Siege mentality

The mirrored sunglasses worn by Putin on the cover of Angus Roxburgh’s The Strongman give the Russian president the look of a crude mafia boss, while the half-face photo on the cover of Masha Gessen’s book makes him appear both more ordinary and more sinister. This hints at the difference of the authors’ approach.

Gessen focuses on the trajectory of a postwar Soviet boy growing up in a shabby communal flat, fierce and vengeful in street fights, who dreams of joining the KGB. This dream was fulfilled: Putin got a boring job as an agent in East Germany, and ten years after returning home he surprisingly became the most powerful man in Russia — which, 12 years later, he remains.

His years in the KGB taught him secrecy. And when he was ‘catapulted to power from obscurity’, as Gessen puts it, he was able to use that experience to control information about himself and create his own myth.