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

by Masha Gessen

Like other members of his generation, Putin replaced belief in communism, which no longer seemed plausible or even possible, with faith in institutions. His loyalty was to the KGB and to the empire it served and protected: the USSR.

The remark made it clear Putin viewed himself as a bureaucrat—a very important and powerful bureaucrat, but a bureaucrat still. “I’d always thought if you became president, even if you were merely appointed to this role, you had to change,” Marina Litvinovich, the smart young woman who had worked on Putin’s preelection image, told me. “If the nation is crying, you have to cry along with it.”

Less than a year after Putin came to power, all three federal television networks were controlled by the state.

We once lived in a totalitarian state that had two main features: totalizing terror and a totalizing lie. I hope that totalizing terror is no longer possible in our country, but we have now entered a new era of a totalizing lie.”

Once the institutions of democracy had been dismantled, it was impossible—it was too late—to organize to defend them.

the triumph over terrorism was not to be questioned.

“Sergei was from a generation who thought that Russia was changing. There was a new Russia, maybe an imperfect Russia, but a getting-better Russia. The basic fundamental principles of law and justice existed—that was his premise. He said, ‘This is not 1937. I’ve done nothing wrong and I know the law. There’s no legal means that they could come and arrest me.’”

Back in 2003, when Khodorkovsky attempted to talk to Putin about corruption, the global organization Transparency International ranked Russia as more corrupt than 64 percent of the world’s countries: in its annual rating it looked slightly more corrupt than Mozambique and marginally less corrupt than Algeria. In its 2010 report, the organization showed Russia as more corrupt than 86 percent of the world: it now fit in between Papua New Guinea and Tajikistan.