Sergei Lebedev's debut novel is Oblivion. At Publishers Weekly Lebedev, who was born in Moscow in 1981, tagged ten books that explain Russia's complicated past and present, including:The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB by Andrei Soldatov and Irina BoroganRead about the other books on the list.
When he became president, Vladimir Putin joked at a meeting of his colleagues from the FSB (the successor to the KGB): “Mission accomplished. The undercover operation was successful.” Even back then there were many who didn’t take this as a joke.
In the USSR the Central Committee reined in the KGB’s ambitions to power, using it as an instrument, “a sword of retribution.” The lone exception was Yuri Andropov, who became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1982.
The book by Borogan and Soltadov shows how, in the post-Soviet era, the situation has been diametrically reversed. Political parties and the executive and legislative branches of power have become instruments of a group of KGB’ers, agents who have become the true masters of the country.
--Marshal Zeringue
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