Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"A riveting, immensely detailed biography of Putin that explains in full-bodied, almost Shakespearian fashion why he acts the way he does." -Robert D. Kaplan

The New Tsar is the book to read if you want to understand how Vladimir Putin sees the world and why he has become one of the gravest threats to American security.

The epic tale of the rise to power of Russia's current president--the only complete biography in English - that fully captures his emergence from shrouded obscurity and deprivation to become one of the most consequential and complicated leaders in modern history, by the former New York Times Moscow bureau chief.

In a gripping narrative of Putin's rise to power as Russia's president, Steven Lee Myers recounts Putin's origins--from his childhood of abject poverty in Leningrad, to his ascension through the ranks of the KGB, and his eventual consolidation of rule. Along the way, world events familiar to readers, such as September 11th and Russia's war in Georgia in 2008, as well as the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, are presented from never-before-seen perspectives.

This book is a grand, staggering achievement and a breathtaking look at one man's rule. On one hand, Putin's many reforms--from tax cuts to an expansion of property rights--have helped reshape the potential of millions of Russians whose only experience of democracy had been crime, poverty, and instability after the fall of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Putin has ushered in a new authoritarianism, unyielding in his brutal repression of revolts and squashing of dissent. Still, he retains widespread support from the Russian public.

The New Tsar is a narrative tour de force, deeply researched, and utterly necessary for anyone fascinated by the formidable and ambitious Vladimir Putin, but also for those interested in the world and what a newly assertive Russia might mean for the future.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Part 1
• Maps (p. 2)
• Chapter 1 Homo Sovieticus (p. 7)
• Chapter 2 A Warm Heart, a Cool Head, and Clean Hands (p. 23)
• Chapter 3 The Devoted Officer of a Dying Empire (p. 37)
• Chapter 4 Democracy Faces a Hungry Winter (p. 52)
• Part 2
• Chapter 5 The Spies Come In from the Cold (p. 71)
• Chapter 6 Mismanaged Democracy (p. 89)
• Chapter 7 An Unexpected Path to Power (p. 104)
• Chapter 8 Swimming in the Same River Twice (p. 119)
• Chapter 9 Kompromat (p. 136)
• Chapter 10 In the Outhouse (p. 154)
• Part 3
• Chapter 11 Becoming Portugal (p. 177)
• Chapter 12 Putin's Soul (p. 203)
• Chapter 13 The Gods Slept on Their Heads (p. 223)
• Chapter 14 Annus Horribilis (p. 243)
• Chapter 15 The Orange Contagion (p. 263)
• Chapter 16 Kremlin, Inc. (p. 281)
• Chapter 17 Poison (p. 304)
• Chapter 18 The 2008 Problem (p. 323)
• Part 4
• Chapter 19 The Regency (p. 345)
• Chapter 20 Action Man (p. 360)
• Chapter 21 The Return (p. 379)
• Part 5
• Chapter 22 The Restoration (p. 401)
• Chapter 23 Alone on Olympus (p. 418)
• Chapter 24 Putingrad (p. 434)
• Chapter 25 Our Russia (p. 457)
• Acknowledgments (p. 483)
• Notes (p. 487)
• Bibliography (p. 535)
• Index (p. 545)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

