Gal Beckerman, The New York Times Book Review
“What Steven Lee Myers gets so right in The New Tsar, his comprehensive new biography - the most informative and extensive so far in English - is that at bottom Putin simply feels that he’s the last one standing between order and chaos… What Myers offers is the portrait of a man swinging from crisis to crisis with one goal: projecting strength… A knowledgeable and thorough biography… Putin himself now represents the chaos he so abhors - the chaos that will surely come in his wake.” The great strength of Myers’s book is the way it shows how chance events and Putin’s own degeneration gradually cleared the path to the Ukraine crisis… Putin emerges as neither a KGB automaton, nor the embodiment of Russian historical traditions, nor an innocent victim of Western provocations and NATO’s hubris, but rather as a flawed individual who made his own choices at crucial moments and thereby shaped history.” What is most striking, given the aura of steely consistency that Putin cultivates, is how he has changed over the years…. Judicious and comprehensive, it pulls back the veil… from one of the world’s most secretive leaders. “Steven Lee Myers’s The New Tsar is not the first biography of Putin, but it is the strongest to date. The New Tsar is a staggering achievement, a deeply researched and essential biography of one of the most important and destabilizing world leaders in recent history, a man whose merciless rule has become inextricably bound to Russia's forseeable future.
On the other, Putin has ushered in a new authoritarianism-unyielding in its brutal repression of dissent and newly assertive politically and militarily in regions like Crimea and the Middle East. On the one hand, Putin's many domestic reforms-from tax cuts to an expansion of property rights-have helped reshape the potential of millions of Russians whose only experience of democracy had been crime, poverty, and instability after the fall of the Soviet Union. This gripping narrative of Putin's rise to power recounts Putin's origins-from his childhood of abject poverty in Leningrad to his ascent through the ranks of the KGB, and his eventual consolidation of rule in the Kremlin. As the world struggles to confront a bolder Russia, the importance of understanding the formidable and ambitious Vladimir Putin has never been greater.
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