Book Reviews

15 August 2025

by Martin Dewhirst

Martin Dewhirst reviews Roman Badanin, Mikhail Rubin, Tsar’ sobstvennoi personoi: Kak Vladimir Putin obmanul vsekh nas, Babook (no place of publication provided), 2025, 493 pp.,  $29, ISBN 9781965369814 [this book has yet to be translated into English; its title could be rendered as ‘The Tsar Himself. How Putin duped us all’ – RiR].

“OMG! Not another book about Putin?”, I sense some pessimists are thinking.  “Why read this long tome when Putin’s demise will soon be officially announced?”, a few optimists might be wondering. Well, this is certainly the best book in Russian about the ‘former’ KGB officer that I have read. (I should admit that I still haven’t tackled Philip Short’s ‘Putin: His Life and Times, 2022, 864 pp., which to my surprise isn’t mentioned in the book under review.)

Badanin’s and Rubin’s tome is extremely readable, has 818 endnotes and includes several good photographs, including those of Putin’s sons, Ivan and Vladimir Spiridonov (p. 241). The authors evidently don’t believe the rumours that Putin has any Georgian connections, or that he is not the father of his elder daughter, or that he has had certain homosexual experiences (rumours or evidence of which may have contributed to the murder in London of Aleksandr Litvinenko). Even so, President Putin appears in this book as a quite exceptionally unpleasant and poorly educated person, even in comparison with President Trump (who does not warrant a single mention in this fairly lengthy volume). Is the latter less or more dangerous than the former?

The authors deserve to be congratulated for not using the word ‘post-Soviet’ about twenty-first-century Russia and for not claiming that the Cold War ended quite a long time ago. However, they don’t say clearly enough that since 1991 ‘the Kremlin’ has been less important than ‘the Lubyanka’ (a point that Yury Fel’shtinsky has made very convincingly, IMHO), and that the desperate attempt to slow down and, ideally, reverse the Decline and prevent the eventual Fall of the Soviet and Russian Empires has long been and still is central to the tactics and strategy of Putin, his closest colleagues, and maybe their successors. (You may have noticed that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov was sporting a sweater with the letters USSR [CCCP, not RF] last weekend. What exactly was he trying to convey, and to whom?) Can Russia thrive as a mere country? Is its New Economic Policy changing again, as it did towards the end of the 1920s? These questions are raised in Part 3, chapters 2 and 3 – see especially pages 164 to 178. However, if you currently have time to read only one chapter, I suggest you choose Part 4, Chapter 4, ‘FSB vzryvayet vsyo’, pp. 302-325, especially pages 310 and 314.

This book is very well and clearly written (I found its periodic use of ‘odnim slovom’  [‘in a word’], – followed by several or many words – rather irritating) and its only weakness is the very incomplete index (though it does contain the key word visyak, a suspended court case). Two of Putin’s most important KGB colleagues, Chemezov and Patrushev, either or both of whom might play an important role if they outlive him, deserve our full attention. Chemezov isn’t in the Index at all, but you can find him on pages 155, 246, 250 and 408. Patrushev gets an incomplete entry, but you can find him also on pages 87, 99, 213, 246, 295-6, 304, 311, 313, 316-7, 320-1, 325, 347, 355, 471 and 478. I hope the Index is improved in the second edition of this very valuable and possibly world-saving book.