The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen’s scathing portrait of Putin offers vivid insight into why so many Russians are protesting his re-election.

(Riverhead, $28)

“Who exactly is Vladimir Putin—and just where has he taken Russia?” asked Paul Starobin in The Wall Street Journal. With Moscow street demonstrators protesting the strongman’s fresh re-election as Russia’s president, Russian journalist Masha Gessen offers answers to both questions with a scathing new biography. Putin presents himself, of course, as “a bare-chested, horseback-riding national superhero.” But behind that façade, Gessen sees an utterly malevolent figure who doles out Russia’s wealth to cronies and orders his opponents murdered. Strip away the thuggishness and Gessen’s Putin is a mere mediocrity—a “small, vengeful man” propped up by the Kremlin’s fearsome propaganda machine. Though Gessen’s portrait may be “excessively prosecutorial,” it offers vivid insight into the sources of the protesters’ anger.

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