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

Reading this book, I have learned a great deal about the history of Russia beginning with the post-war period when Putin first began his career as a low-level government bureaucrat, leading to what seems, given the circumstances of the time, a very improbable rise to the highest position in Russia, where he has since been firmly entrenched.Putin's early career seems very undistinguished, and revisiting the Yeltsin years and learning of how Putin kept a low profile in St. Petersburg, it is fascinating to follow how someone who was apparently completely off the radar screen ended up where he is now - and that he is so strongly in control, at that.As a bureaucrat in St. Petersburg, it seems that Putin (like many in Russia at the time) took advantage of the changing circumstances to fatten his own bank account. He also seems to have been deft in deciding who to support as various leaders came and went, without allowing himself to be taken down with them as they eventually fell from power. It led to his eventually being in a sense the last man standing, as the Russian party sought a leader to succeed Yeltsin.What is also illuminating is the brutality and viscousness of Putin throughout, something that I find particularly relevant given how our world looks today and the role that Putin has, more influential than anyone might have expected.In addition to telling the story of Putin's rise, I found the book to be very informative in reviewing the modern history of post-Soviet Russia, reminding me of many of the events of the past few decades as well as filling in many details I was not previously aware of.

The negative reviews here seem to miss the point. How exactly can an author write a comprehensive, factual bio of a man like Vladimir Putin who controls all media in Russia and is probably disinclined to allow anyone to write anything at all about him that could be considered to be accurate.Although I found Gessar's book to be disorganized, rambling, and the parts about Putin largely based on anecdotal evidence or hearsay, it did provide an informative look into modern-day Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and this satisfied my expectations for the most part.What I thought was most important was how the author confirms how badly 70 years of an inhumane and horribly dysfunctional system like Communism has damaged such a great nation and how glad it should make the reader feel to have been born and privileged to live in the US if that is the case.

Considering that Putin is in the American press in some form every day this was quite a suspenseful page-turner. Masha Gessen is a really skilled reporter. With the turn of ever page I expected to read of her falling afoul of the KGB or having to flee the country. Not only is she a gifted writer but a truly brave and patriotic Russian woman. And the epilogue should give hope to all fighting tyranny where ever they are.

Masha Gessen’s THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE should be out-of-date. Its most recent material, after all, dates from the spring of 2012, when Putin began to pick on the gays and build an atavistic international political coalition. Furthermore, Gessen takes time to walk her readers through the shambolic administration of Boris Yeltsin, which ended in 2000 with his appointment of the then unknown Putin to the job of premier.Nonetheless, FACE remains a vital book since it does reveal the quintessence of Putinism, which has not changed, and has probably intensified, in the following eight years. To illustrate, take the issue of corruption, which Gessen discusses in her chapter “A Coupe and a Crusade.” There, she describes some of the shady dealings that passed through Putin’s office when he was a bureaucrat in St. Petersburg in the late 1990s. At that time:“Putin’s department had entered into a dozen export contracts, together worth $92 million. The city agreed to provide oil, timber… and other resources granted to it by the Russian state; the companies named in the contracts [were granted the right to] export… The commodities mentioned in these dozen contracts apparently had been transported abroad… [But] commissions… [were] between 25 and 50 percent of the sum of each contract, for a total of $34 million in commissions. All evidence seemed to point to a simple kickback scheme… The point of the whole operation… was …to create a contract with someone who could be trusted, to issue an export license to him… to ship the goods abroad, sell them, and pocket the money… But that… was not all that happened. Moscow had actually given St. Petersburg permission to export a billion dollars’ worth of commodities, so the twelve rigged contracts… represented only a tenth of the wealth that should have traveled through Putin’s office.”Another subject that Gessen tackles is Russian’s rigged political system, which she feels has restored the KGB ethos—which is embodied in a ruthless, arbitrary and omnipotent bureaucracy—to power. Here’s how Putin did it:“On May 13, 2000, six days after he was inaugurated, Putin signed his first decree and proposed a set of bills, all of them aimed, as he stated, at “strengthening vertical power.” They served as the beginning of the dismantling of the country’s democratic structures… One of the bills replaced elected members of the upper house of parliament with appointed ones… Another bill allowed elected governors to be removed from office on mere suspicion of wrongdoing. The decree established presidential envoys to seven large territories of the country…. The envoys, appointed by the president, would supervise the work of elected governors. Russian’s liberal politicians—who still believed Putin to be one of them—did not criticize his solution… even though it clearly contradicted the spirit… of the 1993 constitution. So Putin appointed the seven envoys [all with KGB bona fides] … to watch over popularly elected governors."FACE does a great job in showing how Russia operates. In doing so, Gessen touches on such subjects as how journalists are intimidated and murdered, how leaders of the political opposition are neutralized and even poisoned, how tragedies—apartment building bombings and bloody hostage standoffs—are instigated and manipulated to justify the consolidation of Putin’s power, how Putin’s point of view is relentlessly beamed into every home on State TV, and so on. From Gessen’s POV, Putin’s Russia is a horror show. And this is the guy Trump admires? One final point:“Every year, Russia slid lower on the Corruption Perception Index of the watchdog group Transparency International, reaching 154th out of 178 by 2011… By 2011, human-rights activists estimated that fully 15 percent of the Russian prison population was made up of entrepreneurs who had been thrown behind bars by well-connected competitors who used the court system to take over other people’s businesses.”Recommended.

