1.
Accidental Czar is a good overview of the U.S. state department’s interpretation of Vladimir Putin, with fun illustrations by Brian “Box” Brown. The book’s author, Andrew S. Weiss, is the kind of guy who worked as an executive director for the RAND corporation. He went to an Ivy League university (Columbia) and then served on the National Security Council, at the State Department, and at the Defense Department. He was a policy advisor for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, which should tell you something—the guys who worked for both Clinton and W. were usually 100% down with the policy continuities between those administrations, the continuities that led straight to the Iraq War, woot woot. These were also the guys who pushed hard for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.

Weiss previously led the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center, a think-tank for Russian liberals and their allies to encourage and implement liberal reforms in Russia (the Moscow Center was shut down, but Weiss still works for the Carnegie Endowment). His articles have appeared in the New York Times and Foreign Policy. He has appeared on NPR. He has written papers for the Brookings Institute. He goes to the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Is any of that intrinsically bad? No…but when all those meritocratic checkmarks start to accumulate on a single CV, I get suspicious.

Weiss admits that, despite his vast education in Russian and Soviet affairs, there was a lot he didn’t understand about Russia before Putin’s villainous turn. I blame part of that ignorance on Weiss’s ideological commitments: you’ll only get so far in your analysis of Russia if you have centrist-liberal (neoliberal?) priors. Such analysis becomes especially messy when you believe in the benign efficacy of global capital to solve the world’s problems. And according to his biography on the RAND website, “Weiss was a vice president and investment strategist at American International Group, Inc. subsidiary companies, where he worked primarily on global commodities, energy, and foreign exchange markets.”

So yeah, he’s that kind of guy.

2.
Let’s start with the good: Accidental Czar is a lot of fun to read. The accounts of Putin’s upbringing and the myths of Putin’s personal history are entertaining. The histories of Russia that Weiss includes are good overviews of the nation’s origins, development, and ambitions.

Above all, Weiss offers one of the best accounts of “Putin’s brain” that I’ve encountered. An American diplomat once told Weiss that Putin’s entire worldview could be divided into three distinct sources of knowledge: first, there’s the real-world stuff Putin knows that everybody knows (e.g., the American dollar is the global reserve currency; China and the U.S. are locked in a proto-Cold War; the E.U. is facing a reemergence of far-right political parties; the Nazis lost WWII; Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia; etc).

Second, there’s the secret (and real) stuff Putin knows from his firsthand experiences in intelligence and as head of state (stuff you and I aren’t privy to, at least not without Wikileaks).

Third and finally, there’s all the crazy stuff: conspiracy theories about Western homosexuals in Ukraine literally crucifying toddlers on actual crosses, or Obama single-handedly launching the Maidan revolution because Michelle is LGBTQ+, or whatever.

Putin’s brain synthesizes these three types of knowledge through such an extraordinary process of osmosis that, when you’re talking to him, it’s impossible to disentangle the three. You just wind up getting frustrated (like Obama) or played (like Tucker Carlson).

Weiss’s account of Putin’s life and rise to power is mostly accurate, but it has its limits, especially when Putin’s biography begins to intersect with world politics. Weiss portrays American leaders and diplomats as well-intentioned fools and goofs who continually underestimated Putin. These Americans appear naïve and harmless, not political tigers in their own right with their own agendas and their own strategies for global hegemony.

This portrayal is not very plausible.

3.
Alongside Weiss’s American goofs, there are a number of American villains. Take the case of Edward Snowden. Weiss describes the Snowden saga as if the main story was not the wild and flagrant violations of privacy committed by the U.S. government or the terrifying extent of the NSA’s surveillance powers over the entire planet. Weiss brushes over these details and jumps right to Snowden’s flight to Russia—a flight he didn’t exactly choose to make (he was on his way to Latin America and wound up stuck in Russia, which isn’t exactly destination #1 for dissidents).

Snowden has behaved like a weakling and a coward since he wound up in Russia (although I’d challenge you to tell Putin to his face that his domestic surveillance is as pernicious and widespread as America’s). For Weiss, Wikileaks and Snowden are just pawns in Putin’s plan for domination over Eurasia and his scheme to *gasp* deny the presidency to Hillary Clinton (the liberal resentment over Russia’s miniscule role in the 2016 election is pretty thick in Accidental Czar).

