Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
$10.99$10.99
FREE delivery: Friday, April 19 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$9.99
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the author
OK
First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Paperback – May 5, 2000
Purchase options and add-ons
First Person is an intimate, candid portrait of the man who holds the future of Russia in his grip. An extraordinary compilation of over 24 hours of in-depth interviews and remarkable photographs, it delves deep into Putin's KGB past and explores his meteoric rise to power. No Russian leader has ever subjected himself to this kind of public examination of his life and views. Both as a spy and as a virtual political unknown until selected by Boris Yeltsin to be Prime Minister, Putin has been regarded as man of mystery. Now, the curtain lifts to reveal a remarkable life of struggles and successes. Putin's life story is of major importance to the world.
- Print length208 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPublicAffairs
- Publication dateMay 5, 2000
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.6 x 7.63 inches
- ISBN-101586480189
- ISBN-13978-1586480189
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : PublicAffairs; 1st edition (May 5, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 208 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1586480189
- ISBN-13 : 978-1586480189
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.6 x 7.63 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #140,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #40 in Russian & Soviet Politics
- #275 in Russian History (Books)
- #768 in Political Leader Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The West (media, corporations, politicians, banks) have excoriated Putin as some old-fashioned, dangerous, dinosaur Soviet KGB agent who wants to bring Russia back to the good-old Soviet days full of purges and war with the West. The real reason they do this is that Putin has made Russia an independent power that will not submit to Western corporate, banking, and political power. The West had no problem with Yeltsin, even when he attacked his own Parliament with tanks (ironically, Yeltsin rose to power as a Parliamentarian under siege by tanks). Yeltsin destroyed Russia and created a dangerous organized criminal oligarchy, but the West loved him, because he sold cheap Capital to them and made Russia impotent. Of course, he has imprisoned political opponents and journalists, but at the same time, the West has supported his opponents, and if they had their way, there would be another pro-West Yeltsin in office selling cheap oil and impoverishing Russia.
We all grow up adoring democracy and villainizing autocracy, but history teaches us time and again that sometimes undemocratic autocracy does work, sometimes exceptionally well. Take into consideration South Korea's autocracy that allowed them to consolidate industry and become an economic world power. Take into consideration China today. And it was centralized autocratic government that allowed Germany to rise out of the rubble of the Great Depression and become one of the greatest economies in the world (until 1939 when Hitler went to war). Again centralized autocratic government allowed Stalin to make the USSR a superpower. So what are the drawbacks to autocracy? Obviously, under the command of a sociopath, you can get some pretty nasty genocide and purges. While it works well for large-scale industry, it fails to stimulate technological progress and innovation. Centralized autocracy works well to reward uncreative, dullard bureaucrats, but it punishes and often imprisons the rebellious, creative genius. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would never have flourished in the Soviet Union.
Of course, Putin is halfway between the autocrat and democrat, but Russia should free itself completely from the shackles of organized crime and the oligarchs, before it's safe to unleash full democracy and allow all the rebellious and creative people to advance technology. For the time being, Russia is only a big oil giant.
The two big themes of Putin's character is that 1. he is fearless and 2. he never forgets a betrayal. If the West screws him, it will be the end of good relations with Russia, and if the West threatens him with force, he'll only laugh at us. What judo has taught him is to respect your opponent, and we should continue sparring with him, but ultimately treat him and Russia with respect and dignity.
Putin was only a lieutenant-colonel in the KGB before quitting. The West makes it look like he went from Director of the KGB to the President of Russia. After he left the KGB he even did a TV show and told everyone he had been in the KGB. Although, he later became the first "deputy to the chief of the presidential administration" at the FSB (the successor of the KGB) it only lasted a year.
He's a humanist enough to say, "...I realized that our identity is in our friends...If you look at a career as a means to achieve power, control people, or make money, and if you are prepared to lose everything doing that--well, that's another matter. But if you have priorities in life--benchmarks and values--then you realize that there's no point in sacrificing yourself and those who are a part of your life. There just isn't any point. You lose more than you gain."
Of course, let's not get sentimental, Putin is an autocrat who has imprisoned innocent opponents, but we can be thankful that until Hitler he has no ambitions for Russia to take over the world or seize its former possession under the USSR.
There's some interesting stuff in here like: "Many have forgotten, by the way, that when NATO was created at the end of the 1940s, the Soviet Union indicated its intention to enter this bloc... The Pact was a direct response to the formation of the NATO alliance."
Ultimately, the fatal flaw of this book is that it was published in 2000 and only includes a couple years of him being Prime Minister. The whole reason I bought the book was to understand how he was about to fight the oligarchs and organized crime and return Russia to economic growth. During his Presidency (2000 - 2008) the Russian economy increased sixfold. I supposed nationalized oil had a lot to do with this, but I would have liked some details.
Top reviews from other countries
ウクライナ問題を理解する為にも大勢の日本人に読んで欲しいです。
ロシアだけを一方的に悪者扱いする米国民主党に操られる岸田政権も問題です。
インドを見習って欲しい。