CHAPTER 1 Homo Sovieticus   Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin edged forward through the cratered bat­tlefield beside the Neva River, roughly thirty miles from Leningrad. His orders seemed suicidal. He was to reconnoiter the German positions and, if possible, capture a "tongue," slang for a soldier to interrogate. It was November 17, 1941,1 already bitterly cold, and the Soviet Union's humiliated army was now desperately fighting to avoid its complete destruction at the hands of Nazi Germany. The last tanks in reserve in the city had crossed the Neva a week before, and Putin's commanders now had orders to break through heavily reinforced positions defended by 54,000 German infantrymen. There was no choice but to obey. He and another soldier approached a foxhole along a dug-in front, carved with trenches, pocked with shell craters, stained with blood. A German suddenly rose, surprising all three of them. For a frozen moment, noth­ing happened. The German reacted first, unpinned a grenade and tossed it. It landed near Putin, killing his comrade and riddling his own legs with shrapnel. The German soldier escaped, leaving Putin for dead. "Life is such a simple thing, really," a man who retold the story decades later would say, with a characteristic fatalism.   Putin, then thirty years old, lay wounded on a bridgehead on the east bank of the Neva. The Red Army's commanders had poured troops across the river in hopes of breaking the encirclement of Leningrad that had begun two months earlier when the Germans captured Shlisselburg, an ancient fortress at the mouth of the Neva, but the effort failed. The Germans laid a siege that would last 872 days and kill a million civil­ians by bombardment, starvation, or disease. "The Führer has decided to wipe the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth," a secret Ger­man order declared on September 29. Surrender would not be accepted. Air and artillery bombardment would be the instrument of the city's destruction, and hunger would be its accomplice, since "feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us." Never before had a modern city endured a siege like it.   "Is this the end of your losses?" Joseph Stalin furiously cabled the city's defenders the day after the siege began. "Perhaps you have already decided to give up Leningrad?" The telegram was signed by the entire Soviet leadership, including Vyacheslav Molotov, who in 1939 had signed the notorious nonaggression pact with his Nazi counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, which was now betrayed. It was by no means the end of the losses. The fall of Shlisselburg coincided with ferocious air raids in Leningrad itself, including one that ignited the city's main food warehouse. The Soviet forces defending the city were in disarray, as they were everywhere in the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion that began on June 22, 1941, had crushed Soviet defenses along a thousand-mile front, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Even Moscow seemed in danger of falling.   Stalin never considered surrendering Leningrad, and he dispatched the chief of the general staff, Georgy Zhukov, to shore up the city's defenses, which he did with great brutality. On the night of September 19, on Zhukov's orders, Soviet forces mounted the first assault 600 meters across the Neva to break the siege, but it was repulsed by overwhelming German firepower. In October, they tried again, hurling forth the 86th Division, which included Putin's unit, the 330th Rifle Regiment. The bridgehead those troops managed to create on the eastern bank of the Neva became known, because of its size, as the Nevsky Pyatachok, from the word for a five-kopek coin or a small patch. At its greatest expanse the battlefield was barely a mile wide, less than half a mile deep. For the soldiers fated to fight there, it was a brutal, senseless death trap.   Putin was an uneducated laborer, one of four sons of Spiridon Putin, a chef who once worked in the city's famed pre-revolutionary Astoria Hotel. Spiridon, though a supporter of the Bolsheviks, fled the impe­rial capital during the civil war and famine that followed the October Revolution in 1917. He settled in his ancestral village, Pominovo, in the rolling hills west of Moscow, and later moved to the city itself, where he cooked for Vladimir Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, at her official Soviet dacha in the Gorky district on the edge of Moscow. After her death in 1939, he worked in the retreat of Moscow's Communist Party Committee. He was said to have cooked once for Grigory Rasputin at the Astoria and on occasion for Stalin when he visited Lenin's widow, beginning a family tradition of servitude to the political elite. Proxim­ity to power did nothing to protect his sons from the Nazis; the entire nation was fighting for survival.   Vladimir Putin was already a veteran when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. He had served as a submariner in the 1930s before settling down not far from Leningrad, in the village of Petrodvorets, where Peter the Great had built his palace on the Gulf of Finland. In the chaotic days that followed the invasion, he, like many citizens, had rushed to volunteer to defend the nation and was initially assigned to a special demolitions detachment of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, the dreaded secret police agency that would later become the KGB. The NKVD created 2,222 of these detachments to harass the Nazis behind the front, which was then rapidly advanc­ing. One of Putin's first missions in the war was a disaster. He and twenty-seven other partisan fighters parachuted behind the Germans advancing on Leningrad, near the town of Kingisepp. It was close to the border with Estonia, which the Soviet Union had occupied the year before, along with Latvia and Lithuania, as part of the notorious pre­war pact with Hitler. Putin's detachment managed to blow up one arms depot, as the story went, but quickly ran out of ammunition and rations. Local residents, Estonians, brought them food but also betrayed them to the Germans, whom many in the Baltic nations welcomed, at least at first, as liberators from Soviet occupation. German troops closed in on the unit, firing on them as they raced along a road back to the Soviet lines. Putin split off, chased by Germans with dogs, and hid in a marsh, submerging himself and breathing through a reed until the patrol moved on.8 How exactly he made it back is lost to the fog of history, but only he and three others of the detachment survived the raid. The NKVD interrogated him after his escape, but he managed to avoid suspicion of desertion or cowardice and was soon sent back to the front. It might have been courage alone that drove Putin, or it might have been fear. Stalin's Order No. 270, issued on August 16, had threatened soldiers who deserted with execution and their family members with arrest.   Inside Leningrad conditions deteriorated rapidly, despite efforts by the authorities to maintain a sense of normality. Schools opened, as always, on September 1, but three days later the first German shells landed inside the city. With the blockade completed and the city now under regu­lar assault from above, the authorities intensified the rationing of food.   Rations would gradually decline, leading to desperation, despair, and finally death. As Vladimir Putin fought outside the city, his wife, Maria, and their infant son were trapped inside. Vladimir and Maria, both born in 1911, were children of Russia's turbulent twentieth century, buffeted by World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, and the civil war that followed. They met in Pominovo, where his father had moved after the revolution, and married in 1928, when they were only sev­enteen. They moved back to Leningrad as newlyweds, settling back in Petrodvorets with her relatives in 1932. After Putin's conscription in the navy, they had a boy named Oleg, who died in infancy. A year before the war started, they had a second son, Viktor.   