The Extraordinary Rise of the Russian Empire

Download The Extraordinary Rise of the Russian Empire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Dorrance Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1480944033
Total Pages : 479 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (89 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Extraordinary Rise of the Russian Empire by : Arthur C. Hasiotis, Ph.D.

Download or read book The Extraordinary Rise of the Russian Empire written by Arthur C. Hasiotis, Ph.D. and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Extraordinary Rise of the Russian Empire By: Arthur C. Hasiotis, Ph.D. “Political and cultural biases must not be allowed to misrepresent historical writings and an accurate representation of the truth. Otherwise, generations of citizens and leaders will lack the record and guidelines of what actually happened.” With this fundamental principle underlying the effort, Arthur C. Hasiotis, Ph.D. gives us an impressive study of Russian history, from its beginnings to the present day, emphasizing Russia’s relationship of confrontation and cooperation – engagement and constraint – with the great Western powers. Challenging points in the standard historiography, this book presents a powerful reinterpretation of important movements and events. As such, it is far from a dry history, but dives into a number of topical controversies and key geopolitical questions which will keep readers both piqued and informed. Comes with an extensive subject-ordered bibliography and thorough panoply of documentation.

The Russian Empire 1450-1801

Download The Russian Empire 1450-1801 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199280517
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (992 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Russian Empire 1450-1801 by : Nancy Shields Kollmann

Download or read book The Russian Empire 1450-1801 written by Nancy Shields Kollmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Russian identity and historical experience has been largely shaped by Russia's imperial past: an empire that was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys how the areas that made up the empire were conquered and how they were governed. It considers the Russian empire a 'Eurasian empire', characterized by a 'politics of difference': the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state's needs minimally - with control over defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources - and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cultures, elites, and institutions. The center related to communities and religions vertically, according each a modicum of rights and autonomies, but didn't allow horizontal connections across nobilities, townsmen, or other groups potentially with common interests to coalesce. Thus, the Russian empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious; Nancy Kollmann gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups, and surveys the government's strategies of governance - centralized bureaucracy, military reform, and a changed judicial system. The volume pays particular attention to the dissemination of a supranational ideology of political legitimacy in a variety of media - written sources and primarily public ritual, painting, and particularly architecture. Beginning with foundational features, such as geography, climate, demography, and geopolitical situation, The Russian Empire 1450-1801 explores the empire's primarily agrarian economy, serfdom, towns and trade, as well as the many religious groups - primarily Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism. It tracks the emergence of an 'Imperial nobility' and a national self-consciousness that was, by the end of the eighteenth century, distinctly imperial, embracing the diversity of the empire's many peoples and cultures.

Putin's Wars

Download Putin's Wars PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1442253592
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (422 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Putin's Wars by : Marcel H. Van Herpen

Download or read book Putin's Wars written by Marcel H. Van Herpen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fully updated book offers the first systematic analysis of Putin’s three wars, placing the Second Chechen War, the war with Georgia of 2008, and the war with Ukraine of 2014–2015 in their broader historical context. Drawing on extensive original Russian sources, Marcel H. Van Herpen analyzes in detail how Putin’s wars were prepared and conducted, and why they led to allegations of war crimes and genocide. He shows how the conflicts functioned to consolidate and legitimate Putin’s regime and explores how they were connected to a fourth, hidden, “internal war” waged by the Kremlin against the opposition. The author convincingly argues that the Kremlin—relying on the secret services, the Orthodox Church, the Kremlin youth “Nashi,” and the rehabilitated Cossacks—is preparing for an imperial revival, most recently in the form of a “Eurasian Union.” An essential book for understanding the dynamics of Putin’s regime, this study digs deep into the Kremlin’s secret long-term strategies. Readable and clearly argued, it makes a compelling case that Putin’s regime emulates an established Russian paradigm in which empire building and despotic rule are mutually reinforcing. As the first comprehensive exploration of the historical antecedents and political continuity of the Kremlin’s contemporary policies, Van Herpen’s work will make a valuable contribution to the literature on post-Soviet Russia, and his arguments will stimulate a fascinating and vigorous debate.

Eastward to Empire

Download Eastward to Empire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0773593187
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (735 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Eastward to Empire by : George V. Lantzeff

Download or read book Eastward to Empire written by George V. Lantzeff and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1973-01-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian expansion across Siberia to the Far East.

