Of all the many maladies that can afflict society, corruption must be considered among the most destructive. By allowing power to be channeled into the hands of a handful of elites, it hampers economic growth and institutionalizes complacency and inequality, grim realities which not only discourage innovation and progress, but sap the will of those laboring to make positive change in a stagnant system. While some societies can recall better and fairer pasts to help fight darker presents, others lack this encouraging history to draw upon. These nations have struggled with corruption for the entirety of their existences. Their citizens are only aware of a better way through witnessing it in other nations, countries where the history is not so stark and the present not so hopeless.
How does this corruption arise? More over, how is it extracted once it has taken root? Who are the men and women who nurture it and who are those best positioned to attack it? In this biography of Vladimir Putin and the Russia he's made, Ms. Gessen asks these questions and more. Her answers are not always so clear.
Born into modest circumstances, far from the halls of power, no one could have imagined, much less predicted, the rise to prominence of Vladimir Putin, the now three-term president of a new, authoritarian Russia. Diminutive and pugnacious, he was, admittedly, a thug, a self-interested adolescent searching for somewhere to belong in the troubled USSR of the 1970s and 1980s. After a handful of false starts, he would eventually enter into a mutually beneficial marriage with the KGB, the infamous Russian spy service, a relationship that would endure for decades and see him trained and embedded into various governmental posts while the Soviet Union died and gave birth to a new, oligarchical Russia.
Invested with the hopes of desperate Yeltsin loyalists, Putin completed his rise to power in 1999 when he was tapped to succeed the unpopular president. It would take him only a matter of months to betray that faith, engineering convenient crises which he then used to roll back the political reforms of the 1990s. This centralization of power into the hands of the Russian president, completed by 2003, shifted the balance of power in the world's largest country, jeopardizing the interests of powerful oligarchs who were instructed to either get in line or suffer the wrath of Russia's newest Czar. For while this new Russia was definitely not the Soviet Union of distant memory, its tactics were no less deadly, leaving no room for dissidents unwilling to play by the rules of Vladimir Putin.
Penned by a Russian journalist, The Man Without A Face leaves the reader in no doubt of its position on Vladimir Putin and the new Russia. An outspoken critic of Putin's heavy-handed presidency, Ms. Gessen does her best to piece together the admittedly sketchy histories of the rise of Putin and the fall of the Soviet Union, contemporaneous events which fuelled the birth of the new, corrupted Russian state. Though the absence of corroborative accounts hinders her effort to create a definitive biography of the man or the dying regime, she nonetheless lays down a logical narrative deeply informed by the thoroughly documented terrorist incidents that plagued Russia in the early aughts. Putin's abominable responses to these attacks, attacks he likely had a hand in creating in the first place, are rendered, here, in chilling detail, dispelling any questions the reader might have about Putin's willingness to act, at any cost, in the advancement of himself and his strongman agenda.
There's no doubt that The Man Without A Face suffers from the deceptions and the confusion that surround Putin's rise. Ms. Gessen is forced to rely on accepted history and the personal recollections of a handful of compromised witnesses to key events. This is far from ideal for it leaves the author too much room to guess and pontificate, to reaffirm her own biases. However, for all these drawbacks, the author has nonetheless built upon the work of others to make a devastating case against Vladimir Putin, a case there's no doubt he will ignore. For while the faces and the ideologies are different, this is the same Russia in one respect. Corruption is still rampant, corruption which gives the elites a great deal to protect. And when they stand to lose so much, there is very little they are not willing to do in the name of power and self-preservation.
quality work troubled by its suppositions. (3/5 Stars)
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