How did a small-minded, low-level KGB operative come to control the world’s largest country and, in an astonishingly short time, destroy years of progress, making Russia once more a threat to her own people and to the world? Masha Gessen shows that when Vladimir Putin, an unimportant, low-level KGB operative, was rushed to power by a group of Oligarchs in 1999, he was a man without a history. Yet within a few brief years, he had dismantled Russia’s media, wrested control and wealth from the country’s burgeoning business class, and decimated the fragile mechanisms of democracy. Virtually every opposing voice was silenced, with political rivals and critics driven into exile or to the grave. Drawing on information and sources no other writer has tapped, Masha Gessen’s fearless account charts Putin’s rise from the boy who had scrapped his way through post-war Leningrad schoolyards. Now the ‘faceless’ man who manoeuvred his way into absolute and absolutely corrupt power, has become a threat to the stability of the world, and this important book is more relevant than ever. Now with a new preface by the author.