Maria and Viktor only narrowly avoided occupation in Nazi-held ter­ritories. She had refused at first to leave Petrodvorets, but as the Germans closed in, her brother, Ivan Shelomov, forced her to evacuate. He served as a first captain in the Baltic Fleet's headquarters and thus had military authority and what privileges still existed in a city under siege. Captain Shelomov retrieved them "under gunfire and bombs" and settled them into a city whose fate was precarious. Conditions became dire as the winter arrived, the cold that year even more bitter than usual. Maria and Viktor moved into one of dozens of shelters the authorities opened to house refugees pouring in from the occupied outskirts. Her brother helped her with his own rations, but her health faded nevertheless. One day--exactly when is unknown--she passed out and passersby laid her body out with the frozen corpses that had begun to pile up on the street for collection, left for dead, as her husband had been on the front. She was discovered, somehow, in this open-air morgue, her moans attracting attention.   Vladimir's survival seemed no less improbable. He lay wounded beside the Neva for several hours before other Soviet troops found him and carried him back toward the regiment's redoubt on the bank. He might have died, one of more than 300,000 soldiers who lost their lives on the Pyatachok, except that an old neighbor found him on a litter at a primitive field hospital. He slung Putin over his shoulder and carried him across the frozen river to a hospital on the other side.   As it turned out, Putin's injury almost certainly saved his life. His unit, the 330th Rifle Regiment, fought on the bridgehead throughout the winter of 1941-1942. The battle, in scale and carnage, foreshadowed the terrible siege of Stalingrad the next year, a "monstrous meatgrinder," it was called. The forces there endured relentless shelling by the Ger­mans. The forested riverbank became a churned, lifeless landscape where nothing would grow for years. New recruits crossed the Neva to replace those killed or wounded at a staggering rate of hundreds a day until the spring of 1942, when the bridgehead collapsed and the Germans regained the ground on April 27. The 330th Rifle Regiment was entirely destroyed except for a major from its command staff, Aleksandr Sokolov, who managed to swim to safety, despite serious wounds.15 It was one of the deadliest single battles of the entire war, and for the Soviet mili­tary command, a folly that squandered tens of thousands of soldiers and probably prolonged the siege instead of shortening it. Putin spent months in a military hospital, recovering in a city that was dying around him. By the time the last road out of the city was cut, three million civilians and soldiers remained besieged. Maria, who refused to be evacuated when it was still possible, ultimately found her husband in the hospital. Against the rules, he shared his own hospital rations with her, hiding food from the nurses until a doctor noticed and halted Maria's daily visits for a time. The city's initial resilience succumbed to devastation, starvation, and worse. Essential services deteriorated along with the food supply. Corpses lay uncollected in mounds on the streets. In January and February 1942, more than 100,000 people died each month. The only connection to unoccupied territory was the make­shift "Road of Life," a series of precarious routes over the frozen waters of Lake Ladoga. They provided minimal relief to the city, and the siege ground on until January 1943, when the Soviet army broke through the encirclement to the east. It took another year to fully free the city from the Nazi grip and begin the relentless, ruthless Soviet march to Berlin.   Vladimir and Maria somehow survived, though his injuries caused him to limp in pain for the rest of his life. In April 1942, he was released from the hospital and sent to work at a weapons factory that turned out artillery shells and antitank mines. Their son, Viktor, did not survive. He died of diphtheria in June 1942 and was buried in a mass grave at Piskaryovskoye Cemetery along with 470,000 other civilians and sol­diers. Neither Vladimir nor Maria knew where exactly and evidently made little effort to learn. Nor did they ever talk about it in detail later. The war's toll was devastatingly personal. Maria's mother, Elizabeta Shelomova, died on the front lines west of Moscow in October 1941, though it was never clear whether it was a Soviet or a German shell that killed her; Maria's brother Ivan survived, but another brother, Pyotr, was condemned by a military tribunal at the front in the earliest days of the war, evidently for some dereliction of duty, and his ultimate fate was never known, and certainly not mentioned. Two of Vladimir's brothers also died during the war: Mikhail in July 1942, also in circumstances lost to history; and Aleksei on the Voronezh front in February 1943. These were the stories of the Great Patriotic War--tales of heroism and suffering--that Vladimir and Maria's third son would grow up hear­ing and that would leave an indelible impression on him throughout his life. From "some snatches, some fragments" of conversations overheard at the kitchen table in a crowded communal flat in a still-devastated Len­ingrad, he created his family narrative, one reshaped by time and mem­ory, one that might have been apocryphal in places and was certainly far from complete. The Putins were simple people, unlikely to know much of the darker aspects of the war: Stalin's paranoid purges in the Great Terror that had decimated the army before the war; the connivance with Hitler's plans to conquer Europe; the partitioning of Poland in 1939; the forceful annexation of the Baltic nations; the chaotic defense once the Nazis invaded; the official malfeasance that contributed to the starvation in Leningrad; the vengeful atrocities committed by Soviet troops as they marched to Berlin. Even then, after Stalin's death in 1953, it remained dangerous to speak poorly of the state in anything above a whisper. The victory--and the Putins' small part in it--was an inexhaustible fountain of pride. What else could it be? One did not think of the mistakes that were made, the young boy would say later; one thought only of winning. Excerpted from The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin by Steven Lee Myers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This new entry into the ever-growing repertoire of works on Vladimir Putin (b. 1952) is a clear, readable, and detailed study of the leader's political life, illustrated throughout with intimate facts and anecdotes. Former New York Times journalist Myers draws upon publications both international and from within Russia, and utilizes his experience reporting on issues related to Russian politics and foreign affairs as he follows the famously inscrutable Russian ruler from his humble origins to his current presidency. Tracing the development of relationships between Putin and those he trusts, Myers examines how Putin's rise demonstrated his ability to capitalize on advantages, and how his personal loyalties defined his world-view. The author's political analysis places this account in a contextual rather than argumentative framework, reviewing Putin's life in terms of the greater Russian narrative of the post-Soviet era. VERDICT Accessible, well-researched, and comprehensive, this political biography of a powerful and enigmatic global leader will be intriguing to anyone following current events or interested in the ongoing development of Russian politics and culture. [See Prepub Alert, 4/20/15.]-Elizabeth Zeitz, Otterbein Univ. Lib., Westerville, OH © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

New York Times reporter Myers has written a timely, richly detailed, if too narrowly focused biography of Vladimir Putin. Putin, a KGB operative, cannily decided to leave the agency during the Soviet collapse in 1991. He ascended to power nine years later, and now controls the vast Russian Federation as tightly as a czar. As the book reveals, his authoritarian, highly nationalistic style and assertive foreign policy are directed toward rebuilding Russian power in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, not reestablishing Soviet ideology. Myers emphasizes the suppression of internal dissent, which includes the Pussy Riot arrests and-many theorize-whistle-blower Alexander Litvinenko's poisoning. The narrative also covers Putin's moves against the country's oligarchs, such as the imprisonment of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and expropriation of his company, Yukos. Myers concludes with Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. His book appears as tensions between the West and Russia are rapidly rising, involving areas from the Baltic to the Ukraine and escalating to threats of nuclear force. Myers provides little historical context to explain Putin's appeal and the broader Russian disposition. His inside-baseball account, often focused on little-known personalities and behind-the-scenes political machinations, will intrigue readers but leave them with only a shadowy picture of this enigmatic modern-day "tsar." Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

It has now dawned on most American and European politicians that a newly and sometimes dangerously assertive Russia under Vladimir Putin is not a partner. The most obvious example of Russian expansionist desires is, of course, in Ukraine. There is also the constant drumbeat in official and state-controlled media whipping up Russian nationalism and opposition to Western hegemony. So it is essential for Americans and Europeans to understand Putin, who may wield more personal power than any Russian leader since Stalin. Myers is the former Moscow bureau chief and has tracked Putin's career for many years. On a geopolitical level, Myers asserts that Putin's worldview is strongly shaped by the sense that Russia, with its immense size, Orthodox tradition, and unique history, is different and should continue to be different than other European nation-states. Putin also embraces a traditional Russian attitude toward the West that includes both envy and suspicion. On a personal level, Myers views Putin as manipulative and power hungry but also capable of connecting with the aspirations and fears of ordinary Russians. This is an important and well-done effort to explain a leader whom we must reckon with for the foreseeable future.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2015 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

