Getting Russia Right

Dmitri Trenin Book August 29, 2007 Washington

Summary

This book sheds new light on our understanding of contemporary Russia, providing Western audiences with an insider’s explanation of how the country has arrived at its current position and how the United States and Europe can deal with it more productively.

Related Topics

Foreign and Security Policy

U.S.-Russia Relations

In Getting Russia Right, Dmitri Trenin sheds new light on our understanding of contemporary Russia, providing Western audiences with an insider’s explanation of how the country has arrived at its current position and how the United States and Europe can deal with it more productively. Trenin looks beyond Russia’s famous leaders to the economic and cultural spaces outside the Kremlin where promising changes are taking place. Russia is probably not going to join the West, but it is on a path toward becoming Western; capitalist even if not democratic; European in terms of civilization, rather than as part of the EU; and gradually more Western than pro-United States.

Insightful and optimistic, Getting Russia Right offers policy makers, students, and stakeholders in the U.S.–Russia relationship an understanding of what Russia is—and is not. Russia will matter in the foreseeable future, and Trenin’s innovative and objective analysis provides an understanding that is crucial to rebuilding relationships among the world’s key players.

Dmitri V. Trenin is deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment, and chair of the Moscow Center’s Foreign and Security Policy Program. He has been with the center since its inception in 1993. He is author of Russia’s Restless Frontier: The Chechnya Factor in Post-Soviet Russia (with Aleksei V. Malashenko, 2004) and The End of Eurasia: Russia on the Border Between Geopolitics and Globalization (2002), both published by the Carnegie Endowment.

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Reviews for this publication

“It is a pleasure to read a serious analysis by a Russian of contemporary Russia and its foreign policy that is not distorted by at best thinly veiled imperial nostalgia. One can agree with Trenin on many points and disagree also on many, but throughout one knows that one is dealing with a serious interlocutor, seriously concerned about the future of his important country—and who in some ways foreshadows the kind of elite that eventually will take Russia into the democratic West.”
—Zbigniew Brzezinski, counselor and trustee, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and national security adviser to President Carter from 1977 to 1981

"One could ask for no better guides than Trenin ... combine extraordinary intellectual sophistication and an ability to think outside their national skins with hardheaded realism—analytic skills applied equally well to Western policies toward their country."
—Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs

"The great merit of Dmitri Trenin is that he offers an analysis of what Vladimir Putin has achieved more convincing than most and suggests the broad outlines of how the new Russia is shaping up: his book should be compulsory reading for any western diplomat or businessman whose business is to engage with Russia."
—Francis Ghilés, Politica Exterior

“Dmitri Trenin distills an enormous amount of wisdom in this concise, well written book. Russia matters, and the West needs to view it as an emerging capitalist society rather than a failed democratic polity. Property rights, a new middle class, and integration into world markets promise a way forward. Everyone interested in Russia should read this excellent book.”
—Joseph S. Nye, Jr., University Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard University, and author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics

Source: http://carnegie.ru/2007/08/29/getting-russia-right/aivg

Publication Resources

Where capitalism trumps democracy
Financial Times, October 1, 2007

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In Fact

70%

of oil consumed in the United States

is for the transportation sector.

20%

of Chechnya’s pre-1994 population

has fled to different parts of the world.

58%

of oil consumed in China

was from foreign sources in 2012.

million cases pending

in India’s judicial system.

million people killed

in Cold War conflicts.

18%

of the U.S. economy

is consumed by healthcare.

$536

billion in goods and services

traded between the United States and China in 2012.

$100

billion in foreign investment and oil revenue

have been lost by Iran because of its nuclear program.

4700%

increase in China’s GDP per capita

between 1972 and today.

$11

billion have been spent

to complete the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran.

of Iran’s electricity needs

is all the Bushehr nuclear reactor provides.

new airports

are set to be built in China by 2015.

journalists

were imprisoned in Turkey as of August 2012 according to the OSCE.

67%

of the world's population

will reside in cities by 2050.

million Russian citizens

are considered “ethnic Muslims.”

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