the central question, Paul doesn't delve too deeply into the politics
or history of it. He makes it personal, rather than structural or cultural.
To him things went bad mostly because of organized crime, greedy peasants,
and devious foreigners. Not the American or European kind of foreigners, but
bad local "foreigners" - in this case, a cunning and brilliant Soviet Jew
(but also lots of Soviet Chechens).
As he wrote in the intro:
Behind every historic process stand specific individuals. I wanted to know
who Russia's real bosses were. Who had brought the country to such a state?
Who stood at the top of the pyramid?
In the autumn of 1996, I began looking into the affairs of Boris Berezovsky.
No man stood closer to all three authorities at once: crime, commerce, and
government. No man profited more from Russia's slide into the abyss.
:The disintegration of Russia allowed Berezovsky a unique chance to realize
his designs on a grand scale. And as he grew stronger, Russia grew weaker.
A leech drawing strength from a poor defenseless Русь. Typical for a kike
shyster! That's what happens when you let these people in! And look at all
the young reformers around him - like Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar and
even Pyotr Aven. They're all Jews, too! That can't be a coincidence, can it?
The antisemitic stuff is there, but I don't want to make too much of it.
Ultimately it's not that interesting - more comic than sinister. There's
plenty of low-level antisemitism in Russia and lots of people blaming Jews
for profiting off the collapse of the Soviet Union. It might not be true,
but who can fault them for thinking that? The biggest and loudest oligarchs
of the 1990s were Soviet Jews, and they loved the attention. They were
showoffs and reveled in their new power.
Boris Berezovsky about to be mauled by the Great Putin White, rising out of
the Russian Deep State. (The eXile, May 18, 2007.)
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Paul Klebnikov published Godfather of the Kremlin in the 2000, which meant
that he was finishing it just as Boris Yeltsin was handing power to Vladimir
Putin - all with the background support of Russia's oligarchy and the
blessing of Bill Clinton. Rereading the book now, I'm actually surprised at
what a Putin Era vibe it has. I mean, it really channels the grievances held
by Russia's nationalistic and "patriotic" military and security state elite.
It might seem strange that a White Russian like him - whose family lost
everything to the Bolsheviks - would side with Russia's nationalistic,
imperial-minded siloviki:
