The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (2015) by Steven Lee Myers

The improbable rise and frightening reign of Russian president Vladimir Putin is surely one of the most fascinating stories of the early twenty-first century. How did a low-level, low-key former KGB officer become president of a global nuclear power without ever having served in political office and with little national name-recognition at the time of his ascendency? It’s a remarkable story and one that Steven Lee Myers tells remarkably well in The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (2015).

A lot has happened since this book was first published a decade ago. Most significantly, Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that three years later had consumed over a million Russian casualties and put the unpredictable Russian autocrat on his heels. One can only guess how this deadly story will end.

Putin, in many ways, personifies the Russian character – patriotic and proud, yet insecure and paranoid; envious of the West, yet deeply resentful of it; boastful and arrogant, yet haunted by fear and acutely aware of his own weaknesses.

Myers titles Chapter One “Homo Sovieticus.” Putin, he argues, was – and remains – a product of the Soviet Union. Born in Leningrad in 1952, the third son of humble parents who had fought and survived World War II – known in Russia as The Great Patriotic War – Putin grew up steeped in their tales of deprivation, courage, and heroism, which left “an indelible impression on him throughout his life,” Myers writes. The stoic endurance and ultimate triumph of Leningrad’s citizens – who withstood a siege lasting nearly 900 days and costing more than a million civilian lives – would become “an inexhaustible fountain of pride” for the man who would one day see himself as Russia’s modern tsar.

Putin grew up undersized – likely under 5’7” and around 150 pounds – and vulnerable in the courtyards of his proletarian housing complex in Leningrad. Myers suggests that he was bullied, which led him to take up judo, a discipline whose instructors would become “a decisive influence on his life.” His hardscrabble upbringing, Myers claims, instilled in him a lifelong disdain for drinking, smoking, idleness, and disorder. Although Myers never mentions it, it’s hard not to imagine that Putin was also profoundly shaped by the early Soviet triumphs in space exploration. He was nine years old when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and when 25-year-old Gherman Titov spent a full 24 hours in orbit – completing nearly eighteen revolutions of the Earth – before American Alan Shepard had even left the atmosphere. Both Gagarin and Titov were celebrated with massive parades in Leningrad in April and August of 1961, events that Putin either witnessed firsthand or knew intimately. For a city and a nation barely a decade removed from near annihilation, those moments must have felt nothing short of transcendent.

In 1968, a Soviet counterpart to James Bond appeared in Russian theaters: The Shield and the Sword, featuring secret agent Aleksandr Belov. “What amazed me most of all,” Putin later recalled, “was how one man’s efforts could achieve what whole armies could not.” The film inspired not only his career but also his lifelong worldview of Russia as a great and noble power. From that moment, he set his sights on becoming a KGB agent – and nothing would deter him. Putin would later describe himself as “an utterly successful product of the patriotic education of a Soviet man.”

Though Myers notes that Putin was never an exceptional student, he managed to earn admission to Leningrad State University, whose acceptance rate rivaled Harvard’s (just 2.5 percent). At the time, Yuri Andropov – head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982 and one of Putin’s heroes – was working to transform the organization into an elite vanguard of Soviet society. Myers writes that Putin was a true believer in this vision. He ultimately realized his dream of joining the KGB and was assigned to its elite First Chief Directorate, responsible for international intelligence operations.

While deeply devoted to the cause, Putin was not, according to Myers, a careerist driven by personal ambition. Rather, he was a disciplined, dutiful, and largely unremarkable operative – an obscure but loyal soldier serving what he saw as the greater Soviet mission. At thirty-three, newly married (and recently honeymooned in Crimea), he received his first foreign posting: Dresden, East Germany. For the next four and a half years, he would serve as what Myers calls “a devoted officer of a dying empire,” bearing witness to the slow-motion collapse of the communist bloc.

By Putin’s own account, his years in Dresden were “measured, settled, ordinary, and monotonous.” He had imagined the life of a daring undercover agent; instead, his reality was that of a mid-level bureaucrat –  an unprepossessing and inconspicuous apparatchik toiling in the background. As Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika swept through the Soviet Union and its satellites, Putin remained loyal to evolutionary change rather than radical reform, and he came to resent bitterly the disintegration of the Soviet state. He was stunned by the weakness displayed by both the feared East German Stasi and the KGB in the face of popular unrest. When he sought instructions from superiors, the only response he received was: “Moscow is silent.” Myers writes that those three words would haunt him for years to come.

