Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? is a 2014 book by Karen Dawisha. Published by Simon & Schuster, it chronicles the rise of Vladimir Putin during his time in Saint Petersburg in the 1990s.
In the book, Dawisha exposes how Putin’s friends and coworkers from his formative years have accumulated mass amounts of wealth and power. Although Putin was elected with promises to rein in the oligarchs who had emerged in the 1990s, Dawisha writes that Putin transformed “an oligarchy independent of, and more powerful than, the state into a corporatist structure in which oligarchs served at the pleasure of state officials, who themselves gained and exercised economic control… both for the state and for themselves.”
As a result, 110 individuals control 35% of Russia’s wealth, according to Dawisha. Whereas scholars have traditionally viewed Putin’s Russia as a democracy in the process of failing, Dawisha argues that “from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal… who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.”