Finally, most importantly, over Ukraine, which, whisper it quietly, in its present shape truly was a creation of Stalin and Khrushchev. He did so even while warning that Ukraine, as a puppet regime of the West, might deploy WMDs (which it agreed to give up in 1994 in exchange for protection from Russian invasion) against Russia. For readers following coverage of Russia in the American press, this treatment of recent US-Russian relations will be a revelation.

There is a blank evenness to Short’s prose, a steady accumulation of information built through intelligence and concentration on detail with emotions coiled tight, which makes this book a perfect mirror to its subject. From the very beginning, Russia was created as a supercentralized state,” he later explains in his book. His story set me on a course to become a historical fiction author; reimagining the past and bringing little-known stories to a wider audience.Harding pulls no punches, arguing the brutality of the war comes from Putin himself: ‘His apparent goal: the annihilation of a country, a culture and its citizens.

Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years’: Putin speaking at a rally in Moscow, February 2012. Putin is a terrible communicator to begin with; according to “First Person,” his KGB instructors found him withdrawn and tight-lipped, and even his former wife understood him so poorly that, when he was proposing marriage, she thought he was breaking things off.At first he’s not sure if the Spanish police are in fact Russian agents in disguise, and then he’s not sure if he will be held and extradited to Moscow – where he would likely have met the same end as his lawyer. My Vodka Politics book takes a deep dive into Russian history but is ultimately focussed on better understanding contemporary social, economic, and political developments in Russia, where Putin and Putinism are at the core. The Putin of Short’s book is not someone you would invite to dinner; he is crude and cold, arrogant and heartless. From Moscow, Putin watched the US openly intervene in elections whenever it chose, encourage the break-up of the sovereign state of Serbia using bombs, invade Iraq on a tissue of falsehoods and then overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi without any UN resolution.

I turned the wheel sharply in the other direction,” Putin says, “and my rickety Zaporozhets went up on two wheels. I'm an experimental social psychologist and Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. A new history of how Putin and his conflicts have inexorably reshaped Russia, including his devastating invasion of Ukraine.I spent a lot of time in West Germany in the 1980s and was very aware of the very painful and sometimes rather intrusive idea of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which is the coming to terms with the past.

In July, the Russian president wrote that “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia,” which is, to say the least, a peculiar definition of sovereignty.The country was ruined in so many ways – from brains to bridges – and a huge work of reconstruction is still needed to get over the terrible damage done by communism.