This is a bit different:
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
Masha Gessen
The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low- level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.
Handpicked as a successor by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oligarchy to shape according to its own designs. Suddenly the boy who had stood in the shadows, dreaming of ruling the world, was a public figure, and his popularity soared. Russia and an infatuated West were determined to see the progressive leader of their dreams, even as he seized control of media, sent political rivals and critics into exile or to the grave, and smashed the country's fragile electoral system, concentrating power in the hands of his cronies.
As a journalist living in Moscow, Masha Gessen experienced this history firsthand, and for The Man Without a Face she has drawn on information and sources no other writer has tapped. Her account of how a "faceless" man maneuvered his way into absolute-and absolutely corrupt-power has the makings of a classic of narrative nonfiction.
That's the publisher's description. I found a handful or so reviews and way too many mentions to wade through (the official release is tomorrow, so I expect even more material soon), an excerpt, and some other work by Gessen. Here's a bit of bio on her:
It is a brave journalist who undertakes to write a critical – not to say overtly hostile – biography of Putin, in a country where press freedom is severely circumscribed, self-censorship a useful survival mechanism, and where those who have written disobligingly about Putin and his close allies, or dug too deeply into the corruption endemic in Russian politics and business, have often come to grief. In her years as a journalist, Gessen herself has been threatened, intimidated and burgled.
I meet her in a smart coffee shop near her home in central Moscow. Gessen, who is gay, lives with her partner, Darya, a cartographer, and her two children, a 13-year-old son, Voya, whom Gessen adopted as a baby, and an 11-year-old daughter, Yael, born by artificial insemination. Darya is now expecting her first child...
Gessen was born in Moscow. Her father, Sasha, was a computer scientist, her mother, Yolochka, a translator and literary critic. In 1981, when Masha was 14, the family joined the growing exodus of Russian Jews, emigrating to America and settling in Boston. After starting and abandoning a degree in architecture, Gessen became a writer. In 1991, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, she returned to Russia on a magazine assignment, reporting on the country’s fledgling women’s movement. Over the next three years she would return frequently on stories, finally moving back in 1994 to take a job as chief correspondent on a news weekly, Itogi.
Moscow then, she says, 'was the most exciting place in the world. Everything was in flux and everything was up for discussion. People were having serious discussions about the relationship between the individual and the state, how the media should be constructed, what the constitution should be. All of this was being seriously debated by any number of smart people, and you felt like you could have a place in the debate. It was amazing.’
Gessen went on to write on every aspect of the new Russia, including reporting on the war in Chechnya from beginning to end between 1994 and 1996, initially for Russian news magazines, latterly for American publications including the New York Times and Vanity Fair. She became a persistent critic of Putin and his regime...
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