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The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West | 
 enlarge | Author: Edward Lucas
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 13991
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0230606121
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.4701821
EAN: 9780230606128
ASIN: 0230606121
Publication Date: February 19, 2008
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Product Description
In late 1999 when Vladimir Putin was named Prime Minister, Russia was a budding democracy. Multiple parties campaigned for seats in the Duma, the nation’s parliament. The media criticized the government freely. Eight years later as Putin completes his second term as president of Russia and announces his bid for prime minister, the country is under a repressive regime. Human rights abuses are widespread. The Kremlin is openly hostile to the West. Yet the United States and Europe have been slow to confront the new reality, in effect, helping Russia win what experts are now calling the New Cold War. Edward Lucas, former Moscow Bureau Chief for The Economist, offers a harrowing portrait from inside Russia as well as a sobering political assessment of what the New Cold War will mean for the world. In this big, hard hitting and urgently needed book, he shows how * Russia is pursuing global energy markets
* Neighboring nations are being coerced back into the former Soviet orbit
* Journalists and dissidents are being silenced
* Foreign investments and private enterprises are routinely defrauded
* Putin is laying the groundwork for controlling industry and planning his new role as prime minister Drawing on new and hitherto reported material, The New Cold War brilliantly anticipates what is in store for the new Russia and what the world should be doing.
Book Description
In late 1999 when Vladimir Putin was named Prime Minister, Russia was a budding democracy. Multiple parties campaigned for seats in the Duma, the nation’s parliament. The media criticized the government freely. Eight years later as Putin completes his second term as president of Russia and announces his bid for prime minister, the country is under a repressive regime. Human rights abuses are widespread. The Kremlin is openly hostile to the West. Yet the United States and Europe have been slow to confront the new reality, in effect, helping Russia win what experts are now calling the New Cold War. Edward Lucas, former Moscow Bureau Chief for The Economist, offers a harrowing portrait from inside Russia as well as a sobering political assessment of what the New Cold War will mean for the world. In this big, hard hitting and urgently needed book, he shows how * Russia is pursuing global energy markets
* Neighboring nations are being coerced back into the former Soviet orbit
* Journalists and dissidents are being silenced
* Foreign investments and private enterprises are routinely defrauded
* Putin is laying the groundwork for controlling industry and planning his new role as prime minister Drawing on new and hitherto reported material, The New Cold War brilliantly anticipates what is in store for the new Russia and what the world should be doing.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Russophobic Psycho Babble April 2, 2008
Russian Studies (Miami, FL)
20 out of 37 found this review helpful
Poorly written and lacking a balanced approach to a complex issue. Typical of Edward Lucas, he has little understanding of the cultural differences between Russia and the West and he lacks the necessary intellectual insight to bridge that gap. He sensationalizes for dramatic effect (e.g.: "Russia's vengeful, xenophobic and ruthless rulers have turned the sick man of Europe into a menacing bully."). Give me a break! Not worth the paper its printed on.
 Is Russia assembling a new Axis of Evil? May 18, 2008
Pieter (Johannesburg)
19 out of 24 found this review helpful
Russia is heading in an ominous direction that poses a threat to its own citizens, neighboring states and the world as a whole. This book with its disturbing message takes a hard look at the Russian ruling elite which emerged almost entirely from the ranks of the old KGB. Harboring resentment and malice against the West, this elite's attitude is crude and unsophisticated compared to the hostility of the Brussels Eurocracy towards the USA and Israel. The Russian government now directly competes with the West on various fronts, both economical and political. Genuine freedom of expression and the rule of law are long gone and the state has grabbed all political and economic power that matters. Putin's term "managed" or "sovereign" democracy really means a particularly malignant form of Tsarism or Fascism. In her 2004 book Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy, Anna Politkovskaya correctly observed that the brutality in Chechnya was an omen of Russia's future cruelty to all its citizens.
