When Vladimir Putin became acting president of Russia after Boris Yeltsin’s resignation on New Year’s Eve, 1999, the retired KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin, then already living in or around Washington, was asked about the former KGB lieutenant-colonel. “Never heard of him,” Kalugin answered. The youngest chief of counterintelligence in Soviet history, Kalugin may have wanted to underscore the difference between them in achievement and rank. (Since then, Putin has never referred to Kalugin as anything but a “traitor.” Two years into Putin’s first term, Kalugin was tried in absentia, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to 15 years.) Yet, professional jealousies aside, Kalugin could be telling the truth. The best and brightest in Soviet intelligence were sent to “capitalist” countries: first and foremost, America, then Britain, then Scandinavia. Putin wound up in the German Democratic Republic—and even then not in East Berlin, close to the Wall and the action, but in the backwater of Dresden. His job, if he was lucky, was to recruit a stray leftist from West Germany or the Third World. By other accounts, Putin’s brief was even less glamorous: He was a mere liaison between the Stasi and the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, which dealt with domestic dissent. There were legions like him in the back rooms of the secret-police offices of the “socialist camp” countries.

Obscurity is only one of many factors that makes Vladimir Putin’s route to power like that of many a modern autocrat: modest beginnings, by-the-bootstraps perseverance, discipline, hard work, education, assignment to armed forces or secret police, strong will, a relentless but far from spectacular bureaucratic climb—and, always, the final stroke of luck.

Aside from these commonplace details, there is still another encumbrance on a biographer’s ambition: namely the man himself, who is, by all accounts, controlled, sarcastic, cold, crabby, and tight-lipped. Forging even a mildly exciting narrative of such a man’s “rise” is quite a job, but Masha Gessen springs to the challenge valiantly in The Man Without a Face (Riverhead Books, 336 pages). Far from the intended—and, in the end, rather thin—exposé she set out to write, her book is a powerful reminder of what the Obama White House’s “partner” in the Kremlin is truly like. Gessen tells little that is new, but given our unimpressive capacity for remembering the past and our penchant for constantly “starting afresh,” it might be a good idea to revisit Russia’s guiding mind-set, especially as we attempt yet another “reset” with the Kremlin.

It is hard to think of a Russian journalist better qualified for the task. A leading investigative reporter in the 1990s, Gessen has lived her book’s material. And it takes guts to write a book like hers and still insist on living in today’s Russia, where sanctions for overstepping the line are up sharply since Putin’s reelection last year. Still, even for a writer of Gessen’s experience and aggressiveness, the obstacles are high and cannot be entirely cleared. Like anyone writing a biography of a Russian leader, Soviet and post-Soviet alike, she has been handicapped, and occasionally infected, by the lying spirit of a place where almost every source, in or out of power, is now or has been slave and tyrant, victim and victimizer, traitor and betrayed. What Isaiah Berlin said of Mitteleuropa is a fortiori true of the world of Kremlin survivors: “the terrible twisted [land] in which nothing is straight, simple, truthful, all human relations and all political attitudes are twisted into ghastly shapes by those awful casualties, who, because they are crippled, recognize nothing pure and firm in the world!”

To her credit, Gessen pushed for something exceedingly rare in her hunt: information that would be both new and truthful. She tracked down and interviewed a former KGB agent in East Germany in the 1980s; Putin’s former personal economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov; and ex–Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. Alas, in the end, all this work adds little to the dreary childhood narrative that emerged from a book of interviews with Putin, published in 2000, and a few memoirs that have trickled out since. There is the crushing poverty of a rat-infested communal apartment in a crumbling 19th-century building in postwar Leningrad, a city still recovering from the unimaginable suffering of the 900-day siege that killed a million people through starvation and bombardment. Three families huddled together in the flat with no heat, hot water, or a bathroom. (They bathed over a makeshift toilet on the staircase, with water heated on the gas stove.)

A small but tenacious “hooligan,” who fought at the slightest provocation, the young Volodya graduated high school, volunteered for the KGB, and was told to get an education first. He applied to the law department of the Leningrad State University and somehow (he was not a stellar student) passed the tough entrance exams. Along the way he excelled in the Soviet martial art of sambo before moving on to judo. To his delight, at graduation he was spotted by the KGB and became a low-level field officer in Leningrad. In due course he was sent to the Andropov Academy in Moscow, was taught German, and then dispatched to Dresden. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin, by then married and with two daughters, returned to Leningrad and joined the administration of Leningrad’s first elected mayor, the perestroika firebrand (and law professor at Leningrad State) Anatoly Sobchak.

Putin was first put in charge of Leningrad’s foreign economic relations, his fluent German apparently a key consideration in the appointment. A deputy mayor by the time Sobchak lost a reelection bid in 1996, Putin was helped by his ties to some top Yeltsin advisers from St. Petersburg (as well as his KGB connections) and secured a position in the presidential administration in Moscow, where he rose to deputy chief. In 1998, he was appointed the head of the KGB’s successor, the FSB. A year later, in August 1999, apparently impressed by his loyalty, professionalism, and seeming incorruptibility, the Yeltsin circle tapped him to be prime minister. In the next few months, a series of dramatic events made an utterly unknown man Russia’s most popular politician. After three months as acting president, Putin easily won a relatively free election in 2000. 

Gessen expertly captures the almost incredible enthusiasm of the spiritual emancipation that the glasnost revolution brought to Leningrad between 1988 and 1991. Her summary of the August 1991 coup and the trials and tribulations of the 1990s are among the finest I have read, in English or Russian. She has an absorbing story to tell and tells it very well. (Summaries are notoriously hard to keep accurate, yet I spotted only one factual error: Ukraine declared independence not in June 1991, but in early December, following a national referendum.)

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