The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud With the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia
By Amy Knight
Northern Illinois University Press, 2024, 296 pp.
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Knight tells the riveting story of the Russian tycoon and political operator Boris Berezovsky and his role in the rise of Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000. Drawing on many books and articles, as well as interviews with Berezovsky’s family and associates, she chronicles how Berezovsky made his incredible fortune through get-rich-quick schemes; his close ties with the family of Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin; his contributions to the neutralizing of Putin’s rivals; his falling out with Putin almost as soon as the latter became acting president and his forced exile in 2000; and his mysterious death in his London home in 2013. Berezovsky, as portrayed by Knight, marks a striking contrast to Putin: the former boisterous and mercurial, a charmer and a womanizer, a super-ambitious man with an “insatiable need for publicity”; the latter secretive, cold, and calculating. Those familiar with Russia’s post-Soviet history will not find many new facts in Knight’s book, but others are sure to enjoy her narrative, which covers the tumultuous political developments in Russia in the 1990s and the first decade of the next century, replete with terrorist attacks, hostage takings, wars, and vicious political intrigue, including an especially murky period preceding Putin’s anointment as Yeltsin’s successor.