Putin's Kleptocracy - Who Owns Russia - Karen Dawisha.PDF

Karen Dawisha is a professor of political science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and director of the university’s center for Russian and post-Soviet studies. She received her Ph.D from the London School of Economics in 1975 and taught at a number of British and American universities before moving to Ohio in 2000.

Vladimir Putin is thought to have as much as $100 billion in personal assets. If that is a reasonable estimate of his fortune, it would make him arguably the world's richest man, and an obvious question is how he acquired his great wealth.

Dawisha describes the origins of Putin’s kleptocratic regime. She presents extensive evidence about the Putin circle's use of public positions for personal gain, even before Putin became president in 2000. She documents the establishment of Bank Rossiya, the rise of the Ozero cooperative, the links between Putin and Petromed, "Putin's Palace" near Sochi, and the role of security officials from Putin's KGB days in Leningrad and Dresden, many of whom have maintained their contacts with Russian organized crime.

Putin's Kleptocracy is the result of years of research into the KGB and the various Russian crime syndicates. Dawisha's sources include Stasi archives, Russian insiders, investigative journalists in the U.S., Britain, Germany, Finland, France, and Italy, and western officials who served in Moscow.

Russian journalists wrote part of this story when the Russian media was still free. “Many of them died for this story, and their work has largely been scrubbed from the Internet, and even from Russian libraries," Dawisha says. "But some of that work remains."