Leon Aron, in a way, grew up with Vladimir Putin, as he observes in Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War (AEI press, 232 pp., $25). The two men were born a couple of years and 700 kilometers apart in the Soviet Union. Aron emigrated to the U.S. and became a scholar of Russia, an early biographer of Yeltsin, and a longtime senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In his latest book, he attempts to make sense of what he and many other observers at the time regarded as irrational: Putin’s decision in February 2022 to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Aron wants to “try and explain what sort of man was given to so senseless an impulse.” The key to understanding what has happened in Russia since 2000, he argues, is to grasp the motivations and actions of Putin – his ideas and their consequences. To that end, Aron expertly and with lightly worn erudition guides the reader through the “house that Putin built.” The tiger evoked in the book’s title, in a well-chosen image, is the “militarized patriotism” that Putin has attempted to saddle and ride to a dangerous and uncertain end
Olga Sedakova the poet, is a Russian of Putin’s generation. Her Russia is very different from his, as a new English translation of her poetry, Old Songs (Slant, 98 pp., $32), makes clear. In 2014, she signed a public letter protesting the invasion of Crimea and has been an outspoken critic, from Moscow, of what she calls the “cruel and meaningless war that’s being carried out in the name of my country and my language.” Old Songs was written from 1980 to 1981; it draws on a folk tradition of oral poetry, what Sedakova has described as “something along the lines of Russian spirituals.” Her translator, Martha M. F. Kelly, says that the poems hit “notes of humble knowing,” as a wise grandmother might. In his foreword, Rowan Williams writes that, while Sedakova’s life has spanned “the end of the repressions of the Soviet era and the beginnings of a new age of angry, violent nationalism,” her “detachment from these varieties of anti-humanism is consistent and deep.”
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