For a long time the West refused to notice. It should have woken up during the second Chechen war but instead there was only isolated protest in Europe and the USA, primarily from private bodies like the Jamestown Foundation and Italy's Radical Party. When Putin seized all influential media the West opened one eye then shut it again. When Khodorkovsky was jailed the same thing happened, and when the murder of dissidents and journalists became commonplace more observers expressed alarm though government criticism in the Western Alliance remained rather muted. This license to kill spread beyond the borders of Russia with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in the UK at a time when Tony Blair was almost embarrassingly amicable with Putin. More detailed information on the Litvinenko murder is available in Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB by Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko, and The Litvinenko File: The Life and Death of a Russian Spy by Martin Sixsmith.
The media now portrays Putin as a hero that rescued the country from the "chaos" of the 1990s since the political class has revived the Soviet habit of revisionism. And it uses the Orthodox Church for spreading the ideology of patriotism and Russian nationalism, a policy that inflames xenophobia resulting in violent racist attacks on non-Slav and non-Russian citizens. There have also been signs that this church is reverting to its infamous history of antisemitism. Militarism and imperialism are integral to the new nationalism although Lucas believes that the aim is the "Finlandisation" of Europe rather than territorial expansion. In the West Russia has plenty of paid propagandists plus the romantically deluded species known as Russophiles for whom this failed state with its history of genocide, sadism and misery can do no wrong.
Lucas charts the rise of Putin (explained in horrifying detail in Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror) and the course of the new cold war in a thorough and systematic manner, concluding with advice for the West on how to conduct and win it. Although he doesn't soon expect any military threat, Russia's nuclear stockpile must be reckoned with. The weapons employed in this multifaceted undeclared war are oil, gas and the revenues generated by their export. Instead of allocating it to real needs, the Kremlin uses the income to further its imperialist ambitions by acquiring strategic assets in Europe. Some of it flows straight to the elite for private investment abroad.
This war is pursued while Russia suffers from demographic collapse, massive corruption and widespread lawlessness. Ex-KGB operatives are in charge of all major companies and state enterprises, ensuring more inefficiency and corruption. On the international stage, not only has Russia behaved like a thug against Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia and Georgia, it is supplying weapons to rogue states Iran and Syria and their terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. There is no shortage of willing collaborators in the West, like previous German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, although western investors have begun to realize that investment in Russia is not worth the risk. When foreign companies resist state interference they risk confiscation. A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia exposes the mentality, power and incompetence of the ruling class.
The geopolitical implications are staggering, as the Putin gang eagerly befriends all enemies of the West. Russia is pursuing an energy policy aimed at strangling the liberal democracies by e.g. establishing a gas cartel. Lucas warns the West to get its house in order by inter alia cleaning up financial markets and reconsidering Russia's G8 membership. Should a criminal state be allowed to remain in a club of civilized nations? Whatever other evils result from Russia's abandonment of Western values, it is sure to become a more barbaric place for its citizens and a considerably more dangerous international player. One may confidently expect it to supply Iran with nuclear weapons technology and to cooperate with every loathsome thugocracy that defiles the planet.
Evidence is accumulating that Russia seeks an alliance with the Islamic world and a partial restoration of the Soviet Empire through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of which China is a member. The Kremlin ignores the real threat from China despite the particularly dire demographic and infrastructural implosion in Russia's far east. However, the Shanghai arrangement will bring the Turkic speaking states of Central Asia (plus Persian Tajikistan) back into the bear's embrace. Turkey's future role will be crucial; it remains to be seen where its recent Islamist trend will take it and how its foreign policy might change in case of almost certain exclusion from the inner core of the EU. Of course economic ties to Europe are assured but the country might establish closer relations with the aforementioned Central Asian states.
Should Israel be forced to act against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah an intensified Russian engagement in the Middle East conflict cannot be excluded. It might reluctantly be drawn into direct military intervention by its humiliated and devastated allies in the region. For those interested in prophetic speculation, I recommend Epicenter by Joel Rosenberg, an engrossing book based on the prophecies of Ezekiel about an anti-Israel confederacy which increasingly resembles an expanded axis of evil, an anti-western alliance that Russia is so vigorously pursuing.
