Download or read book Putin s Oil written by Martin Sixsmith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title investigates Vladimir Putin's war for control of Russia's vast oil reserves, in particular Mikhail Khodorkovsky's oil firm, Yukos. "Putin's Oil" investigates the complex world of Kremlin politics, including conspiracies and conspiracy theories, allegations that Roman Abramovitch plotted with Putin to destroy Khodorkovsky, suspicions of betrayal and double agents in the Kremlin and in Yukos, murder charges against Khodorkovsky's partners, and the KGB defector who claims they were carried out by Kremlin agents. After the mysterious death in a helicopter crash of the Englishman who had taken over Yukos, the company's war against the Kremlin is now being waged by a troika of mild mannered Britons, pursued by Interpol arrest warrants and Moscow's fury. Khodorkovsky remains in a penal camp in far Eastern Siberia. Martin Sixsmith, former BBC Moscow Correspondent, has gained unprecedented access to many of the players in the drama. The resulting book is both a thriller and an analysis of the defining moments of Putin's presidency and their ongoing impact in Russian and world politics.
Download or read book Wheel of Fortune written by Thane Gustafson and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year on Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Republics The Russian oil industry—which vies with Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer and exporter of oil, providing nearly 12 percent of the global supply—is facing mounting problems that could send shock waves through the Russian economy and worldwide. Wheel of Fortune provides an authoritative account of this vital industry from the last years of communism to its uncertain future. Tracking the interdependence among Russia’s oil industry, politics, and economy, Thane Gustafson shows how the stakes extend beyond international energy security to include the potential threat of a destabilized Russia. “Few have studied the Russian oil and gas industry longer or with a broader political perspective than Gustafson. The result is this superb book, which is not merely a fascinating, subtle history of the industry since the Soviet Union’s collapse but also the single most revealing work on Russian politics and economics published in the last several years.” —Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs “The history of Russia’s oil industry since the collapse of communism is the history of the country itself. There can be few better guides to this terrain than Thane Gustafson.” —Neil Buckley, Financial Times
Download or read book Oil in Putin s Russia written by Adnan Vatansever and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an in-depth review of Russia's key economic policies, this book is the first systematic study of the political economy of oil windfalls in Putin's Russia.
Download or read book The Depths of Russia written by Douglas Rogers and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-23 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia is among the world’s leading oil producers, sitting atop the planet’s eighth largest reserves. Like other oil-producing nations, it has been profoundly transformed by the oil industry. In The Depths of Russia, Douglas Rogers offers a nuanced and multifaceted analysis of oil’s place in Soviet and Russian life, based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in the Perm region of the Urals. Moving beyond models of oil calibrated to capitalist centers and postcolonial "petrostates," Rogers traces the distinctive contours of the socialist—and then postsocialist—oil complex, showing how oil has figured in the making and remaking of space and time, state and corporation, exchange and money, and past and present. He pays special attention to the material properties and transformations of oil (from depth in subsoil deposits to toxicity in refining) and to the ways oil has echoed through a range of cultural registers. The Depths of Russia challenges the common focus on high politics and Kremlin intrigue by considering the role of oil in barter exchanges and surrogate currencies, industry-sponsored social and cultural development initiatives, and the city of Perm’s campaign to become a European Capital of Culture. Rogers also situates Soviet and post-Soviet oil in global contexts, showing that many of the forms of state and corporate power that emerged in Russia after socialism are not outliers but very much part of a global family of state-corporate alliances gathered at the intersection of corporate social responsibility, cultural sponsorship, and the energy and extractive industries.
Download or read book Petrostate written by Marshall I. Goldman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-20 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the financial collapse of August 1998, it looked as if Russia's day as a superpower had come and gone. That it should recover and reassert itself after less than a decade is nothing short of an economic and political miracle. Based on extensive research, including several interviews with Vladimir Putin, this revealing book chronicles Russia's dramatic reemergence on the world stage, illuminating the key reason for its rebirth: the use of its ever-expanding energy wealth to reassert its traditional great power ambitions. In his deft, informative narrative, Marshall Goldman traces how this has come to be, and how Russia is using its oil-based power as a lever in world politics. The book provides an informative overview of oil in Russia, traces Vladimir Putin's determined effort to reign in the upstart oil oligarchs who had risen to power in the post-Soviet era, and describes Putin's efforts to renationalize and refashion Russia's industries into state companies and his vaunted "national champions" corporations like Gazprom, largely owned by the state, who do the bidding of the state. Goldman shows how Russia paid off its international debt and has gone on to accumulate the world's third largest holdings of foreign currency reserves--all by becoming the world's largest producer of petroleum and the world's second largest exporter. Today, Vladimir Putin and his cohort have stabilized the Russian economy and recentralized power in Moscow, and fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) have made it all possible. The story of oil and gas in Russia is a tale of discovery, intrigue, corruption, wealth, misguidance, greed, patronage, nepotism, and power. Marshall Goldman tells this story with panache, as only one of the world's leading authorities on Russia could.
