Did Vladimir Putin read George Friedman's "The next 100 years" and get upset?
A curious story of a book that you cannot buy in Russia anymore
In 2020 I read George Friedman's "The next 100 years" (and I wish I'd done it sooner). What impressed me most as a non-American who has found a home in the U.S. was not even Friedman's future forecasts but the way he captures the essence and the spirit of the United States, the unwritten laws this country is founded and operates on. Immediately, I approached a dear friend who was also exiled from Russia and has lived in America for several years and told him he ought to read this book. Unfortunately, he doesn't read in English quite well yet, so he tasked his friends back in Russia with buying him a copy in Russian and sending it to the U.S. Here is when the story begins.
There was no George Friedman book in entire Russia. It was impossible to find in bookstores online anywhere in the country; you could not get it in the most secluded offline bookstores in Moscow that usually carry the best reading examples. The only person who seemed to have a copy of "The next 100 years" and was willing to sell it was a private seller on the Russian version of Amazon, Ozon, who listed it for an unprecedented 15,000 rubles - almost $250. My friend was stunned by the price tag, but I persuaded him it was worth it, and he had it bought for him. So finally, the very valuable Russian-language "The next 100 years" by George Friedman reached the United States last month.
Having read the very first twenty pages of the book, my friend, a person with a financial background, came to a gloomy conclusion: "I bet Putin has been given this book. Well, not the entire book, rather a summary. And I wish he had never read it". Stunned by this line, I took the book, turned it over, and little did I know: there was a blurb written by not less than Fedor Lukyanov, the head of The Council for Foreign and Defense Policy think tank that gathers Putin's annual political discussion club Valdai. The fact that Lukyanov wrote a blurb for "The next 100 years" makes it almost sure that Vladimir Putin has been introduced to its contents at some point.
In short, George Friedman predicts the United States will remain a major power in the world in the 21st century. At the same time, Russia will likely fall apart - after losing a war it would start against Ukraine in the early 2020s, predicted Friedman in 2009.
Now read Lukyanov's blurb: "The shocking forecast of the world development had caused fierce discussions in RuNet long before the book was published in Russian. The future scenario laid out by George Friedman is undoubtedly subjective; the faith in America's inevitable greatness makes the author biased. But this book is not some fascinating fiction. A deep analysis of the current tendencies, sharply noticed by the author, forces you to think seriously about the challenges that the world and Russia will face".
While part of the Kremlin's expert circle, Fedor Lukyanov is considered one of the sanest thinkers among all others. Yet even he cannot imagine that an American can be unbiased when writing something good about America. If Friedman thinks the United States will remain the dominant power for the rest of the century, Lukyanov resumes, it is simply because the author is American.
Now imagine what a far less intellectual, educated, and well-read Vladimir Putin would think had he read the book or a summary of it. Add to that Friedman's background: in 1996, he founded Stratfor, the private intelligence publishing and consulting firm. Make no mistake, Vladimir Putin's background at the KGB raises a big red flag whenever he hears "intelligence." I could bet any money that to Putin, Stratfor was simply CIA. And when the chief of this organization writes a book about the world's future, it's not an analysis. It's a plan put up at the most private offices of the CIA (a question unanswered is why they would publish such vital plans at all, but that, I'm confident, the Kremlin wise men have the answer for as well).
Now it is not hard to imagine that when Vladimir Putin hears that the founder of the intelligence firm Stratfor says Russia will fall apart, being a narrow-minded, conspiracy-prone mid-level KGB officer that he is, Russia's president hears that the CIA is out on a mission to destroy Russia.
If you think that such idiocy simply cannot be in anyone's mind, just remember that in the early 2000s, the then-head of the FSB, Nikolay Patrushev formed a special task force within the service to extrapolate the thoughts of the world leaders. The results followed promptly: the FSB generals successfully entered the head of Madeleine Albright and reported back that she thought Siberia should not belong to Russia exclusively. Since then, it has been a pearl of conventional wisdom in Russia that Madam Albright actually said that. Mr. Patrushev, now at the very top of the Kremlin power tower, keeps repeating the nonsense in his public interviews.
Coming back to George Friedman's book. Why did it disappear from bookstores in Russia? In a normal world, more copies are printed if a book is successful and the demand is high. My wild guess is that "The next 100 years" was secretly banned from republishing, and all the copies ever printed have been confiscated from the sale. Why? Because Vladimir Putin cannot afford to have a prediction of America's future greatness on display, even when it comes from a "biased" American author.