Del terror rojo al Estado mafioso

Vladimir Putin is the longest-serving Russian leader after Stalin, a figure in which he reflects to reach 30 years in power: Putin plans to be president until the year 2036. In this book, the prestigious academics Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Popov propose expose how the Russian president, who did not come from an oligarchic clan or family, came to the leadership of this mafia state. He did it as a representative of the system in which he had developed his entire career: as a member of the KGB. Putin's rise to power was the high point in the history of the Soviet special services, formed in 1917 under the acronym VChK. These secret services, famous for their atrocities and the slaughter of millions of people, survived under the various governments and became part of the very fabric of the Russian state. The year 1991 marks the moment when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which exercised political control of the security services, gave in and finally relinquished power, leaving it in the hands of the KGB. His boss, Putin, built around him a new state governed by a mafia junta that operates outside the law and on the principle of absolute personal loyalty to the president. The second phase of the establishment of the mafia State is its current desire for expansionism. With the invasion of Crimea in 2014, Putin consolidated the new nationalism under the principle that, in order to protect the interests of the "Russian world", neighboring lands belonging to the former Empire and the USSR must be annexed. A project of reunification of all Russian-speakers within the borders of a single State that explains the current war in Ukraine. These pages dissect the current kleptocratic regime built around the figure of Putin and are the key to understanding how a country that was a member of the European Union has become a strategic adversary of NATO and the biggest obstacle to peace in Europe.