I am not a student of politics, in fact the topic usually bores or horrifies me of late. But I had to understand where this guy came from. Now that I know, I wish I was still ignorant. He and someone in our own US government have a great deal in common, and that is chilling. A must-read, no matter which party (or none) you support.

After reading Ester and Ruzya, which was a great picture of history, I got hooked on Masha Gessen. This book is a fascinating look into the rise of a Putin I knew nothing about. The book went through 2011, I hope she writes a sequel through today. The book left me with hope for the future of Russia and here he is still in power which is tragic.

Masha Gessen uses her talents as a reporter to describe the birth and death of Russian democracy. Her analysis, backed up with extensively documented research, comes to life through her first hand experiences of events. How fortunate we are to have someone as astute as she documenting this history.Unfortunately, her optimistic attitude about Russia after 2011 has proven to be disproved,

This book is essential reading to understand Russia's recent history and current predicament. Gessen does a brilliant job of illustrating how Russia had a brief moment when they could have emerged from the long dark years of communism a new and free society until a nondescript KGB agent entered the picture and changed their future forever. 17 years later and Putin still rules Russia with an iron fist. Gessen shows how any attempt at creating a viable opposition is ruthlessly crushed. Witness what is happening with elections right now and how Navalny, an incredibly brave man, is being harassed and obstructed at every turn.He is lucky to be alive, that much is obvious from this book. The book shows you what a clear pattern this is, which has been going on ever since Putin took control. The comment about Nazi's and the 'banality of evil' has never seemed to appropriate as Putin is a master of asymmetrical warfare and presenting himself and Russia as the constant victim of Western aggression. Modern Russia is a dictatorship, pure and simple, and like all dictators, Putin is capable of anything, including assassination and mass murder. Until the Russian populace rises up and throws Putin out, they will never know true freedom. Perhaps they like it that way? It is baffling how popular Putin remains, to be sure.

This is an extraordinarily well written & researched book on the rise of a brutal, unethical political dictator, Vladimir Putin. To state that this little man of diminutive height & depraved character rules the Russian people with an iron fist, is a vast understatement. As I was reading, it occurred to me he's and older, Russian version of North Korea's Kim Jong Un. He has murdered more dissidents & journalists to keep him Hell for several lifetimes. He has embezzled BILLIONS of dollars from the Russian people. For me, the book was a page-turner. If you enjoy all things political, this book is for you. A few of the people Putin murdered: Alexander Litvinenko (poisoned), Galina Starovoitova (murdered) Yushenkov (murdered), Yuri Shchekochikhim (murdered), Anna Politkovskaya (murdered).

