Karen Dawisha, who has died aged 68 of cancer, was an outstanding and original scholar of Russia who argued that Vladimir Putin had turned his country into a corrupt authoritarian state run by a group of KGB cronies.

Her 2014 book, Putin’s Kleptocracy – Who Owns Russia?, is a definitive account of how Russia’s president and his friends grabbed and consolidated power. Along the way they became among the richest people on the planet, and the beneficiaries of what Dawisha called “a kleptocratic tribute system”.

Putin never had any intention of embracing western-style democracy, she wrote. Instead, after inheriting power in 2000 from Boris Yeltsin, he knowingly took Russia down an autocratic path. Putin set himself up as the head of a mafia-like cabal. It looted the state and its natural resources.

Stealing was done under the cover of restoring “Russian greatness”. There was “massive predation”, on a scale not seen since the tsars. Risk was nationalised and profit privatised. A new neo-feudal class featuring about 100 billionaires presided over a deeply unequal economy.

Dawisha’s controversial thesis came from exhaustive research. She tracked down obscure newspaper articles purged from the Russian internet. One document from late 1999 set out plans to crush independent media and opposition. This is exactly what happened. Putin’s old spy agency, the FSB, played a vanguard role.

Dawisha spent almost eight years working on the book. Cambridge University Press, which had printed several of her earlier titles, agreed to publish. In 2014, however, after reviewing the 500-page manuscript, it abruptly dropped plans to bring out a UK edition.

There was no doubt about the veracity of her material, or its premise – that Putin has a close circle of criminal oligarchs at his disposal and has spent his career cultivating them. John Haslam, CUP’s executive producer, admitted this, but said the CUP might face action from wealthy Russians in the British courts.

It was a pusillanimous decision, and one that earned widespread criticism from Dawisha’s fellow academics. Dawisha blamed the UK’s repressive libel laws rather than CUP. The story ended well. Simon & Schuster quickly picked up the book and published it, in the US and then the UK, to critical acclaim.

Karen was born in Colorado Springs in 1949. Her mother, Paula (nee Keene), was a school teacher and her father, Harry Hurst, a jazz musician. She had two brothers and a sister. She went to a local state school, where a Russian language course sparked an interest in Russia, and then to the University of Colorado in Boulder, to study Russian politics.

A year in Britain turned into a bachelor’s degree from Lancaster University, followed by a PhD in 1974 from the London School of Economics. In the 1980s she became an adviser to parliament’s foreign affairs committee and joined the policy planning staff of the US state department. She was also attached to the Brookings Institution.

With Mikhail Gorbachev in charge in Moscow, Dawisha examined how post-communist states might make a transition to democracy. Her thinking was unusually free-ranging. She looked at what perestroika might mean for Warsaw bloc states in her 1990 analysis: Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform: The Great Challenge.

Dawisha devoted her professional life to the study of Russia. She taught at the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland (1985-2000), and then went as professor to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, based in the department of political science.

She was founding director of the university’s Havighurst Center. Over the next 16 years, as Putin rolled back freedoms, she built up an internationally renowned institution for scholars of Russian and post-Soviet studies. Colleagues found her gracious, energetic, interesting – and fierce in the defence of her ideas.

Dawisha also liked a party. She cooked dinner at her home in Miami for students from all over the world. As well as teaching Russian politics, she got her class to perform traditional Chechen dancing. On another occasion they copied notorious disco moves by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s prime minister, on a quad in front of the library.

Dawisha’s earlier articles and books were highly regarded. But it was her later work on Putin that was written with clarity, moral passion and bravery, at a time when critics of Russia’s president were dying in murky ways. Putin’s Kleptocracy came out, by chance, just months after Putin annexed Crimea, ushering in a fresh crisis with the west.

In 2007 Dawisha met Putin as part of a delegation of visiting scholars. After the appearance of her book, further trips to Russia were impossible, though Dawisha continued to read Russian newspapers on a daily basis, and conducted numerous interviews. She stepped down from the Havighurst Center in 2016 after her illness was diagnosed.

Some political scientists disagreed with her depiction of Russia as a thoroughly criminalised entity. They acknowledged the country was a mafia state, but detected countervailing tendencies. Dawisha initially believed that Putin was stumbling towards democracy, the mainstream view, until her research turned up the president’s multiple connections to organised crime.

Dawisha discovered that Putin and many members of his inner circle were part of the same lakeside dacha cooperative established in the 1990s near St Petersburg. One friend was Sergei Roldugin, a cellist. Dawisha mentioned Roldugin in Putin’s Kleptocracy and noted his close friendship with Putin.

Roldugin later featured in the Panama Papers, when $2bn were found in a series of offshore bank accounts linked to him. Putin’s Kleptocracy became a sort of bible for the investigative journalists looking at Putin’s money.

Karen met her husband, Adeed Dawisha, an Iraqi academic, at Lancaster University. He survives her, along with their children, Emile and Nadia, and grandson, Theo.

• Karen Dawisha, academic, born 2 December 1949; died 11 April 2018