Systemic embezzlement, skimming, fraud and personal enrichment through power—these have long been assumed about Vladimir Putin's inner circle, but they have not been comprehensively laid out until now. Karen Dawisha's book made headlines in April, five months before it was published, when Cambridge University Press backed out of publication in Britain, fearing English libel laws. "Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?" delivers precisely the kind of meticulously researched evidence one would hope for in a work preceded by such controversy.

The book begins in the late 1980s with revelations about the Communist Party's accumulation of currency accounts and the KGB's role in taking control of that money as the Soviet Union collapsed. Ms. Dawisha, a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio, relies mostly on publicly available information like U.S. congressional testimonies and diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks. But the threads from these sources, which took years to sort through, are woven together to produce a tapestry of startling scope and detail.

For example, Ms. Dawisha cites an Aug. 23, 1990, Central Committee decree authorizing "urgent measures on the organization of commercial and foreign economic activities of the Party" and outlining the need for an "autonomous channel into the party's cash box . . . the final objective is to build a structure of 'invisible' party economics." Top-ranking KGB officials were charged with creating such a structure, and accumulated party earnings were then used to purchase shares of companies and banks. Many major businesses that sprouted up in the early 1990s in Russia had the help of former KGB officers with their know-how and ready access to money.

As one KGB agent identified only as "Nikolay" recalled in an interview, "We, the patriots of the KGB, were moving millions and millions of dollars into bank vaults. And along those same channels also moved money from organized crime, to the point that I would not be able to tell which monies belonged to the KGB and which to the mafia. In response to my timid questions, they responded: just move the damn money. And I did."

ENLARGE

Mr. Putin, a KGB officer from 1975-91, does not appear to have been implicated in illegal dealings until he left the agency and began working in the "gangsters' paradise" of St. Petersburg. There, he found himself at the "nexus" of three worlds, as Ms. Dawisha puts it: mobsters, bureaucrats and former KGB officials like himself. While he was head of the St. Petersburg Committee for Foreign Liaison between 1991 and 1996, Mr. Putin was accused of issuing permits to export raw materials in exchange for badly needed food that never reached the city. According to opposition figures, some $100 million worth of raw materials simply disappeared. Mr. Putin denies these claims and has blamed the companies exporting the raw materials.

Such allegations are not new, but Ms. Dawisha puts them in context by discussing many similar incidents where party and KGB officials used funds to bail out friendly companies rather than buy food for the winter. She writes about a 1999 criminal investigation in which a construction company was suspected of using St. Petersburg city funds during the 1990s to build villas in Spain for Mr. Putin and his friends, and about more recent reports from a whistleblowing businessman claiming that in 2005 Mr. Putin, already president, was using millions of dollars that had been earmarked for medical facilities to build a luxurious palace. A clear pattern is suggested.

"Putin's Kleptocracy" is an important and valuable work because it provides the most exhaustive investigation into the patterns of Russian government corruption to date, going beyond the broad indictments offered by books like Masha Gessen's "The Man Without a Face" (2013) and "The Corporation" (2009) by Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky. Ms. Dawisha is at her best when she follows the money of Mr. Putin's inner circle and to determine "who owns Russia."

Problems arise, though, when Ms. Dawisha turns to analyzing the motivations of Mr. Putin and his cabal. In her telling, they always intended to establish a "regime that would control privatization, restrict democracy and return Russia to Great Power (if not superpower) status." She argues that while "we may never know precisely when the current regime decided to do what they have clearly done," the "complex and clever system" came about by "intelligent design." Mr. Putin and his KGB friends, she writes, "sought from the beginning to establish an authoritarian regime in Russia, not perhaps for its own sake but because controlling the political and economic development of the country was for them a greater ambition than building any democracy."

Ms. Dawisha is ascribing complicated motivations to a set of actions that most likely came about through simple greed. It's not that Mr. Putin didn't set out to create an authoritarian state: He did. It's that the link between authoritarian plans and illegal business dealings is assumed by the author, but never fully explored. If, for example, while he was an official in St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin aided an organized crime group in seizing control of the city port—one of the allegations cited by Ms. Dawisha—how does that directly explain his rise to power? It may explain how he benefited from a lawless system, but it doesn't explain how he created it.

What we know from the author's meticulous reporting—that KGB agents and party officials scrambled to get a hold of party funds that they reinvested in companies and banks—suggests they were acting to save their behinds, not rebuild an empire. In fact, the whole trajectory that Ms. Dawisha lays out paints a picture of a leadership bent on personal interest at the expense of the state. It's hard to imagine Mr. Putin "deciding" at any point in the 1990s to rebuild a country when he is described as exclusively concerned with lining his own pockets.

While reading this or any book about Russia, it would be wise not to presume intimate knowledge of the motivations of the man in the Kremlin and let the reporting speak for itself.