Sample chapters available online...
Contact me:
ed+@
+edwardtrimnell.com
(remove the "+" signs)
E C O N O M I C S
w i t h E D W A R D T R I M N E L L
January 28, 2008
What I'm reading
Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser
I can still remember the heady days of 1989 that marked the end of the Cold War. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The conventional wisdom back then was that Russia would evolve into a Western-style democracy. (The Communism gig had clearly run its course, after all.) Everyone was giddy about Russia. Great, we all thought. The Ruskies don’t want to bomb us anymore. And they’ve given up on the idea of turning Western Europe into a sausage and boiled bean-eating worker’s paradise. The German heavy metal band Scorpions even waxed poetic on the changes with a song, “Winds of Change”, in 1991. That song got a lot of airplay.
We didn’t consider that there was a third alternative: a Russia which is neither democratic nor Communist. This is the nation described in Kremlin Rising.
Baker and Glasser describe a Russian economy that is recovering from ten years of mismanagement under Boris Yeltsin. Vladamir Putin’s Russia is regaining its place in the world---but not necessarily as the liberal democratic partner of our post-Glasnost visions. Putin has firmly reestablished a system of one-party rule within Russia; now the one party is his own United Russia party instead of the Communists.
This is a book about geopolitics and power struggles in high places. But it is also a book that explores the new Russia on the ground, at an intensely personal level. There are many individual stories in Kremlin Rising. As the authors describe, some Russians are successfully becoming nouveau riche capitalists. (Moscow reportedly boasts more billionaires than any other city in the world.) Others are flailing about without direction or a social safety net, unable to cope with the Russian version of capitalism.
This is a book that no one would have predicted in 1991. It is a must-read for those of you have been watching Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
