Russians in positions of power tend to measure their country’s standing in the world against the United States, longing to be recognized as equally important and powerful and getting very angry when they’re not so treated. President Vladimir Putin has made victimhood at America’s hands a leitmotif of his reign, and many Russians have bought into his claim that Washington tirelessly seeks ways to weaken, impoverish and otherwise humiliate their country. Many critics of Putin, in Russia and in the West, similarly hold that Washington’s treatment of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union was disdainful and thus undermined embryonic moves toward democracy, contributing to the rise of Putinism.

Garry Kasparov, the great Russian chess grandmaster who has become a fierce Putin opponent, offers a mirror image of this theme. In his view, espoused in many articles and now in “Winter Is Coming,” the West — more specifically, the United States, and even more specifically the Democratic Party under President Obama — is guilty of chronic appeasement and weakness in letting bad guys like Putin stay in power.

I should say up front that I cannot agree that the United States somehow deliberately sought to humiliate Russia in those chaotic days in the 1990s when Communist rule collapsed, or somehow failed to support the first tentative democratic reforms. To argue that the United States had the prescience and power to understand and direct events in Russia overlooks the enormous complexity in the disintegration of a vast, nuclear-armed, totalitarian empire. From the time Mikhail Gorbachev first loosened Soviet control until the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, events moved in ways nobody in the East or West could predict or fully grasp, and it is to Russia’s and America’s credit that so little blood was shed in that momentous transition.

Kasparov sees things differently. To him, what hope there was for Russia after the Berlin Wall came down soon turned into a steady march toward authoritarian rule under a former K.G.B. agent, aided and abetted by a feckless West. Half the book is about the evolution of Putin from Boris Yeltsin’s handpicked successor to the capo di tutti capi of a mafia state. There is not much new here, and most readers will not need to be convinced that Putin is a bad guy.