What Everyone Needs to Know About Russia Today March 6, 2008
Dave Essel (on the web)
13 out of 22 found this review helpful
Russia has always been a mystery that resulted in books being written about the country from the Marquis de Custine's 1839 Journey Through Eternal Russia onwards.
During the First Cold War, it became traditional for the Moscow correspondents of the big papers to write their big 'explain the USSR' book on completion of their tour of duty or following their expulsion.
Edward Lucas' book is a grand continuation of the tradition. It is a superb political history of Russia's muddy waters and murky eddies as yet again the country turns its back on European/Western norms and takes its exceptionalist route to fresh disasters.
Lucid and clear (as one would expect from a writer for the Economist), it presents in a short volume all one needs to know about Russia today and the course it is taking. As one often finds with really good books, this is a great read for both the specialist, who will find fresh angles on things he already knows about and enjoy the pithiness with which everything is put, and also the for the intelligent person wishing to take up a new subject, as he will find brief yet comprehensive coverage.
In addition, this excellent book should be compulsory reading for every Western politician whether they have to deal with Russia themselves or not. Lucas is right - a new cold war is upon us. The argumented proof is in the book. We need to be ready for it: reading this book will be a good start.
Behind a facade of democracy March 11, 2008
Raimonds (Riga,Livonia,EU)
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
The book provides a trenchant analysis of Russia's identity crises in the past two decades. The quests for that identity are still continuing and becoming increasingly dangerous for Russia's near and far neighbors. Edward Lucas argues, that the Kremlin has been unable to define its ideology after the end of the Cold War, and instead has filled up ideological vacuum in Russia with anti-Westernism. Russian leaders seek to win hearts and minds of people inside, and even outside Russia, by throwing down a gage to Western values, disputing their very existence. The book proves their attempt has so far been partly successful, as far as foreign businesses dealing with Russia are concerned.
Readers will be caught up by Lucas' talent to juggle with historical facts, figures and web sources to prove his statements, no matter whether that is the total annual amount of bribes paid in Russia ($ 240 billion) or the assessment of Putin's German language skills (passable). His aptitude to bring those into play is at least as efficient as the Russian president's answers in his annual tele-press conferences.
The author's word of warning for Western business and political leaders is not to be complacent and talk airily about "a strategic partnership" with Russia at the time, when the idea, that peoples of the Eastern Europe might genuinely wish to be in alliance with worlds free countries is dismissed as sentimental nonsense. Every Russian investment, as discussed in the chapter seven, is politically loaded expression of foreign policy made by Kremlin Inc., but energy dialogue between Russia and the West "resembles a battle-hardened chess grand master playing against a bunch of inattentive and squabbling amateurs". Instead talking about non-existing partnership he advises Western leaders to take a strategic pause, which would send to Russian politicians a powerful signal, making it obvious, that their thinking doesn't lead to a new civilization but a dead end.
A MUST-READ Book March 31, 2008
Morris Goldstein (San Francisco, CA)
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
Edward Lucas is one of the most well-informed---if not the single best- informed--- Westerners on Russia and its role in international politics. At the same time, he has the ability to write with the greatest clarity about all the dreadfully dangerous actions Mr. Putin has taken since seizing power. Everyone who seeks to understand the true nature of the Russian threat to the world simply must buy and read this brilliant book. Written with the crisp brilliance expected of him by Edward Lucas' longtime readers, his newest readers will understand why he is so admired, so trusted and so unfailingly correct in his conclusions. While subtler than Stalin (not a high standard), Putin is obviously a grotesquely evil, amoral and kleptomaniacal national leader whose every move belongs under Edward Lucas' brilliant scrutiny. If you fail to buy and read this book, you will be a lesser citizen of the world for your inaction. This is one of the absolute MUST READ books in print.
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