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The Economist April 25th 2020
2 Bezukhov is forever thinking one thing and
saying another; young Nikolai Rostov, en-
amoured of the tsar, is eager to die, then Made men
bolts away like a terrified hare.
“The amplified extremities of emotion
during extreme times,” tweeted Kristin
Boldon, a reader in Minneapolis. “I can re-
late.” Tolstoy’s genius is to capture these
confused internal battles, which are never
more evident than amid the cabin fever of
quarantine—the oscillating closeness and
exasperation with loved ones, claustro-
phobia jostling with odd hints of libera-
tion. “He shows us we can be many things Wemerged from the Soviet ashes, West-
at once,” says Ms Hughes, who compiles
the observations of Ms Li and others into a
weekly newsletter. People are always com-
plicated, Tolstoy insists; all must constant- resurface as a diminished but coherent
ly find new footing in a shifting world.
Borodino to Bergamo
As great art can, the novel is helping its
readers adjust to their own uncertain reali-
ty. As George Saunders, another American
novelist, puts it, Tolstoy observes human-
kind “the way God sees us”, with empathy
and forgiveness, implicitly encouraging
readers to view themselves with the same
generosity. The book club itself embodies
the common humanity that the coronavi-
rus has pointed up: a paradoxically rich
connection with strangers who are widely
dispersed yet linked by their predicaments
and imaginations.
Whether listening to an audiobook
while walking or curling up at the end of an
exhausting homeschooling day, thousands
of isolated souls are on the same page (as a
side-benefit, struggling bookshops have
seen a welcome run on the novel). The
readers are an entertaining, highly literate
bunch, weighing in every day with erudite
analyses and favourite quotes. There are
line-by-line comparisons of different
translations, and revelations about Tolstoy
and his miserable marriage to Sofia, who
while bearing and bringing up several chil-
dren edited the manuscript seven times.
There are selfies with the book, photos of
pets with the book, a bowl of borscht with
the book, links to films and paintings and
poems, even a Tolstoy tattoo featuring the
comet of 1812. It is not too late to start: there
are still hundreds of pages to go.
Art imitates life and life responds in
kind. One reader tweeted the famous chart
made by Charles Minard of Napoleon’s
losses in his campaign of 1812—the same
chart to which, a day later, a critical-care
doctor in New York referred to illustrate the
winnowing of hospital supplies as the pan-
demic struck. Another reader shared a line
from a letter that Vasily Grossman, some-
times called “the Soviet Tolstoy”, wrote to
his daughter from the battle of Stalingrad.
“Bombers. Shelling. Hellish thunder,”
Grossman reported. “It’s impossible to read
anything except ‘War and Peace’.” 7
Power in Russia
Putin’s People. By Catherine Belton. Farrar,
Straus and Giroux; 640 pages; $35. William
Collins; £21.99
hen a bedraggled Russian phoenix
ern pundits were divided. Would the new
creature sink into chaos, as often seemed
inevitable; or, with Western help, would it
state? A decade later, when an energetic
Vladimir Putin succeeded an ailing Boris
Yeltsin, Russia-watchers were seduced by a
different false binary. Some thought Mr Pu-
tin would press on with creating a law-
based, outward-looking market system.
Others expected corruption and criminal-
ity to keep Russia poor and weak.
Such debates often say more about the
biases of futurologists than about the fu-
ture. As Catherine Belton’s powerful and
meticulously reported new book shows,
the apparent anarchy of the post-Soviet
world has instead given way to a massive
concentration of wealth and power, which
is used by the new Russian elite to quash
dissent at home and project force abroad.
Her subtitle is blunt and revealing:
“How the kgb Took Back Russia and then
Took on the West.” It also raises questions.
For starters, what exactly is the kgb? Liter- boss of the Yukos oil company. She re-
ally the “Committee for State Security”, one
of the two pillars (with the Communist
Party) of the Soviet state, whose successor
agencies, above all the fsb, which focuses
on domestic security, have been ever more
dominant. More broadly, Russia’s intelli-
Prince of darkness
Books & arts 75
gence community includes military espio-
nage—and shadowy individuals who have
grown rich through their proximity to this
spooky world.
But as Ms Belton shows, the continuity
between the Soviet agency that nurtured
Mr Putin as a young officer, and the securi-
ty-based behemoths that bestride today’s
Russia lies less in institutions than in men-
tality. It is a mindset that believes anybody
can be turned; that advantage can be
sought in any situation, including anar-
chy; and that collaboration on ever-shift-
ing terms is possible with any partner,
from organised crime to Christian clergy.
Drawing on many interviews and dili-
gent perusal of documents, Ms Belton, for-
merly a Moscow correspondent for the Fi-
nancial Times, traces the links between Mr
Putin’s formation in the kgbworld, his ear-
ly career as a cold warrior in East Germany
and his increasingly open confrontation
with the West. Instead of exhorting Russia
to take its liberal medicine, many Western-
ers now worry about protecting their own
politics from Russian subversion.
The book charts the milestones of this
process, including the string of lethal
bombings that coincided with Mr Putin’s
ascent in 1999; later acts of terror in the
Caucasus and Moscow; the crash of 2008
that hit Russia hard; Mr Putin’s re-election
in 2012; and the intervention in Ukraine in
2014 and ensuing sanctions. In a narrative
tour de force, Ms Belton explains how these
developments affected the Russian elite.
The pivotal event, she thinks, was the
downfall in 2003 of Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
counts his trial, and the appropriation of
his assets, with passionate precision.
As she shows, Russia’s masters covered
these seizures in a cloak of legal procedure
which, in its sheer complexity, helped
transform the Russian judiciary into an or-
gan of the superstate. Those masters also
thought (rightly) that Western objections
could be parried by offering investors some
nuggets from the energy giant they were
creating. Indeed, all the current or former
insiders in this book assume that, beneath
a thin layer of democratic bluster, Western
elites are biddable and buyable.
For all her insights into ruthless minds,
Ms Belton does at least raise the possibility
that some of those who surrounded Mr Pu-
tin in his early years in office sincerely be-
lieved in something: that the capitalist
model of the 1990s had conceded too much
to a hostile West. One who stands out is
Sergei Pugachev, a businessman and erst-
while adviser, who claims credit for guid-
ing the switch to state capitalism with a
nationalist tinge. He fell foul of the au-
thorities after 2012 but makes no apology
for his previous role. Only his efforts to
turn Mr Putin into a sincere Christian were
a waste of breath, he tellingly concludes. 7