'Putin's People' Documents the Ruthless and Relentless Reach of Kremlin Corruption (NYT Book Review)

[Mike 03]

New York Times Book Reviews
Jennifer Szalai
July 16, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

Book:

Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West
By Catherine Belton
Illustrated. 624 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

In the years that it took the journalist Catherine Belton to research and write “Putin’s People,” her voluminous yet elegant account of money and power in the Kremlin, a number of her interview subjects tried various tactics to undermine her work. One of them, “a close Putin ally” apparently alarmed by her questions about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s activities as a K.G.B. agent in Dresden in the 1980s, emphatically insisted that any rumored links between the K.G.B. and terrorist organizations had never been proved: “And you should not try to do so!” he warned.

Another source, defending Putin’s tenure as the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, took a cooler approach. Asked about a local politician named Marina Salye who found evidence of corruption in the so-called oil-for-food scheme that Putin oversaw in the early ’90s, he didn’t bother to deny her findings; he just rejected the very idea that her findings mattered. “This all happened,” he smugly acknowledged. “But this is absolutely normal trading operations. How can you explain this to a menopausal woman like that?”

Belton suggests that this is the kind of two-pronged strategy the Kremlin has used to pursue its interests at home and abroad: Deploy threats, disinformation and violence to prevent damaging secrets from getting out, or resort to a chilling cynicism that derides everything as meaningless anyway.

<snip>

“Putin’s People” ends with a chapter on Donald Trump, and what Belton calls the “network of Russian intelligence operatives, tycoons and organized-crime associates” that has encircled him since the early ’90s. The fact that Trump was frequently overwhelmed by debt provided an opportunity to those who had the cash he desperately needed. Belton documents how the network used high-end real estate deals to launder money while evading stricter banking regulations after 9/11. She’s agnostic on whether Trump was a witting accomplice who was aware of how he was being used. As one former executive from the Trump Organization put it, “Donald doesn’t do due diligence.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review-putins-people-kgb-catherine-belton.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage

[tblue37]

1. I will put this one on my reading list! nt

[Mike 03]

2. I'm really, really tempted too. But I've been buying a lot of books lately and not keeping

up with the pile I have.

What will we do with all of our Trump/Russia books when this administration is over?

[tblue37]

3. I always download a sample to my Kindle so I don't lose track of the next ones I want to read. nt

[Mike 03]

4. That's a good strategy.

[tblue37]

5. It also lets me decide if a book is worth reading. For example, I couldn't even get through the

sample of Bolton's tedious tome, so I didn't buy the book.