“Live in Luxury, Reign until Death” – Putin’s goal

详细摘要

A new book by two Russian investigative journalists describes Vladimir Putin as a man obsessed by money and ready to do anything to keep power. They sum up his ideology – “Live in…

A new book by two Russian investigative journalists describes Vladimir Putin as a man obsessed by money and ready to do anything to keep power. They sum up his ideology – “Live in Luxury, Reign until Death”.

“The Tsar in Person – How Vladimir Putin Deceived Us All”, nearly 800 pages long, is the result of 20 years of research by Roman Badanine and Mikhail Rubin, which has been published in Russian and French. It won the Grand Prix Strasbourg, a French literary prize this year.

Both men fled Russia in 2021 after agents of the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, raided their homes in Moscow. They left Rubin’s passport on his table – a tacit instruction to leave the country. They live now in the United States.

Both were formerly accredited to the Kremlin. They conducted hundreds of interviews for the book. It presents Putin as a modern-day tsar, without ideology or convictions, a dictator capable of “limitless cruelty” who sees himself as above morality and laws.

“For anyone who has followed his acts and movements day after day, it is clear that Putin has absolutely no ideology. The war in Ukraine has made this clear: it is not an extension of his ideas, merely a means of staying in power,” they write.

In the 1990s, Putin was not anti-Western. He visited France with his family and bought a house for one of his favourite mistresses near Nice, in southern France. But, in the late 2000s, he found it useful to create an external enemy out of the West. He saw that anti-Americanism was popular among the public.

The book describes him as the richest man in Russia, owning land, companies and palaces like an Italianate complex near Gelendzhik on the Black Sea. Construction, which began in 2005, cost an estimated US$1 billion, in a domain of 74 hectares. But Putin hides his ownership through offshore companies and the names of friends and associates.

“In the 2000s, during his first two mandates, there was a second wave of privatisation, enabling those close to him to profit and…

“He…

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