I was a bit out of my depth with this one, as it’s a long-winded and pretty dense exploration about why Russia is so drawn to authoritarianism and how Putin plays into that idea of a strong leader at the helm. At times it read more like a rant than a measured argument and I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether all the author’s conclusions and his analyses are in fact correct, although it felt pretty convincing and as he is very much an insider he no doubt knows what he’s talking about. Andrei Kovalev was a diplomat and a member of Gorbachev’s staff, and worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Yeltsin and Putin. He documents the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lead up to Putin’s assumption of control. As a career bureaucrat he had privileged access to state secrets, an in depth knowledge of the Kremlin and, perhaps more importantly, of the way Russians view the world and their role within it. He talks about the Russian “slave psychology” from the time of the Czars to the present. He has little time for Putin and that’s when the book becomes more of a diatribe and a rather tedious one at that. Kovalev currently lives and works in Belgium, and as he concentrates on the period form 1989-2004 it could be that the book is a bit out of date now. However, there’s much here that is thought-provoking and insightful, and although not a book perhaps for the general reader, certainly an important one for those who need to know more about what makes Russia tick.