Karen Dawisha, 68, Dies; Traced Roots of Russian Corruption.

'Karen Dawisha, a Russia scholar who researched Vladimir V. Putin’s circle of trusted friends from St. Petersburg in the 1990s and, in a 2014 book, labeled the state they plotted out a “kleptocracy,” died on April 11 in Oxford, Ohio. She was 68.

Her husband, Adeed Dawisha, said the cause was lung cancer.

Karen Dawisha, who at the time was a professor of political science at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University in Oxford, distilled her research into “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?"

The book argued that corruption and authoritarianism in Russia in recent decades were not byproducts of the country’s emergence from communism but rather the building blocks of a plan devised in the early 1990s by Mr. Putin and a circle of trusted associates. Many were, like him, former K.G.B. officers who were appalled by the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The book made accusations so weighty that Cambridge University Press, Professor Dawisha’s longtime publisher, refused to publish it for fear of being sued by Mr. Putin or his allies under Britain’s restrictive libel laws.

Professor Dawisha, furious, took the manuscript to the American publisher Simon & Schuster, which published it, but she noted in a letter to Cambridge University Press that the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom had already translated her thesis into policy, having announced sanctions against the precise individuals who formed the basis of her book.

She said in the letter, which was later published by the Economist, that Mr. Putin’s friends had succeeded in building channels of influence in British institutions, prompting Cambridge University Press to “cower and engage in pre-emptive book-burnings as a result of fear of legal actions.”

“These Kremlin-connected oligarchs feel free to buy Belgravia, kill dissidents in Piccadilly with Polonium 210, fight each other in the High Court, and hide their children in British boarding schools,” she wrote.

Few academics have focused their work on high-level corruption in Russia, in part because publishing on the topic could result in a travel ban by that country. Western policymakers until recently held out hope that Mr. Putin would prove an ally in conflicts in Syria and Iran.

But beginning in 2014, Western governments began to openly embrace her central thesis: that a network of corrupt oligarchs centering on Mr. Putin formed the basic structure of his political system.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/obituaries/karen-dawisha-68-dies-traced-roots-of-russian-corruption.html?