Godfather of the Kremlin

“I chose it because it takes on a fiendishly difficult subject – the businessman and oligarch Boris Berezovsky and his role in creating Putin. I think anybody who has come to be interested in Russia during the Putin period thinks of Berezovsky as someone who has fallen out with Putin, is in exile in London, showing his skill at manipulating the media. He does that very well. This book is a marvellous reminder of the fact that Berezovsky was an extremely powerful man, perhaps the most powerful man in Russia towards the end of Yeltsin’s term, and actually helped to create Putin the president and to put Putin where he is.” Read more...

The best books on Putin’s Russia

Simon Pirani, Historian