Leading UK journalist Angus Roxburgh has written a book about Putin and Putinism, drawing on his extensive experience in Russia (including a stint as a media adviser to the Putin team):

The book is good in revealing all sorts of fascinating stories about the Putin period. My favourite is the one where Putin produces a dog which sniffs Angela Merkel’s legs, Putin knowing that Merkel is scared of dogs.

But the book annoyingly strives to find an angle to balance the KGB-isation of Russia with the argument that in responding to the collapse of Russia the West has been ‘insensitive’.

Ha ha ha!

Here’s an extract my review over at LSE EUROPP:

The problem with this book is that Roxburgh seems to think that Americans and Europeans who are unimpressed with this sort of Russia are somehow misguided. Explaining Putin’s policies and instincts in terms of his fanatical Soviet KGB training is not enough. He strains for a grand unifying theme to explain why Putin and Russia have moved back towards this corrupt unstable autocracy. He claims to find the answer in the claim that the West‘s (and especially Washington’s) failure to ‘understand’ Russia has led to ‘patronising’ and ‘insensitive’ policies which have somehow provoked the Russian elite to behave badly. We are all guilty.

This thesis is launched as the book begins, in a facile portrayal of the Western policy approach in the early Yeltsin years. It recycles without question a familiar but banal argument that the West crassly imposed capitalist ‘shock therapy’ on Russia. In fact the shock and ensuing confusion and (yes) poverty for many millions of Russians came about because the Soviet system itself abruptly keeled over. Ministries emptied out. The machine stopped.

There was no policy tool-box for dealing with this situation. Far from being patronizing or prescriptive, Western governments fell over themselves to be helpful and accommodating to Russia’s new leaders. After WW2 we ran extensive courses for influential Germans in ‘de-Nazification’. Nothing comparable by way of de-communistification was even contemplated for Russia, let alone for the rest of the Soviet Union. We did not even insist as a reasonable price for huge programmes of assistance that Lenin, the supreme symbol of communist terror, be taken from Red Square and given a decent burial.

Throughout the book Roxburgh finds himself torn between saying that we were too tough, or not tough enough. Somehow after all those supposedly patronising Western experts turned up in Moscow the Russian economy in a few years’ time was growing strongly, private initiative flourishing as never before. He seems to think that Western governments should have called for war crimes trials of senior Russians involved in smashing Chechnya; how ‘insensitive’ would that have been? Worst, he uncritically rehashes the paranoid Soviet/Putinistic assertion that the West has been ‘encircling’ Russia.

This last claim needs nailing. It takes Russia’s ‘concerns’ as the defining norm and relegates everyone else’s: Russia ‘encircles’ much of the world. Anything which happens across nine+ time zones somewhere near Russia can be presented by self-serving Russian extremists as ‘anti-Russia encirclement’.

The strategic policy issue is simple. For seventy years the Soviet Union pumped out violence, corruption and lies on an incomprehensible scale. So the basic logic of today’s situation is that the descendants of those responsible for so much brutality need to show a healthy contrition if they want their ‘concerns’ to weigh heavily with the rest of us. Today’s Russia is not responsible for the crimes of the Soviet Union. But an honest Russia can not rummage around in the mouldy bun of Soviet history and extract raisins of glory, any more than Angela Merkel can say positive things about Hitler and expect to be taken seriously…

Plenty more where that came from.