7th Installment - May 3, 2022
Join Keith Moon as he guides readers through The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, by former New York Times Moscow bureau chief, Steve Myers who recounts Putin’s rise to power from a childhood of abject poverty in Leningrad to his ascent through the ranks of the KGB, and his eventual consolidation of rule in the Kremlin.
The Washington Post described the book as “Judicious and comprehensive; it pulls back the veil… from one of the world’s most secretive leaders. The great strength of Myers’s book is the way it shows how chance events and Putin’s own degeneration gradually cleared the path to the Ukraine crisis…” The New York Times Book Review stated, “What Steven Lee Myers gets so right is that Putin simply feels that he’s the last one standing between order and chaos… Myers offers the portrait of a man swinging from crisis to crisis with one goal: projecting strength…”
Keith Moon joined The Hotchkiss School faculty in 1989 and holds the E. Carleton Granbery Teaching Chair. A frequent traveler to the Soviet Union and Russia before the pandemic, Moon has taught Russian, English, history, and Spanish as well as an annual Russian course at Noble Horizons for the last decade. He holds a B.A. in Russian language and literature from Dartmouth College and an A.M. in Russian area studies from Harvard University. He is also a board member of Special Olympics CT and serves on the Salisbury Board of Education.