Myers writes that Putin saw the end of the Cold War as “an unconditional Soviet surrender, followed by a humiliating, chaotic, and catastrophic retreat.” For him, it was nothing less than the collapse of his entire world – his country, his career, and his beliefs. He returned home angry, ashamed, and remorseful for not having done more. According to Myers, Putin and his fellow KGB officers were “defeated, dejected, and effectively out of work – displaced refugees of a crumbling empire.” After fifteen years, his dream career had ended as a nightmare.

Back in Leningrad, Putin and his family moved in with his parents in their small apartment. The city’s new mayor, Anatoly Sobchak – a former law professor at Putin’s alma mater, Leningrad State University – was searching for a discreet and unambitious liaison to the security services. Putin’s name surfaced, and he was soon brought on board. At last, Lieutenant Colonel Putin would be a true undercover agent – only within his own country. “He worked for the old regime,” Myers observes, “and for those who would overthrow it.”

Putin joined Sobchak’s staff as director of Leningrad’s newly formed Committee on Foreign Relations, charged with attracting foreign investment to the city, including Sobchak’s dream of turning Leningrad into a Russian Las Vegas. In particular, Putin used his German language skills to court German investors and over time became an established “wheeler and dealer,” brokering investments and refereeing business disputes. Eventually, the author says, Putin developed “a reputation for competence, effectiveness, and absolute, ruthless loyalty to Sobchak.” Over the next decade, it was these consistent trademarks, relatively unusual in post-Soviet Russia, that would distinguish Putin and grease his path to ultimate power.

When the 1991 coup attempt unfolded, Sobchak emerged as one of the country’s leading democrats and a vocal opponent of the hardline Soviet plotters. Putin was finally forced to choose sides – and he chose Sobchak. He resigned from the KGB after sixteen years of service. “Not at all by his own design,” Myers writes, “Putin landed on the winning side of the Soviet Union’s collapse.” What none of us can know – and what Myers never dares to guess – is what was in Putin’s mind and heart at the time. While he positioned himself as an avowed democrat, Myers says, he also says that Putin believed, “the imperative of the strong state … remained part of the collective Russian temperament.” Even in a democracy, Putin believed that law and order depended on the quiet, effective work of the secret services.

Putin became one of the three first deputies in Sobchak’s government, still in charge of foreign economic affairs. One of the other first deputies, Vladimir Yakolev, eventually broke with him in 1996 and campaigned against Sobchak for mayor of St. Petersburg. Yakolev’s candidacy and betrayal infuriated Putin. When Sobchak lost the election, Putin stuck with his boss. “Sobchak’s unexpected loss left Putin without a job,” Myers writes, “without a patron and without a purpose.” It seemed to be the humiliation of Dresden all over again. After five years as the “second man in Russia’s second city” he was unemployed and with only $5,000 to his name.

At the time, Pavel Borodin was the powerful head of the Kremlin’s “Department of Presidential Affairs,” responsible for managing state property, construction, and logistics for the Russian government. Borodin offered Putin, desperate for any job, a position in Moscow within his department. Putin became Borodin’s deputy, handling legal and international affairs tied to Kremlin property management. Myers says that his greatest professional quality at the time was his inconspicuousness. Around this time Putin also pursued his advanced degree at the Plekhanov Mining Institute. His thesis, which the author claims was completely ghost-written and plagiarized, was focused on developing an economic policy based on Russia’s immense natural resources. Few academics have ever had the chance to put their thoughts into practice the way Putin eventually would.

In 1997, Putin risked his reputation – and possibly his life – to spirit his former boss, Anatoly Sobchak, out of Russia to Paris to avoid prosecution. The daring and illegal operation caught President Boris Yeltsin’s attention for its display of loyalty and resolve. By the late 1990s, the Russian economy was in free fall: a barrel of oil sold for less than the cost of extracting it in Russia. During this period, Putin cultivated a reputation as a competent, disciplined, and incorruptible administrator who refused to take bribes. Yeltsin appointed the unremarkable former KGB lieutenant colonel to lead the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, hoping he could restore its prestige and authority. He became the first – and last – civilian to head the organization. Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s fortunes, both political and personal, continued to deteriorate. From the outside, Putin appeared to be barely hanging on to his position.

