Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 1610397193
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The ascension of Vladimir Putin—a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB—to the presidency of Russia in 1999 was a strong signal that the country was headed away from democracy. Yet in the intervening years—as America and the world’s other leading powers have continued to appease him—Putin has grown not only into a dictator but an internationalthreat. With his vast resources and nuclear arsenal, Putin is at the center of a worldwide assault on political liberty and the modern world order.
For Garry Kasparov, none of this is news. He has been a vocal critic of Putin for over a decade, even leading the pro-democracy opposition to him in the farcical 2008 presidential election. Yet years of seeing his Cassandra-like prophecies about Putin’s intentions fulfilled have left Kasparov with a darker truth: Putin’s Russia, like ISIS or Al Qaeda, defines itself in opposition to the free countries of the world.
As Putin has grown ever more powerful, the threat he poses has grown from local to regional and finally to global. In this urgent book, Kasparov shows that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not an endpoint—only a change of seasons, as the Cold War melted into a new spring. But now, after years of complacency and poor judgment, winter is once again upon us.
Argued with the force of Kasparov’s world-class intelligence, conviction, and hopes for his home country, Winter Is Coming reveals Putin for what he is: an existential danger hiding in plain sight.
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revealed, for example, that some soldiers had earlier stumbled onto sugar bags full of a “strange substance” on a nearby base, which turned out to be hexogen. 78 W I N T E R I S C O M I N G A deep investigation and analysis of the case were turned into a devastating book by former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, Blowing Up Russia. The same Litvinenko, who had become a Áerce Putin critic, was assassinated in London in 2006 with the rare radioactive substance polonium-210. An independent FSB
faults and fall from grace while in ofÁce, Yeltsin was a true freedom Ághter. Had he felt obliged to speak out about Putin’s dictatorial maneuvers it could have had real repercussions going into the 2008 election season. But after he died on April 23, 2007, Putin clearly felt no constraints. Yeltsin deserves to be remembered for more than his drinking and for sitting atop a tank during the August coup attempt. In December 1991, the Western world watched with grave suspicion as Mikhail Gorbachev
fallacy says that taking human rights off the bargaining table weakens foreign policy, or even imperils national 1 13 t h e s e a rc h f or p u t i n ’s s ou l security. To take the bigger picture Árst, let us agree that the more liberal democracies there are in the world, the safer we all will be. “Never” is a risky word in any argument, but it’s safe to say that healthy democracies almost never make war on each other. In the long run, policies that promote the creation and success of more
brutality and heavy-handed campaigning if he knew he and United Russia were going to win easily? The answer is that he was becoming aware of how brittle his power structure was. Instead of sounding like the tsar, high above the crowd, he was starting to sound like just another paranoid autocrat, surrounded by enemies. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.” And so demagoguery it was and demagoguery it continued to be. A violent pro-Putin youth group,
annexation of European soil that has already happened in Ukraine? Denial is not an acceptable policy. Fretting only about what might happen when the current situation is already catastrophic is a pathetic attempt to defer tough decisions. Ignoring your cancer and arguing with the doctors who diagnosed it will not save you, no matter how much you fear treatment. There is no way to be sure exactly what will happen if the nations of the free world, led by the United States and NATO, confront Putin