In the book, Dawisha exposes how Putin's friends and coworkers from his formative years have accumulated mass amounts of wealth and power.

"[3] Dawisha responded that "one of the world's most important and reputable publishers declines to proceed with a book not because of its scholarly quality... but because the subject matter itself is too hot to handle.

[5] Putin's Kleptocracy has been called an "unblinking scholarly exposé"[6] animated by "admirable relentlessness",[5] in which "the power of her argument is amplified by the coolness of her prose".

[8] Anne Applebaum commended the book's intense "focus on the financial story of Putin's rise to power: page after page contains the gritty details of criminal operation after criminal operation, including names, dates, and figures," and lauded its courage: "Many of these details had never been put together before — and for good reason.

"[5] In an article for The Times Literary Supplement by Richard Sakwa commented that the book is "an extraordinary dossier of malfeasance and political corruption on an epic scale" in which the accusation that "Putin and his close colleagues have enriched themselves is now effectively proven" and "a courageous and scrupulously judicious investigation into the sinews of wealth and power in Vladimir Putin's Russia".

At a London event in 2015, Dawisha fielded a question referencing Sakwa's review, responding: "When a president talks about his business elite as chickens sitting on eggs... what is the nature of the understanding that they have?