Putin's Russia

 
 
Putin's Russia
The Rise of a Dictator
by Darryl Cunningham

Drawn & Quarterly
2022

 

 

Putin's Russia is a work of graphic nonfiction, maybe graphic journalism. 

 
It's also a book overtaken by events, since it was published in February 2022, but completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fairness to Cunningham, something similar could happen to anyone who writes about still-living world leaders, and he does conclude with a warning about Putin's continuing threat to global democracy.

 
Cunningham's art uses thick lines and only a little solid color. His images accompany the text much like the visuals in an episode of Frontline, or the like.

 
The book briefly covers Putin's childhood and his work as a KGB officer in East Germany. The important part of the story probably picks up with Gorbachev's dismantling of the Soviet empire, when Putin starts as a corrupt municipal bureaucrat in 90s St Petersburg and quickly rises in the government, probably aided by his connection to the KGB, until he is Yeltsin's chosen successor, and the second president of 'democratic' Russia.

 
In a typical early incident, a non-corrupt city official realizes that Putin has been authorized to sell state assets to buy food, but instead he'd just been keeping the money. Ordinary people went hungry, Putin got rich with stolen money, the city councilors who voted to punish him were all dismissed by the mayor, and the official who reported him was intimidated into going into exile. The most unusual thing about this case, compared to Putin's future pattern of conduct, is that the official who challenged his theft was not murdered by hired thugs.

 
A lot of the rest is probably well-known by now, although I appreciated Cunningham showing how badly the post-Soviet rebuilding of Russia went wrong, and how likely it was that some oligarch or other would consolidate power over the others by using assassinations and selective prosecution (for the same corruption all of them engage in.) 

 
If Putin is distinguished from the crowd of kleptocrats, it is perhaps by his unusual brutality, such as when he arranged for the KGB's successor agency to bomb apartment buildings in Moscow in order to blame the crime on Chechan separatists and use that to justify an invasion and carpet bombing.

 
Cunningham's focus widens and his narrative becomes more diffuse as we reach the present day, and it becomes harder to decide which incidents are most important. The book ends with a call to action for the US and UK governments to crack down of money laundering and stop treating Putin like a normal world leader, rather than a mobster with a country.