You’d never know, reading this book, the extent to which the U.S. lords its surveillance, intelligence, and military agencies over enemies and allies alike…and how little we’d know about America’s covert foreign policy without Snowden’s revelations. For Weiss, Snowden is just another pitstop on the road to the November 2016 U.S. election and the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

4.
Things get a little silly as Weiss moves toward the 2016 election. At the beginning of Chapter Six, Weiss recounts the history of KGB propaganda in the U.S., from spreading lies about the secret origin of HIV in a U.S. lab to spreading obvious non-lies about the fact that Ronald Reagan wanted was taking a militaristic stance against the U.S.S.R., or the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was *gasp* a homosexual. These are the mighty columns of disinformation on which, according to Weiss, Putin built the edifice of the Donald Trump presidency.

Weiss recounts how Putin successfully used asymmetrical warfare in Ukraine in the years between 2014 and 2022. He also recounts how Putin’s allies in London encouraged Brexit; how his media hosted Nigel Farage, Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, and Iowa’s crypto-Nazi former congressman, Steve King; and how his lackeys tried to sow divisions among and within Western nations.

I remember seeing some of this firsthand as a tourist in Berlin in 2014, when far-right demonstrators outside the Bundestag waved Russian flags and placards with slogans like “EU ist nicht Europa” and “BRD ist nicht Deutschland” (one wonders what is Germany, precisely, if not the BRD? Is this some kind of backwards appeal to the deutsches Volk who unsuccessfully invaded the Soviet Union?).

None of this seemed to be working in Germany, where the rise of the far-right had more to do with Syrian refugees than with Putin’s machinations. And if Putin’s machinations succeeded in Ukraine before 2022, it was only insofar as the Kremlin could hack the nation’s physical and digital infrastructure and wreak havoc all over the country. Putin was successful in shutting down the power in Kyiv; he certainly wasn’t successful in winning the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people.

So these brazen, destructive tactics weren’t exactly successful in Ukraine. But Weiss argues that far less powerful tactics were somehow successful in the United States, where Putin’s goons created fake Facebook accounts to rile up American voters (who were already pretty riled up) and leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks (emails that confirmed what most people already knew and/or thought about Hillary Clinton). Weiss complains that Trump used Russian propaganda “to paint Clinton as sleazy and unethical,” which…c’mon, you don’t exactly need Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to make that argument.

Weiss also complains that the American far-right (Donald Trump and his supporters) and the much smaller American far-left (Jill Stein and the weirdos who vote for her) had connections to Russia. Consequently, conservative complaints about American elites after the 2008 financial crisis and leftist complaints about American foreign policy after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are, for Weiss, at least partially Russian in origin.

To be fair, Weiss is careful to point out that the divisions that led to Donald Trump’s victory were homegrown American divisions, and that you didn’t need to be a one-time KGB agent to see with your own eyes that 50% of Americans view the other 50% of Americans as mortal enemies, and vice versa.

In one of the book’s images, we see a meme (based on a real meme) showing Satan arm-wrestling Jesus. Satan says, “If Clinton wins, I win!” Jesus responds, “Not if I can help it!” The meme prompts the viewer to hit “like” to help Jesus win.

As an Orthodox Christian with an Evangelical background, I can tell you that this is pure grade-A ‘Murican-bred religious nationalism, even if it was authored by a cash-hungry teenager in St. Petersburg. This is where policy analysts like Weiss lose track of the plot—they spend lifetimes at elite institutions learning about non-American societies while missing much of American culture and its discontents. (I remember hearing the “Pod Save America” guys talking about how, during the Obama administration, they didn’t understand Evangelicals’ commitment to Israel because they didn’t grow up around Evangelicals. Which, if you live in America and you didn’t know any Evangelicals growing up, you lived a fairly charmed-but-isolated American life.)

All that to say: you don’t need to be a Russian spy to understand the braindead logic of American Christians and deploy that logic in Trump’s favor. You also don’t need RT in order to platform Alex Jones and Richard Spencer, or to smear George Soros. America’s homegrown conservative media is happy to do that without any help from the Kremlin. Steve King didn’t become a Nazi-loving congressman because of Russian hackers in St. Petersburg. He was elected by like-minded racists from Iowa.

Jones and Spencer and King (and Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage) are not, as Weiss claims, “useful idiots” for Moscow. They’re just idiots.

5.
I’m not trying to minimize the effects of Russian propaganda, especially regarding Ukraine. The accusation that Ukraine is overrun with neo-Nazis is, for me, quite serious. First, it’s just not true—there are more flesh-and-blood neo-Nazis in the German Bundestag today than in the Ukrainian Rada (where, if I’ve heard correctly, there are precisely zero extreme-right representatives). Some propagandists point out that Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. But we conveniently ignore the fact that, for every single Ukrainian collaborator with the S.S., there were hundreds (thousands?) of Ukrainians fighting the Nazis in the Red Army.