Fragile Empire

Download Fragile Empire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300185251
Total Pages : 558 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Fragile Empire by : Ben Judah

Download or read book Fragile Empire written by Ben Judah and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A beautifully written and very lively study of Russia that argues that the political order created by Vladimir Putin is stagnating” (Financial Times). From Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Russian Far East, journalist Ben Judah has traveled throughout Russia and the former Soviet republics, conducting extensive interviews with President Vladimir Putin’s friends, foes, and colleagues, government officials, business tycoons, mobsters, and ordinary Russian citizens. Fragile Empire is the fruit of Judah’s thorough research: A probing assessment of Putin’s rise to power and what it has meant for Russia and her people. Despite a propaganda program intent on maintaining the cliché of stability, Putin’s regime was suddenly confronted in December 2011 by a highly public protest movement that told a different side of the story. Judah argues that Putinism has brought economic growth to Russia but also weaker institutions, and this contradiction leads to instability. The author explores both Putin’s successes and his failed promises, taking into account the impact of a new middle class and a new generation, the Internet, social activism, and globalization on the president’s impending leadership crisis. Can Russia avoid the crisis of Putinism? Judah offers original and up-to-the-minute answers. “[A] dynamic account of the rise (and fall-in-progress) of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” —Publishers Weekly “[Judah] shuttles to and fro across Russia’s vast terrain, finding criminals, liars, fascists and crooked politicians, as well as the occasional saintly figure.” —The Economist “His lively account of his remote adventures forms the most enjoyable part of Fragile Empire, and puts me in mind of Chekhov’s famous 1890 journey to Sakhalin Island.” —The Guardian

The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire

Download The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Prima Lifestyles
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 856 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (97 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire by : Brian Crozier

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire written by Brian Crozier and published by Prima Lifestyles. This book was released on 1999 with total page 856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than 80 years, the Soviet Empire cast an ever-lengthening shadow across the face of the world. Lenin's ruthless legacy consumed Eastern Europe and toppled governments on virtually every continent. Yet at the moment when the Empire appeared to have reached its zenith, it collapsed like a house of cards. "Brian Crozier's definitive history of the Soviet Empire is a chilling account of an ideology that haunted our century." -- Henry Kissinger In this seminal work, the eminent British writer and historian Brian Crozier tells the brutal history of the Soviet Empire--its birth, life, and sudden death. The book begins at the beginning, in 1917, when the oversized dreams of Lenin and the happenstance of events conspired to change the course of history. In meticulous detail, Crozier follows the Soviet conquests across Europe and into Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. He uses recently declassified information from Soviet archives to add texture and depth to familiar parts of the story--the betrayal at Yalta, the terror of Stalin, the tragedy of Hungary, the split with China, the false hope of Prague Spring, the rise of Castro, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Revealed along the way is the dark underside of a regime whose march toward supremacy resulted in the loss of tens of millions of lives. The book concludes with reflections on the extraordinary disintegration of Lenin's utopia and the seemingly endless chaos left in its wake. Provocative, comprehensive, and majestic in scope, "The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire is the definitive account of history's most turbulent days.

The Future Is History

Download The Future Is History PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 159463453X
Total Pages : 530 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (946 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Future Is History by : Masha Gessen

Download or read book The Future Is History written by Masha Gessen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

The Russian Origins of the First World War

Download The Russian Origins of the First World War PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674072332
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Russian Origins of the First World War by : Sean McMeekin

Download or read book The Russian Origins of the First World War written by Sean McMeekin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg. It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.

Collapse of an Empire

Download Collapse of an Empire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 0815731159
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (157 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Collapse of an Empire by : Yegor Gaidar

Download or read book Collapse of an Empire written by Yegor Gaidar and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My goal is to show the reader that the Soviet political and economic system was unstable by its very nature. It was just a question of when and how it would collapse...." —From the Introduction to Collapse of an Empire The Soviet Union was an empire in many senses of the word—a vast mix of far-flung regions and accidental citizens by way of conquest or annexation. Typical of such empires, it was built on shaky foundations. That instability made its demise inevitable, asserts Yegor Gaidar, former prime minister of Russia and architect of the "shock therapy" economic reforms of the 1990s. Yet a growing desire to return to the glory days of empire is pushing today's Russia backward into many of the same traps that made the Soviet Union untenable. In this important new book, Gaidar clearly illustrates why Russian nostalgia for empire is dangerous and ill-fated: "Dreams of returning to another era are illusory. Attempts to do so will lead to defeat." Gaidar uses world history, the Soviet experience, and economic analysis to demonstrate why swimming against this tide of history would be a huge mistake. The USSR sowed the seeds of its own economic destruction, and Gaidar worries that Russia is repeating some of those mistakes. Once again, for example, the nation is putting too many eggs into one basket, leaving the nation vulnerable to fluctuations in the energy market. The Soviets had used revenues from energy sales to prop up struggling sectors such as agriculture, which was so thoroughly ravaged by hyperindustrialization that the Soviet Union became a net importer of food. When oil prices dropped in the 1980s, that revenue stream diminished, and dependent sectors suffered heavily. Although strategies requiring austerity or sacrifice can be politically difficult, Russia needs to prepare for such downturns and restrain spending during prosperous times. Collapse of an Empire shows why it is imperative to fix the roof before it starts to rain, and why so

The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

Download The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400821002
Total Pages : 373 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire by : John B. Dunlop

Download or read book The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire written by John B. Dunlop and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1995-04-03 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first work to set one of the great bloodless revolutions of the twentieth century in its proper historical context. John Dunlop pays particular attention to Yeltsin's role in opposing the covert resurgence of Communist interests in post-coup Russia, and faces the possibility that new institutions may not survive long enough to sink roots in a traditionally undemocratic culture.

Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Download Russian History: A Very Short Introduction PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199580987
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (995 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Russian History: A Very Short Introduction by : Geoffrey Hosking

Download or read book Russian History: A Very Short Introduction written by Geoffrey Hosking and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading international authority discusses all aspects of Russian history, from the struggle by the state to control society to the transformation of the nation into a multi-ethnic empire, Russia's relations with the West and the post-Soviet era. Original.

Russia in Revolution

Download Russia in Revolution PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198734824
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (987 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Russia in Revolution by : Stephen Anthony Smith

Download or read book Russia in Revolution written by Stephen Anthony Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smith presents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violent collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society. Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church. In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail?; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system?; why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground?; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power?; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war?; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921 fail?; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924? A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.

Spies and Scholars

Download Spies and Scholars PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Belknap Press
ISBN 13 : 0674241851
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Spies and Scholars by : Gregory Afinogenov

Download or read book Spies and Scholars written by Gregory Afinogenov and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Financial Times Best Book of the Year The untold story of how Russian espionage in imperial China shaped the emergence of the Russian Empire as a global power. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire made concerted efforts to collect information about China. It bribed Chinese porcelain-makers to give up trade secrets, sent Buddhist monks to Mongolia on intelligence-gathering missions, and trained students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy on their hosts. From diplomatic offices to guard posts on the Chinese frontier, Russians were producing knowledge everywhere, not only at elite institutions like the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. But that information was secret, not destined for wide circulation. Gregory Afinogenov distinguishes between the kinds of knowledge Russia sought over the years and argues that they changed with the shifting aims of the state and its perceived place in the world. In the seventeenth century, Russian bureaucrats were focused on China and the forbidding Siberian frontier. They relied more on spies, including Jesuit scholars stationed in China. In the early nineteenth century, the geopolitical challenge shifted to Europe: rivalry with Britain drove the Russians to stake their prestige on public-facing intellectual work, and knowledge of the East was embedded in the academy. None of these institutional configurations was especially effective in delivering strategic or commercial advantages. But various knowledge regimes did have their consequences. Knowledge filtered through Russian espionage and publication found its way to Europe, informing the encounter between China and Western empires. Based on extensive archival research in Russia and beyond, Spies and Scholars breaks down long-accepted assumptions about the connection between knowledge regimes and imperial power and excavates an intellectual legacy largely neglected by historians.

The Russian Revolution

Download The Russian Revolution PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 046509497X
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (65 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Russian Revolution by : Sean McMeekin

Download or read book The Russian Revolution written by Sean McMeekin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an award-winning scholar comes this definitive, single-volume history that illuminates the tensions and transformations of the Russian Revolution. ​ In The Russian Revolution, acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin traces the events which ended Romanov rule, ushered the Bolsheviks into power, and introduced Communism to the world. Between 1917 and 1922, Russia underwent a complete and irreversible transformation. Taking advantage of the collapse of the Tsarist regime in the middle of World War I, the Bolsheviks staged a hostile takeover of the Russian Imperial Army, promoting mutinies and mass desertions of men in order to fulfill Lenin's program of turning the "imperialist war" into civil war. By the time the Bolsheviks had snuffed out the last resistance five years later, over 20 million people had died, and the Russian economy had collapsed so completely that Communism had to be temporarily abandoned. Still, Bolshevik rule was secure, owing to the new regime's monopoly on force, enabled by illicit arms deals signed with capitalist neighbors such as Germany and Sweden who sought to benefit-politically and economically-from the revolutionary chaos in Russia. Drawing on scores of previously untapped files from Russian archives and a range of other repositories in Europe, Turkey, and the United States, McMeekin delivers exciting, groundbreaking research about this turbulent era. The first comprehensive history of these momentous events in two decades, The Russian Revolution combines cutting-edge scholarship and a fast-paced narrative to shed new light on one of the most significant turning points of the twentieth century.

A History of Russia and Its Empire

Download A History of Russia and Its Empire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 0742568407
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (425 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A History of Russia and Its Empire by : Kees Boterbloem

Download or read book A History of Russia and Its Empire written by Kees Boterbloem and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This clear and focused text provides an introduction to imperial Russian and Soviet history from the crowning of Mikhail Romanov in 1613 to Vladimir Putin’s new term. Through a consistent chronological narrative, Kees Boterbloem considers the political, military, economic, social, religious, and cultural developments and crucial turning points that led Russia from an exotic backwater to superpower stature in the twentieth century. The only text designed and written specifically for a one-semester course on this four-hundred-year period, it will appeal to all readers interested in learning more about the history of the people who have inhabited one-sixth of the earth’s landmass for centuries.

The Rise of the Russian Empire

Download The Rise of the Russian Empire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (334 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Rise of the Russian Empire by : Saki

Download or read book The Rise of the Russian Empire written by Saki and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

The New Tsar

Download The New Tsar PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307961613
Total Pages : 594 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (79 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The New Tsar by : Steven Lee Myers

Download or read book The New Tsar written by Steven Lee Myers and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2015 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The epic tale of the rise to power of Russia's current president-- of his emergence from shrouded obscurity and deprivation to become one of the most consequential and complicated leaders in modern history." --