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.

Ms. 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 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.