Second, you hear this talking point about Ukrainian Nazis and Ukrainian collaboration with Nazis repeated in the U.S. all the time…especially (I’m ashamed to say) on the anti-war left, for whom no American military intervention is ever justified. Well, that is, no American intervention except for WWII, but the American left is awfully quick to point out that the Soviets won that war on the West’s behalf.

As for Putin's propaganda in the West: honestly, if Putin is fighting a propaganda war against the United States, so what? As Julia Ioffe said in an interview after the 2022 invasion, we should be very honest about what’s happening in Ukraine. This war is the result of a criminal invasion of Ukraine by Russia first and foremost, but it’s also a war between Russia and the West. And this war started in 2014 at the earliest. So why all the hand-wringing about Russian propaganda and cyberattacks? Because Putin targeted NPR darlings like Hillary Clinton and wrapped his arms around neoliberal bêtes noires like Julian Assange, Steve Bannon, Jille Stein, and (above all) Donald Trump? Is liberal rage against Putin about Ukraine or the 2016 election? Are they angry because Putin is a murderous autocrat or because “orange man bad”?

In any event, Putin is clearly failing at whatever he’s trying to achieve through these manipulations of Western media. Weiss quotes Putin’s old KGB boss, General Kalugin, who says that the KGB’s prime directive “was not intelligence collection, but subversion—active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO.”

Whelp, mission not accomplished, whether we’re talking about 1989 or 2024.

6.
In Accidental Czar, Weiss includes several entertaining sections (wonderfully illustrated by Brown) on the history of Russia. But these sections rely too much on an interpretation of Russian history that has become popular in Western academic circles, especially since Putin became such a baddie. According to this interpretation, the whole Russian “thing”—the Russian character, the Russian soul, Russian autocracy, Russian bureaucracy, Russian corruption, Russian military resilience—is the consequence of Russia’s unique geographic location: an expanse of difficult-to-defend territory stretching for thousands of kilometers in every direction around Moscow, the center.

Want to understand Russian history and Russian policy? Well, you’ve gotta understand its geography…just as understanding British or American or French or Chinese history and policy requires you to understand their geography.

There’s a lot of truth and power in this kind of analysis, what we call “geopolitics,” but it’s became especially popular after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. In the two years since the full-scale invasion, geopolitical analysis has been positively unavoidable. Ideology is out; realism is in. Nineteenth-century Great Power politics is back—turns out, it never left! And everybody is doing it, on all sides of the Ukraine issue, from John Mearsheimer (realpolitik scholar and opponent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine) to Stephen Kotkin (centrist scholar who advocates for a partition of Ukraine) to innumerable lesser-known foreign policy experts throughout the world (including in China) and even, at times, Alexandr Dugin (pro-Russian crypto-fascist), Timothy Snyder (pro-Ukrainian liberal historian who personally purchased drones for the Ukrainian army), and Antony Blinken (our internationalist Secretary of State who has never met a Muslim-majority nation he wouldn’t like to invade).

Geopolitical analysis of global politics and economics can be an incredibly powerful tool for understanding why certain nations prefer certain policies. But it can also serve as voodoo cultural studies, especially when you start ascribing ideas about “national personalities,” “historical patterns,” and “cultural characteristics” to the locations of rivers and mountains.

And I worry about the extent to which we’re all overcorrecting toward Great Power theories of history after the (bogus) “end of history” euphoria of the 1990s and the (failed) multi-trillion-dollar construction of American military hegemony in the early 2000s. Now America is just one of three global superpowers playing chess with a bunch of marginal nations full of newly un-colonized brown people whom we don’t exactly trust. Some of those nations, like Brazil and India, are moving up in the world, and for America, now is the time to win them for the West, for liberalism, for international institutions, and for global capital. This is America’s foreign policy project for the twenty-first century, and Putin is making that project a little…complicated.

One last thing...
When Madeline Albright is blurbing your book, you know that you’ve either written a book that Madeline Albright really happens to like or you’ve written state department propaganda. Accidental Czar is the latter. A lot of the material is completely true, but it’s still anti-Russian propaganda. I enjoyed the book, but I don’t trust it. The information is mostly true, but the reason it has been compiled into this graphic novel is to construct a narrative about American naivete and the need for robust action against America’s enemies. As with most stories we tell about Russia, we’re talking about us, not the Russian people or the Ukrainian people. Their diverse and oft-conflicting stories get lost amid our constant storytelling.