Download or read book Blowout written by Rachel Maddow and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All “A rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting, and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today.”—The New York Times Book Review In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, revolutionaries in Ukraine raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. Unlikely as it might seem, there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. She deftly shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Vladimir Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the West’s most important alliances, and the United States. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.” Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”
Download or read book Russia s Oil Barons and Metal Magnates written by S. Fortescue and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia's Oil Barons and Metal Magnates contains a critical analysis of the claims made against oligarchs. In doing so, it presents a detailed analysis of the place of the oligarchs in both the metals sector and in the Russian political economy.
Download or read book Putinomics written by Chris Miller and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Vladimir Putin first took power in 1999, he was a little-known figure ruling a country that was reeling from a decade and a half of crisis. In the years since, he has reestablished Russia as a great power. How did he do it? What principles have guided Putin's economic policies? What patterns can be discerned? In this new analysis of Putin's Russia, Chris Miller examines its economic policy and the tools Russia's elite have used to achieve its goals. Miller argues that despite Russia's corruption, cronyism, and overdependence on oil as an economic driver, Putin's economic strategy has been surprisingly successful. Explaining the economic policies that underwrote Putin's two-decades-long rule, Miller shows how, at every juncture, Putinomics has served Putin's needs by guaranteeing economic stability and supporting his accumulation of power. Even in the face of Western financial sanctions and low oil prices, Putin has never been more relevant on the world stage.
Download or read book Petro Aggression written by Jeff D. Colgan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oil is the world's single most important commodity and its political effects are pervasive. Jeff D. Colgan extends the idea of the resource curse into the realm of international relations, exploring how countries form their foreign policy preferences and intentions. Why are some but not all oil-exporting 'petrostates' aggressive? To answer this question, a theory of aggressive foreign policy preferences is developed and then tested, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Petro-Aggression shows that oil creates incentives that increase a petrostate's aggression, but also incentives for the opposite. The net effect depends critically on its domestic politics, especially the preferences of its leader. Revolutionary leaders are especially significant. Using case studies including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, this book offers new insight into why oil politics has a central role in global peace and conflict.
Download or read book The Art of Sanctions written by Richard Nephew and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nations and international organizations are increasingly using sanctions as a means to achieve their foreign policy aims. However, sanctions are ineffective if they are executed without a clear strategy responsive to the nature and changing behavior of the target. In The Art of Sanctions, Richard Nephew offers a much-needed practical framework for planning and applying sanctions that focuses not just on the initial sanctions strategy but also, crucially, on how to calibrate along the way and how to decide when sanctions have achieved maximum effectiveness. Nephew—a leader in the design and implementation of sanctions on Iran—develops guidelines for interpreting targets’ responses to sanctions based on two critical factors: pain and resolve. The efficacy of sanctions lies in the application of pain against a target, but targets may have significant resolve to resist, tolerate, or overcome this pain. Understanding the interplay of pain and resolve is central to using sanctions both successfully and humanely. With attention to these two key variables, and to how they change over the course of a sanctions regime, policy makers can pinpoint when diplomatic intervention is likely to succeed or when escalation is necessary. Focusing on lessons learned from sanctions on both Iran and Iraq, Nephew provides policymakers with practical guidance on how to measure and respond to pain and resolve in the service of strong and successful sanctions regimes.
Download or read book Russian Energy Policy and Military Power written by Pavel Baev and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an examination of how the political design for restoring Russia's 'greatness' has been shaped by the increase of its profile as a key energy supplier and the continuing decline of its military might.
Download or read book Russia s Response to Sanctions written by Richard Connolly and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in-depth scholarly analysis of the effects of Western sanctions, and Russia's response on the Russian economy.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Russian Oil written by David Lane and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1999 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the dominant export-oriented industries in Russia, oil is a major source of tax revenue and wealth. The privatization of these vast assets has made the industry a site not only for conflict between power holders but also a strategic target for international corporations and Western governments. In this thoughtful analysis, a group of international specialists explores the political and economic issues and controversies surrounding the oil industry's move to capitalism. The authors examine the spread of crime and corruption, the role of Russian and Western financial institutions, regional tensions, and the international dimension. As a paradigm for the Russian economy as a whole, the case of oil industry provides invaluable insights for understanding the political and economic problems confronting Russia today.
