The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

by Masha Gessen

the Khrushchev thaw, the brief period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Stalinist terror had lifted and Brezhnev’s stagnation had not yet set in.

Podoltseva had read or heard somewhere that when people see someone eating a lemon, they begin, empathetically, producing copious amounts of saliva—which happens to be incompatible with playing a wind instrument. It worked: the music stopped, and the speeches continued.

“I have a dream,” he actually said,

The KGB lost his letter of resignation—whether by clever arrangement or by virtue of being an organization chronically incapable of managing its own paperwork.

In 2007, Vaksberg published a book on the history of political poisonings in the USSR and Russia.

In it, he advanced the theory that Sobchak was killed by a poison placed on the electrical bulb of the bedside lamp, so that the substance was heated and vaporized when the lamp was turned on. This was a technique developed in the USSR.

DEMOCRACY IS DICTATORSHIP OF THE LAW, the sign over the entrance to the small building proclaimed, quoting an oxymoronic pronouncement of Putin’s in direct violation of election law.

I tested my theory as I moved from precinct to precinct: everywhere I went, I was welcome to cast my vote, using my Moscow documents or nothing at all.

I had wanted to bring my own book as a gift to Putin, but my friends and family begged me not to; a midnight text-message plea from a colleague finally convinced me not to do it.