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Kim Zigfeld is glad the tide is turning on the Western perception of Putinism. Two new books focus on the menacing signs coming from the Kremlin.

By the third week of January this year, we heard Russia announce that it would not hesitate to be the first to use nuclear weapons in battle, that it would resume this May parading tanks and missiles through Red Square in the Soviet fashion, that it would reestablish the application of double jeopardy in criminal trials and would file criminal charges against former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, in order to stop him from running for president in March.

Back in April of 2006, when I started little blog called La Russophobe with the goal of warning the world that, in my judgment, a neo-Soviet state was rising in Russia, a development that would lead in short order to a new cold war (if not a hot one), and to urge the West to begin preparing to win that conflict (not only for our sake, but that of the Russian people as well). At that time, many thought of me as a crackpot chicken little. The Russian economy was supposedly “booming” and Vladimir Putin was purportedly just a “necessary strongman” as Russia made the “transition to democracy.”

But within six months, both Andrei Kozlov and Anna Politkovskaya had been assassinated in Russia. He was the country’s leading reformer within the Kremlin walls, aggressively investigating corruption at the highest levels, and she was Russia’s leading domestic force for change outside the Kremlin, a journalist confronting the Kremlin on both foreign and domestic issues at every turn. Suddenly, it began to seem that friendly relations with the West and its values weren’t necessarily the Russia’s cup of tea.

Speaking of tea, the next thing you knew, Russia’s most sensational foreign dissident, KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, had been murdered by radioactive poisoning in London. Then Russia was making military incursions in Georgia, blackmailing Eastern Europe back towards Russia’s sphere of influence by threatening to withhold its energy supply, providing weapons to arch American foes like Venezuela, Iran, Syria and Hamas. Putin declared himself president (or whatever) for life, and started imposing Zimbabwe-like, Soviet-style price controls to keep from being devastated by inflation.

And, quite suddenly, my view was the conventional wisdom.

As if to make it official, not one but two different books by former Russia correspondents of major newspapers have recently appeared under the title “The New Cold War.” One is by a British correspondent for the Economist magazine, Edward Lucas (certainly the most defiantly confrontational and courageous Russia pundit in the MSM), and carries the subtitle “How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West.” In my judgment, it’s the most important book on Putin’s Russia yet published. The other, by Mark MacKinnon, a Canadian correspondent for the Globe & Mail newspaper, is sub-headlined “Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the former Soviet Union.” It seems that MacKinnon has tramped just about everywhere in the former USSR, meeting just about every single person along the way, and now he tells the tale. Both MacKinnon and Lucas also operate well-regarded Russia blogs.

The Commitee to Protect Journalists says there are more than a dozen confirmed cases of Russian reporters having been murdered for political reasons since Vladimir Putin took power, while many others — like Natalya Morar — have been hounded, assaulted, or sent into exile. My own blog currently has nearly 100 posts recording such incidents, just in the past two years, including a complete list of the 211 Russian journalists who have died of unnatural causes since Vladimir Putin became Boris Yeltsin’s chief of staff in 1997. Until recently, we might have thought that Western journalists were immune from this kind of terrorism, but Congressional Quarterly recently reported that the shooting several months ago of Kremlin critic Paul Joyal outside his home in Washington DC, which occurred days after he was featured on NBC blaming the Kremlin for the killing of Alexander Litvinenko (a conclusion the British government itself would later adopt), has been linked by some analysts to the Kremlin and remains unsolved.

The books make a neat set. Lucas tells us why and how the new Cold War started, and advises us how to win. MacKinnon doesn’t seem much interested in taking sides, but shows us the consequences of the war on the front lines with scintillating stories, that read almost like fiction, from places like the former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus and Uzbekistan, all places he’s spent a great deal of time. For Lucas, Vladimir Putin is at the center of the storm; for MacKinnon he’s crucial, but shadowy figures the public knows little about, most especially financier George Soros, are nearly as important.

Lucas makes the absolutely vital point right in the title of his work: The neo-Soviet Kremlin is just as dangerous to the people of Russia as it is to the outside world, something that has been true of Russia’s government from the beginning and which had its fullest illustration in the cruelty of Joseph Stalin. By taking action now, he argues, the West will not only be helping itself, but the citizens of Russia as well. His plan of action flows organically out of his analysis of the state of the enemy we face. He argues that Russia is not as strong as we fear, but strong enough to pose a serious threat that will exacerbate if left unaddressed, laying out all the data on both sides of the equation in masterful fashion.

And it’s the presence of that plan which makes the Lucas volume so important. The New York Times, for instance, published an editorial on January 30th and savaged Putin for “kicking the corpse of democracy” by banning Kasyanov from challenging his hand-picked successor Dimitry Medvedev for the presidency next month. Yet, the Times didn’t offer a single word of practical advice for dealing with the corpse kicker, and it seemed to have forgotten that on March 26, 2000, just after Putin was elected to his first term, a Times editorial called him a “democrat” who was “impressed by the benefits of liberty and free markets” and noted that “a steady hand in the Kremlin would be welcome.” It stated that “Mr. Putin helped build the beginnings of a capitalist economy in the early 1990’s” — a ridiculous falsehood, because Putin, who holds no economics or business credentials whatsoever, was in those years nothing more than the clueless lackey of a corrupt local politician who used to be his professor — and speculated that he might choose “to advance reform while protecting the newly won liberties of the Russian people” and make “government an effective, honest and compassionate agent of change.” So even if the Times did have some advice, it wouldn’t necessarily be a good idea to listen. Lucas, by contrast, has consistently been warning the world, from the beginning, about the threats presented by the Putin regime

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