The reptilian, poker-faced former KGB agent, now Russian president seemingly for life, earns a fair, engaging treatment in the hands of New York Times journalist Myers. The author was based in Russia for some years during Vladimir Putin's rise to power, and he clearly knows his material and primary subject, which is very important in the tracking of this slippery conniver, who was in a good place to take power at President Boris Yeltsin's decline in 1999. A curious, coldblooded opportunist, the spy who came in from the cold by hitching his star first to prominent politician Anatoly Sobchak, a leader of the democratic movement in the 1990s, Putin used the perks of power to create a complex system of cronyism and nepotism. Myers shows how Putin convinced everyone that this way of operating was part of the Russian soul and how he perpetuated it through an archaic form of Russian corruptione.g., profiting from deals and then offering disingenuous explanations. When the civil war in Chechnya erupted, Putin's strong-arm tactics and hard-line stance against terrorism swung popular opinion. "This is not just about restoring Russia's honor and dignity," he said. "It's about putting an end to the breakup of the Russian Federation." This was Putin's successful mantra for surviving at the top, from 2000 to the present, in successive presidential runs that were frankly illegal. He took over the TV channels for the state's purposes, consolidated gas and petroleum companies into enormously powerful monopolies, put a recalcitrant military firmly under his command, and convinced the world that Russia could hold the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi, which became his pet project. Myers astutely notes how Putin's speeches increasingly harkened back to the worst period of the Cold War era's dictates by Soviet strongmen. The author ends with the haunting lyrics from a Great Patriotic War of 1953 song that was conveniently used for the appropriation of the Crimea. A highly effective portrait of a frighteningly powerful autocrat. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.