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The title PUTIN: HIS LIFE AND TIMES mimics William Taubman's famous book title 'Gorbachev: His Life and Times.' The two works stand in alliance as deeply penetrating stories with psychological twists, based on a wide range of sources and interviews. 600 pages of PUTIN (plus 200 pages of notes) renders every development of Putin's life starting from his parents' background and ending, though slightly in a rush, in the fall of 2022, after the first months of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine. Philip Short doesn't shy away from portraying Putin as a human being and, as such, a product of the Soviet system and its beliefs as well as a united whole of many contradictory personal traits.

With leniency, equal to Taubman's sympathy toward Mikhail Gorbachev, the author describes Putin's not well-off childhood where a wrong step - considering young Vladimir's stubbornness - could have led to a different outcome, not as a president but criminal. While picturing the subsequent years, Short tries to remain balanced: he doesn't use hindsight of the year 2023, with war with Ukraine raging and Russia being a pariah as a consequence, to present Putin as an unrepented villain, the West as a savior and beacon of democracy. In his opinion, the opposition between American exceptionalism and Russian exceptionalism is the cause of the current escalation, reminiscent of the Cold War years when both countries viewed their relations in zero-win terms. Concessions are made only in neutral spheres like space exploration, but on the whole (my ruminations here), the countries' negotiations look like (Russian saying) a dialogue between a deaf person and a mute one: neither side hears the other, and each side considers itself superior over another. Each side feels infallible in its pursuit of national interests, disregarding small players that are trying to navigate between the two giants and not get crushed in the process. Ukraine has a value as second Vietnam, a battlefield of American democracy vs. Russia's authoritarian regime, not as an independent country with its population, economics, and policy.

If you are a Russia hawk, Timothy Snyder alike, there is a huge possibility you would strongly disagree - or even be disgusted - by Short's position toward Putin's politics as a combination of calculated steps and the necessity to react to unpredictable events. Invasion of Georgia as a counterweight to Kosovo? No way! Cuban missile crisis vs. American missiles in Poland? It's not the same thing! Short does equate these events as does his object of research, Putin. This leads us to the interesting question of who is right and who is wrong in such debates. While admitting the shortcomings of the American democracy, you, as a Russia hawk, would vehemently advocate for it to be adopted worldwide and, in some cases, advise me to go live in Russia or North Korea without the freedoms of the abovementioned democracy. I'd point out once again the deficiencies of any state system, and the futile dialogue will go on and on, and on... But the strong side of democracy is a potentially wide variety of opinions.

Between these two extremes - those who loathed Putin and everything he stood for and the contrarians who tried to understand what made him act as he did - there was no middle ground. To propose a balanced account of Russia during the years that Trump was in power was like trying to argue that Hitler had redeeming features. (p.603)

PUTIN: HIS LIFE AND TIMES brilliantly, in-depth, answers the question of why. Your acceptance of the answer is another matter.

My reviews of books about previous Soviet/Russian leaders:
Nikita Khrushchev
Leonid Brezhnev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Boris Yeltsin by Tim Colton (still on my TBR list)