The Man Without a Face

"It’s a very polemical portrait of Putin, a man whom she detests. I think she nails a lot about him. She really focuses in on Putin the man and inverts this common picture of a glamorous, decisive, tough guy to show that the reality is sordid, scary and in a way rather pathetic. One quite interesting thing she notes is that he has a kind of kleptomaniac streak. She points out the occasions where he has embarrassingly pocketed trinkets. Once there was a glass model of a Kalashnikov filled with vodka and he just swiped it. He also took a ring from an American sports tycoon who had to claim he had given it to Putin as a gift. She concedes that you can’t do an armchair diagnosis, but she thinks he is afflicted by a rare form of kleptomania called pleonexia, where you get quasi-sexual satisfaction from expropriation. “A huge work of reconstruction is still needed to get over the terrible damage done by Communism” The book tells the story of this small, grey man from the back rooms of the KGB – he was not even a distinguished frontline spy but a pretty unimpressive backroom boy – and how he worms his way into the inner councils of the St Petersburg city administration, then enriches himself hugely before moving to Moscow. Then there is an account of him rescuing the Yeltsin family from possible impeachment and disaster and then taking over the whole country. It’s a compelling biographical story. But what she also does is place it in a very impressive political and bureaucratic context. She says the hybrid of the old KGB and the new mafia in St Petersburg – which sort of mated and mutated under Putin in the years he was there – transposed to Moscow and then took over the whole country. I found that a convincing and compelling account of what’s happened. You have on the one hand these “espiocrats”, these people whose mindset is absolutely conditioned by the world of the secret police and the secret service abroad. On the other hand is this mafia and its basic motivation, which is money and the ruthless desire to steal as much as possible from anybody who gets in their way or anybody they can reach. A free election is not just about counting the votes correctly; it’s about what happens in the campaign. And I think that the way the campaign was constructed meant there wasn’t any doubt about Putin winning it because you didn’t have any serious challenger on the ballot – you had two professional losers, a clown and a stooge. So obviously Putin looked good against them. The other thing is that he had the relentless support of all the mainstream media and particularly television where most Russians get their news. The rigging you do on election day is the least important bit of election rigging. But I think there has been a huge change. For a long time, Russians would say that the health system was bad, corruption was bad, the criminal justice system didn’t work, and that they were fed up with their elected representatives. But if you were to ask them if they approved of Putin they would say they did. He may have his faults, they would argue, but he’s got the country back on its feet again and there’s no real alternative. But I think that has profoundly changed now. It’s really hard for people to feel enthusiastic about Putin. His public approach now is based on kicking out foreigners and standing up for the ordinary Russian against the elites in the big cities. But that’s not really a programme. It’s the few cards he’s got left to play. If you compare that to the visionary rhetoric of his early years in power – with the promise of turning Russia into one of the most prosperous countries in Europe and a commitment to “dictatorship of the law” – now people just say: “Well, you had 12 years to do it and you didn’t when you could have done it, when you were hugely popular and had lots of money. Why should we get excited about any promises that you make now?”"