At the end of his presidency, Boris Yeltsin and his closest associates – including members of his family – faced serious and credible corruption threats. Politically weakened and in failing health – “sixty-eight, frail, and politically crippled,” as Myers writes – Yeltsin feared prosecution in retirement for himself and his inner circle, widely known as “the Family.” Meanwhile, “Putin rose through the ranks as the Yeltsin era seemed to be in its death throes.” The soft-spoken apparatchik from St. Petersburg projected calm and control at a moment when the Kremlin was unraveling. A peaceful transfer of power was virtually unknown in Russian history. “The personification of power ran so deep in Russian culture that it seemed inconceivable,” Myers observes. Yeltsin felt besieged by rivals who might tear him apart once he stepped down – figures such as Yevgeny Primakov (Prime Minister, 1998–1999), Yury Luzhkov (Mayor of Moscow, 1992–2010), and Sergei Stepashin (Prime Minister in 1999 and former Interior Minister and FSB chief). Then, at age forty-six, the unremarkable Vladimir Putin was named Russia’s fifth prime minister in just eighteen months. Few expected him to last more than a few weeks; he was perceived as a transitional figure at best, soon to be swept aside.

Putin’s first decisive move was to double down on crushing the insurgency in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. He deployed nearly 100,000 Russian troops – roughly the same number the Soviets had sent into Afghanistan, a country almost forty times larger than Chechnya. Many in Moscow’s political elite assumed Putin was committing political suicide, yet his gamble proved unexpectedly popular. Suddenly, he appeared to embody a new and independent political force. “Putin’s rise was as astonishing as it was unexpected,” Myers writes. “His blunt public statements, even the coarse ones, seemed refreshing after the confusion and obfuscation of Yeltsin’s administration.”

Putin became the face of a newly formed, vaguely defined political party called Unity, which rejected traditional right-versus-left politics in favor of patriotism and national unity. Then, on New Year’s Eve 1999, Yeltsin stunned the country by announcing his resignation, granting Putin three months as acting president before the March election. In return, Putin swiftly enacted a decree granting Yeltsin immunity from prosecution and protecting his papers and property from seizure. With the stroke of a pen, Putin removed the single greatest threat to Yeltsin and his family – the very objective Yeltsin had in mind when he chose his trustworthy and loyal successor.

At the turn of the millennium, Russia was a hollow remnant of its former Soviet empire. The country’s GDP had fallen to less than one-tenth that of the United States, and even matching the economies of Spain or Portugal would require years of sustained growth. It was a humiliating collapse in both economic strength and global stature. From the outset, Putin rejected the trappings of democracy – he gave no speeches, held no rallies, and engaged in no debates. His prescription for Russia’s revival was national unity, patriotism, and a strong centralized state. He managed to take pride in his Soviet upbringing and KGB past while distancing himself from the failures of the Soviet system. “Anyone who does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart,” he often said, “and anyone who wants to see it re-created in its former shape has no brain.” 

Rather than reversing Yeltsin’s reforms, Putin called for a new “dictatorship of the law,” an effort to root out the corruption and cronyism that had plagued both the late Soviet and early democratic eras. “Putin’s ascension to the pinnacle of power,” Myers writes, “was so rapid, so unexpected, so astounding, that a prominent Russian historian described it in otherworldly terms – as the act of a higher power bestowed on a battered, grateful nation.” His election in March 2000 marked the first peaceful, democratic transfer of power in Russia’s eleven-hundred-year history. He declared just $13,000 in total assets at the time of his inauguration.

Putin’s overriding political and economic objective for his new administration was stability – and his chosen means to achieve it was control of the media and dilution of competing political parties. At first, Myers writes, Putin sought rapprochement with the West, particularly Western Europe, projecting the image of a new Russia eager to engage with the world. He even took daily, hour-long English lessons in an attempt to communicate with his peers directly. But by the end of his first term, he had become convinced that the West – especially the United States – had no intention of ever treating Russia as an equal. Instead, he came to believe its aim was to exploit Russia’s natural resources while keeping the nation weak and marginalized.

Demonstrating Russia’s strength and resilience became an obsession for Putin. The world, he believed, had to be shown that no one and nothing could bring Russia to her knees. One of his first acts as interim president was to double down on the war against separatists in Chechnya. His commitment to an unconditional victory never wavered, even in the face of humiliating battlefield losses and the horrific terrorist attacks on the Moscow Dubrovka theater in October 2002 and an elementary school in Beslan, North Ossetia in September 2004 – both of which ended in tragedy after botched rescue operations where hundreds of hostages were killed by Russian counterterrorism forces.

