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

by Masha Gessen

What I found in St. Petersburg was a city—Russia’s second-largest city—that was a state within a state. It was a place where the KGB—the organization against which Starovoitova had waged her most important and most hopeless battle—was all-powerful.

In other words, it was very much like what Russia itself would become in a few years, once it came to be ruled by the people who ruled St. Petersburg in the 1990s.

What I did find was that throughout the 1990s, while young people like me were constructing new lives in a new country, a parallel world had existed alongside ours. St. Petersburg had preserved and perfected many of the key features of the Soviet state: it was a system of government that worked to annihilate its enemies—a paranoid, closed system that strove to control everything and to wipe out anything that it could not control.