Download or read book Change in Putin s Russia written by Simon Pirani and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2010-01-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Science.
Download or read book The Colder War written by Marin Katusa and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the massive power shift in Russia threatens the political dominance of the United States There is a new cold war underway, driven by a massive geopolitical power shift to Russia that went almost unnoticed across the globe. In The Colder War: How the Global Energy Trade Slipped from America's Grasp, energy expert Marin Katusa takes a look at the ways the western world is losing control of the energy market, and what can be done about it. Russia is in the midst of a rapid economic and geopolitical renaissance under the rule of Vladimir Putin, a tenacious KGB officer turned modern-day tsar. Understanding his rise to power provides the keys to understanding the shift in the energy trade from Saudi Arabia to Russia. This powerful new position threatens to unravel the political dominance of the United States once and for all. Discover how political coups, hostile takeovers, and assassinations have brought Russia to the center of the world's energy market Follow Putin's rise to power and how it has led to an upsetting of the global balance of trade Learn how Russia toppled a generation of robber barons and positioned itself as the most powerful force in the energy market Study Putin's long-range plans and their potential impact on the United States and the U.S. dollar If Putin's plans are successful, not only will Russia be able to starve other countries of power, but the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) will replace the G7 in wealth and clout. The Colder War takes a hard look at what is to come in a new global energy market that is certain to cause unprecedented impact on the U.S. dollar and the American way of life.
Download or read book Weak Strongman written by Timothy Frye and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Media and public discussion tends to understand Russian politics as a direct reflection of Vladimir Putin's seeming omnipotence or Russia's unique history and culture. Yet Russia is remarkably similar to other autocracies -- and recognizing this illuminates the inherent limits to Putin's power. Weak Strongman challenges the conventional wisdom about Putin's Russia, highlighting the difficult trade-offs that confront the Kremlin on issues ranging from election fraud and repression to propaganda and foreign policy. Drawing on three decades of his own on-the-ground experience and research as well as insights from a new generation of social scientists that have received little attention outside academia, Timothy Frye reveals how much we overlook about today's Russia when we focus solely on Putin or Russian exceptionalism. Frye brings a new understanding to a host of crucial questions: How popular is Putin? Is Russian propaganda effective? Why are relations with the West so fraught? Can Russian cyber warriors really swing foreign elections? In answering these and other questions, Frye offers a highly accessible reassessment of Russian politics that highlights the challenges of governing Russia and the nature of modern autocracy. Rich in personal anecdotes and cutting-edge social science, Weak Strongman offers the best evidence available about how Russia actually works"--
Download or read book Kremlin Rising written by Peter Baker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-06-07 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Hedrick Smith's The Russians, Robert G. Kaiser's Russia: The People and the Power, and David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb comes an eloquent and eye-opening chronicle of Vladimir Putin's Russia, from this generation's leading Moscow correspondents. With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia launched itself on a fitful transition to Western-style democracy. But a decade later, Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, a childhood hooligan turned KGB officer who rose from nowhere determined to restore the order of the Soviet past, resolved to bring an end to the revolution. Kremlin Rising goes behind the scenes of contemporary Russia to reveal the culmination of Project Putin, the secret plot to reconsolidate power in the Kremlin. During their four years as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser witnessed firsthand the methodical campaign to reverse the post-Soviet revolution and transform Russia back into an authoritarian state. Their gripping narrative moves from the unlikely rise of Putin through the key moments of his tenure that re-centralized power into his hands, from his decision to take over Russia's only independent television network to the Moscow theater siege of 2002 to the "managed democracy" elections of 2003 and 2004 to the horrific slaughter of Beslan's schoolchildren in 2004, recounting a four-year period that has changed the direction of modern Russia. But the authors also go beyond the politics to draw a moving and vivid portrait of the Russian people they encountered -- both those who have prospered and those barely surviving -- and show how the political flux has shaped individual lives. Opening a window to a country on the brink, where behind the gleaming new shopping malls all things Soviet are chic again and even high school students wonder if Lenin was right after all, Kremlin Rising features the personal stories of Russians at all levels of society, including frightened army deserters, an imprisoned oil billionaire, Chechen villagers, a trendy Moscow restaurant king, a reluctant underwear salesman, and anguished AIDS patients in Siberia. With shrewd reporting and unprecedented access to Putin's insiders, Kremlin Rising offers both unsettling new revelations about Russia's leader and a compelling inside look at life in the land that he is building. As the first major book on Russia in years, it is an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the country and promises to shape the debate about Russia, its uncertain future, and its relationship with the United States.