At the same time, Putin moved swiftly to consolidate state control over Russia’s vast oil and gas wealth – not merely to strengthen a struggling economy, Myers writes, but to restore Russia’s stature as a global superpower. He accomplished this by targeting the country’s most powerful energy magnates, imprisoning figures such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev of Yukos Oil, and making involuntary exiles of Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich from Sibneft. Between 2000 and 2007, Putin systematically brought Russia’s strategic “commanding heights” industries – oil and gas, media, defense, and banking – under direct or quasi-state control. Myers notes that the 2004 merger of Rosneft and Gazprom, engineered under Putin’s guidance, gave the Kremlin “an energy juggernaut as rich as Exxon and as pliant as Saudi Arabia’s Aramco.” By 2006, state-owned energy companies accounted for roughly one-fifth of Russia’s GDP and a third of its stock market value. By 2007, Putin and the hardliners in his inner circle, known as the siloviki, had maneuvered to control half of Russia’s oil production (up from ten percent in 2000), all gas exports through Gazprom, and every major media outlet and pipeline. With oil prices tripling since the 1998 fiscal crisis, the Kremlin’s share of oil profits surged from $6 billion to more than $80 billion. Russia had become Kremlin Inc – and Putin its undisputed CEO and chairman of the board.

Meanwhile, a new generation of oligarchs emerged – quite unlike the swaggering, freewheeling Russian billionaires of the 1990s. These new power brokers were “dour, colorless, secretive, and completely loyal to the man who had lifted them from obscurity.” Many were Putin’s old judo buddies and St. Petersburg associates, handpicked to oversee industries deemed vital to Russia’s national security – especially energy and media.

Putin’s approval ratings soared into the seventies, forcing the Kremlin to recruit token opponents merely to preserve the façade of a “managed democracy.” His party, United Russia, had no real ideological platform beyond unwavering support for Putin himself. Once again, he ran no campaign ads, held no rallies, and offered no concrete policy proposals – he simply embodied the image of Russian stability. The Kremlin’s chief worry was not defeating an opponent, but ensuring that voter turnout exceeded fifty percent to legitimize the election. In the 2007 parliamentary elections, United Russia won 315 of the Duma’s 450 seats. By then, an estimated seventy percent of Putin’s senior political appointments came from the ranks of the military, intelligence, and police – men wholly loyal to him. No Russian leader since Brezhnev had commanded such comprehensive control over the state.

It is clear that Putin is driven by an obsession with projecting strength and unity in his confrontation with the West. In the aftermath of the Beslan massacre, he declared, “We demonstrated weakness—and the weak are beaten.” Following that tragedy, Putin moved to dismantle what remained of Russia’s democratic institutions, abolishing direct elections for governors, mayors, and regional presidents. From then on, he personally selected candidates for these positions and submitted their names to regional parliaments for formal approval. “Step by step,” Myers writes, “Putin erased the legacy of his predecessor [Yeltsin], just as surely as Stalin had Lenin’s, as Khrushchev had Stalin’s, as Brezhnev had Khrushchev’s, and as Yeltsin had Gorbachev’s.”
“The Russian people are backward,” Putin later told a group of foreign journalists, “they cannot adapt to democracy, as they have done in your countries.” In Russia, Putin argued, popular will was the road only to chaos. He presumably feels that same way about Ukrainians. 

A series of massive pro-democracy protests in Ukraine known as the Orange Revolution took place from November 2004 to January 2005. It erupted after widespread reports of fraud in the November 2004 presidential election, in which Kremlin-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was declared the winner over opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko. Demonstrators, dressed in orange – the color of Yushchenko’s campaign – demanded fair elections and democratic reforms. The Ukrainian Supreme Court annulled the results and ordered a re-run in December 2004, which Yushchenko won, marking a victory for Ukraine’s pro-democracy movement and a humiliation and “ominous warning” to the Kremlin, according to Myers.

