The New Tsar: Putin and the Long Chain of Russian Rulers

Steven Lee Meyers opens The New Tsar, his new biography of Vladimir Putin, with several pages describing thirty-year-old Putin using his wits and mettle to survive a hostile climate. But the scene is not the post-Communist Russia of the 1980s. It is Leningrad, 1941, and the Putin in question is not the man who would go on to rule Russia in the post-Perestroika twenty-first century but his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin. As Meyers makes clear, and as every Russian knows, in order to make sense of the Russia we know today, one must begin with the past.

Just as Putin grew up hearing stories about his father’s heroism in the Great Patriotic War — a narrative, Meyers writes, “reshaped by time and memory, one that might have been apocryphal in places and was certainly far from complete” — Putin’s own father undoubtedly grew up hearing his father’s stories of life before the Revolution, and so on, reaching back to the days of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. To get a sense of the long chain of Russian rulers who preceded Putin and influenced both his life and his country, check out the following biographies and memoirs.

Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie
She was born into a German family of minor nobility in 1730, but from the start, the girl who was called Sophia was determined to change her fate. She started by changing her name, to Catherine, when she traveled to Russia at the age of fourteen, intent on marrying a prince. She got her wish, and went on to rule Russia for more than three decades, a period that included the tumult of the French Revolution. As Massie writes, Catherine was truly ahead of her time, and helped prepare the country for the challenges and opportunities of modernity.

Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed
When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power during the Russian Revolution, John Reed, a poet and journalist from America, was there. A friend of Lenin’s and passionate advocate of revolutionary socialism, Reed wrote a firsthand account of the events of November 1917, giving both historical perspective and man-on-the-scene descriptions of the exhilaration and chaos of one regime toppling as another came to power. Both an artifact of a time of incredible optimism and also a portrait of Lenin as a man and a leader, Reed’s book is a valuable time capsule of Russia at the start of the post-Imperialist era.

Stalin by Stephen Kotkin
Millions died as the result of Stalin’s indomitable will, and millions more saw their lives and families destroyed. But the man behind this sweeping, deadly power was born in a position of utter powerlessness. The son of a poor cobbler, Joseph Stalin trained to be a seminarian before he got swept up in the fervor of the Russian Revolution. Following Lenin’s death, he shrewdly consolidated power to take over leadership of the Soviet Union, and imposed harsh policies of collectivization and industrialization, sending all critics and adversaries to the Gulag. As Kotkin writes in this first volume of his biography, Stalin’s humble beginnings only set the stage for his thirst for total domination, making the breadth of his reach at the height of his power all the more extraordinary.

Khrushchev by William Taubman
Stalin’s successor was a complicated man and Russia still struggles to make sense of his legacy, Taubman writes in the first full-length American biography of the Russian leader. Khrushchev supported Stalin’s brutal regime for twenty years and defended his murderous tactics. But he also publicly denounced the dictator’s crimes, and brought to light many secrets of his reign of terror. As a leader himself, Khrushchev reformed Communism, and brought the world to the edge of annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Gorbachev: On My Country and the World by Mikhail Gorbachev
As the last leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev presided over the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet regime in Eastern Europe, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and the introduction of democratic process. But the road to democracy was hardly smooth, and the country suffered food shortages, ethnic violence, and increased organized crime. In this memoir, the former leader reflects on his tenure and the problems facing modern Russia and the world in general, which now lie in the hands of leaders like Putin.