Russian President Vladimir Putin, who made a career in the KGB, the Soviet Union’s main intelligence service between 1954 and 1991, associates himself, thanks to this position, with the corrupt oligarchs who seize power in Russia during the fall of communism, before bribing Western officials. This is the thesis, in a shocking book, of the British journalist Catherine Belton, who worked in Moscow.
Ex-correspondent in this capital of the London daily FinancialTimesshe interviewed a multitude of Russian economic and political personalities to unravel the mystery of the astonishing transformation of their country since 1991. This is the fruit of her gigantic work Putin’s Menwhich, translated from English by Olivier Bougard and Anne Confuron, is full of testimonies, sometimes questionable, but offering, on the whole, guarantees of veracity.
Relying, in addition to testimonies from Russians, on that of Thomas E. Graham, American expert on Russia at Yale University and sometimes adviser to the United States Embassy in Moscow, Catherine Belton emphasizes that “the revolution that ended seven decades of communist rule was done almost without bloodshed because many within the system did not want the Party or socialism to survive”. She concludes: “The collapse was insider trading. »
Excerpt from “Putin’s Men”
This upheaval goes beyond the borders of the Russian Federation, which emerged from the defunct Soviet Union. The British essayist believes that Putin’s men aim “to build a bridge with Russia’s imperial past”. She points out that Putin himself, reviving the religious pretext of Russia’s Orthodox imperial past, “charted a path that overthrew what remained of the country’s democracy and that he sought to unite the country by opposing it to the West”.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is Russia’s most vivid expression of imperial nostalgia and desire to once again become a global superpower. Catherine Belton explains this war by the fear of seeing the Ukrainian capital escape Russian control. She detects a paranoia in it, which she sums up as follows: “The West was plotting to keep kyiv away from Moscow. »
But the least democratic of American presidents, Donald Trump, remained, in the eyes of Putin’s men, the objective ally of a dictatorial Russia. The serious financial problem of his casino in Atlantic City, in 2014, allows Catherine Belton to write: “Trump had survived his first threat of bankruptcy and the Russians were among those who had helped him. »
Despite the geographical distance, Putin and Trump are very similar. Both are haunted by nostalgia for the superpowers that were their countries. Strange harmony!