The Orange Revolution clashed directly with Putin’s emerging worldview inspired by Russian political philosopher and legal theorist Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954). Ilyin believed Russia required a strong, centralized, and morally guided state – ideally under an autocratic leader – to maintain national unity and prevent chaos. He distrusted democracy, seeing it as divisive and morally weak, and argued that Russia’s salvation lay in a “Christian totality” where the ruler embodied the nation’s spiritual will. To Ilyin, liberal democracy encouraged selfishness, materialism, and the decay of national spirit. He contrasted this with a uniquely Russian model grounded in faith, duty, and collective identity, with Russia as a divinely chosen civilization with a moral calling to preserve Christian values and resist Western decadence. In modern Russia, Ilyin’s writings have been selectively revived to provide an intellectual and spiritual justification for authoritarian rule, national unity, and resistance to Western liberal influence. His emphasis on moral strength, patriotic obedience, and Russia’s special Orthodox destiny has made him a symbolic philosopher of Putin’s worldview.

Meanwhile, Putin was chasing another dream that harkened back to his Cold War roots – hosting and dominating the Olympic games. Myers claims that the western boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow left a lasting and bitter taste in the mouths of the Russian people. Putin’s popularity soared when, against very long odds, he secured Sochi as the site of the 2014 winter games. Putin put his old judo partner, Arkady Rotenberg, in charge of the Olympics, and spared no expense. Russia would end up spending $51 billion – over seven times more than the Canadians did in Vancouver in 2010 – making it the most expensive Olympic games in history and an orgy of corruption. “Corruption had become so pervasive it was institutionalized,” Myers says. The ski jump site alone, with an initial budget of $40 million, ended up costing $260 million and was never fully completed. Putin also funded one of the most elaborate and successful athletic doping schemes in modern history en route to a dominating performance by the Russian team (thirteen gold medals and thirty-three total medals, most of any nation).

Myers refers to Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency, which followed Vladimir Putin’s two-term limit, as “the regency.” Medvedev never had a real chance to establish himself as an independent political force, though Myers suggests he tried. Only forty-three at the time of his election – like Putin before him, it was the first he had ever contested – Medvedev presented a markedly different image from his predecessor. Myers describes him as “gentle and open,” in contrast to the “steely and brittle” Putin. Less than one hundred days into his term, Medvedev failed a critical test by responding sluggishly to the Georgian invasion of the breakaway republic of South Ossetia – a hesitation Putin interpreted as weakness and would never forgive. “Medvedev’s authority extended only as far as Putin’s forbearance allowed,” Myers writes. For the duration of his presidency, he was doomed to play Robin to Putin’s Batman. In the end, Myers writes, “Medvedev proved to be nothing more than a pawn in Putin’s gambit to sidestep the letter of the law that limited a leader’s term.”

Putin’s unconstitutional return to the presidency in 2012 sparked the largest public protests in Moscow since the August coup of 1991. He viewed the demonstrations not as spontaneous expressions of domestic discontent but as the “active work” of the CIA and U.S. State Department – an American effort to unseat him, just as authoritarian rulers had been toppled during the Arab Spring the previous year. His return marked the onset of a renewed authoritarian crackdown reinforced by patriotic and religious appeals. Putin now cast himself as the defender of a conservative and deeply patriarchal Russia. The Duma quickly passed laws criminalizing libel and blasphemy and raised the fine for participating in unauthorized protests from 5,000 to 300,000 rubles – roughly $10,000, far beyond the reach of most citizens. Putin also moved swiftly to undo nearly all reforms enacted under Medvedev’s administration, even trivial ones, such as restoring the two time zones Medvedev had eliminated.

By 2014, Putin was openly at war with the West. “When we dissolve our army, concede all our natural resources, and sell all our land to Western investors,” he fumed, “that’s when they will cease to criticize us.” But Putin had very different plans. He envisioned Russia as the global center of gravity – a rich, indispensable, and united nation, respected and feared worldwide. He crossed the Rubicon with his military takeover of Crimea in February 2014, following the ousting of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, during the Maidan Revolution. To him, all criticism and pressure were part of a vast Western conspiracy aimed at weakening Russia and his rule. He no longer cared what the West thought or how it would react. “All his fears, passions, weaknesses, and complexes [became] state policy,” wrote Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin. Ironically, almost inexplicably, the more disastrous his decisions appeared, the more powerful he became. The annexation of Crimea – the first territorial annexation in Europe since Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – propelled Putin’s approval rating to 85 percent.

After returning to the presidency in 2012 with no clearly defined agenda, Putin set Russia on a bold and confrontational course that fused the worst instincts of both the Soviet Union and the tsarist empire. “No Putin, no Russia,” became the rallying cry. He had consolidated the nation behind his will – unyielding, unchallenged, and unassailable.