You can get a better idea of why certain Russians not only tolerate but revere Putin if you remember that, within a few years of Communism’s fall, average life expectancy in Russia had fallen below that of Bangladesh. Putin did not found a kleptocracy; he inherited one. The ignominy falls on Boris Yeltsin, whose opportunism made him an indispensable foe of Communism in the late 1980s, but made him an equally poisonous founding father for any modern democratic state. “Most Russians have come to believe that democracy is what happened in their country between 1990 and 2000,” Laqueur writes, “and they do not want any more of it.”

Yeltsin “made” Putin, even though the two were never close. Putin combined two traits that almost never appear together: iron loyalty and an appetite for any kind of risk. The zealous prosecutor Yuri Skuratov had leaked compromising details from an investigation into Sobchak’s city government, an irregularity that appalled Putin. In 1997, Skuratov was on the verge of arresting Sobchak, when Putin, then in his job as investigator, spirited his old boss out of the country on a plane.

This act of loyalty—risking his career, his reputation, everything, for a onetime mentor who had already fallen from power and could no longer help him—wowed Yeltsin, even though he disliked Sobchak. Other political operatives may have been demoralized. Putin understood that the Russian government still held a few trumps.

When Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov tried to topple Yeltsin, Luzhkov’s wife’s business came under investigation. In March 1999, Russian media obtained videotapes showing the crusading Skuratov at an orgy. Whether or not the tapes were genuine, the reassertion of political power was. That is surely part of the reason why Yeltsin named the relative political novice as prime minister that summer, then shocked the country on New Year’s Eve by resigning as president and naming Putin to succeed him.