The strengths of this book is that it is written by a Russian journalist living in Russia and it is up to date. Most accounts of Russian politics, and Putin in particular, are by non-Russian analysts so I was intrigued to see if a Russian account would throw up anything different. Masha Gessen's view that Putin schemed, bullied and manipulated to establish an authoritarian regime with himself at the centre is not new. However, she suggests some interesting insights into Putin's mind-set and the processes through which he was recruited to, and then took control of, the power networks that claimed Russia. Along the way she tells some good stories about people and scams from the chaotic post-soviet period that enabled Putin to rise unseen to the top. She also tells us what it was like to be part of the opposition protests that took place between the Duma and presidential "elections".This is a journalistic account and Gessen makes it clear from the outset that she is strongly opposed to the Putin regime. It is not an impartial analysis that you could quote for an academic essay but it is very readable and, in the end, quite optimistic. I recommend it to anyone interested in Russian politics.

This was a timely read, in light of events in Ukraine/Crimea in the last few weeks. The author, a Russian journalist with, unusually, joint Russian and US citizenship, shows how Putin emerged from relative political obscurity to become head of the FSB in 1998 then Yeltsin's successor as President in 2000; how many of those who had supported him ceased to support him when they realised his true nature, and how he pursued them vengefully using various semi-legal or illegal processes. It also describes how he has suborned the political and judicial systems to his personal rule. In short, the author concludes that he has basically restored Soviet norms and assumptions of arbitrary rule, but within a system based on his personal rule, not the rule of an identifiable political ideology such as communism (the dominant ideology, to the extent that there is one, is a form of state capitalism, but Putin appears to stand for nothing).From a series of official interviews with the man himself in 2000, and from interviews from some of his former friends and associates, a picture emerges of Putin as he was under the Soviet system. Essentially he was an unremarkable young man, but with a self-confessed tendency from boyhood towards violence when he did not get his own way. He unsuccessfully volunteered his services to the KGB when he was still at school and was in turn sought by them while at university. During the years of Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost, Putin was a minor KGB operative in Dresden in East Germany, gathering low level information from newspapers and attempting to persuade Latin American students to become spies. The fall of the Soviet Union seems to have left him initially bewildered and confused as it meant the relatively sudden collapse of the system that had made him what he was; in the 1990s, he played lip service to notions of reform and democratisation and seems to have been able to fool enough people to get on, including the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who effectively made him what he became towards the end of that decade.All this certainly explains Putin's recent actions - along with a large number of his fellow countrymen, he hankers after the certainties of the Soviet system, but unlike them he has a firm grip on the levers of the state with which he can make reality fit with his vision. He has no compunction about the methods he uses in order to achieve this, as he has been used to getting his way after nearly a decade and a half at the top of the Russian state and effectively thinks he can get away with almost anything. He follows a very old (as old as the Tsars) Russian political tradition of completely blackening all political and personal opponents. Seen in this light, his actions in almost certainly sending troops into the Crimea, while denying having done so, abrogating Ukraine's treaty rights, and portraying the Ukraine authorities as fascists who are supposedly suppressing the rights of Russian speakers, make a kind of sense. An important book at the current time.

I have found reading some of the reviews on this book almost as interesting as the book itself. We none of us know whether the history we learn is accurate or not but by reading widely we can get a picture from the different perceptions that arise from the various viewpoints. This book covers many interesting developments in modern Russia's fast moving and changeable political scene and Masha Gessen has been well placed in order to write on them. When you follow current affairs on Russia and travel there it is clear something is awry in a land that is populous, resource rich, and intellectually and culturally wealthy. This book provides questions and answers that are not out of line with other avenues of research. Very readable.