A strong line required

Putin and the Rise of Russia, by Michael Stuermer

For many years, Professor Michael Stuermer has been one of the West’s most respected authorities both on Russia and on Germany. As at home in English as in his native German, he has pursued not only an academic career, but has brought lustre to the usually grubby trade of journalism as chief correspondent for Die Welt. Few can be as well qualified to write about contemporary Russia, to analyse the extraordinary phenomenon of Putin or to add a late addendum on Putin’s successor, Dmitri Medvedev.

The resulting book is authoritative, readable and concise. Stuermer traces Putin’s rapid rise via Sobchak’s mayoral office in St Petersburg and Borodin’s holding company for foreign assets to Yeltsin’s ‘family’ at the Kremlin. The new Tsar emerges as a man at home with power who has a strong analytical grasp of the vast difficulties Russia must surmount in order merely to survive, let alone to achieve his primary objective: stability.

The basic facts are depressing. Perhaps the most important is that the population is shrinking, and shrinking rapidly. As Stuermer puts it: ‘Russia, in the 19th century a land of infinite population growth, is now a land of elderly women, mostly widows, as men tend to die in their mid- fifties.’ Putin has said that they die of ‘excessive drinking and work accidents resulting from booze’. Every year the population shrinks by between 800,000 and 900,000. By 2050, some ‘pessimists in Moscow’ are forecasting that the population will consist of fewer than 100 million souls. What makes the situation worse is that so many skilled workers are emigrating, dramatically exacerbating Russia’s shortage of highly skilled labour.

The only part of the population that is growing is Islamic.