Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer and Russian leader

Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer and Russian leader, is introduced as a man made politically consequential by the collapse of the world that had formed him. In the narrative, he first appears not as an established national figure but as a forty-year-old intelligence officer returned from East Germany, jobless and without a place to live, driving an illegal cab in Leningrad. His later ascent begins in this dislocation: the oligarchs who help bring him forward mistake loyalty for subservience, and discover too late that the obscure officer they have chosen intends to rule them as well as the country.

Displacement and the post-Soviet crisis

Putin’s early predicament is set against the social shock of Russia’s transition to a market economy. Under Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar, the rapid liberalization of prices produced inflation of 2,600 percent. Vouchers intended to give citizens a share in national wealth were mailed on September 1, 1992, to every Russian citizen over one year old; by the time they arrived, inflation had reduced their practical value to roughly a bottle of vodka. Many people sold them for little more, while enterprising buyers assembled assets that would help make them billionaires within months.

The resulting transformation enriched a small group and impoverished millions. The narrative contrasts the fortunes of Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky with the circumstances of people whose wages could not keep pace with prices. Putin is placed among the defeated by this upheaval: after his intelligence work in Dresden, he was hastily repatriated when East Germany ceased to exist, and in Leningrad he resorted to black-market cab driving. His anger at the new Russians is described as comparable to Eduard Limonov’s. The book also connects the two men through their view of the Soviet collapse: both regard the end of the Soviet empire as the twentieth century’s worst catastrophe. That shared judgment does not make them political allies; rather, it establishes an ideological echo between a future ruler and a writer who would oppose the order taking shape around him.

Chosen as a successor

As Yeltsin’s second term approached its end, the oligarchs sought a successor who would protect their interests. Their immediate concern was the loans-for-shares scheme: private banks had lent money to an impoverished state against shares in major natural-resource companies, with the possibility of taking ownership if the loans went unpaid. Because the deadline followed the presidential election, the oligarchs needed Yeltsin, rather than Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov, to remain in power and honor the arrangement.

Berezovsky proposed an unknown figure from the security services. Putin had worked in East Germany, struggled after the Berlin Wall fell, and then found a position in the Federal Security Service, which he had quietly headed for the preceding year. The qualities Berezovsky emphasized were not public popularity or political brilliance but dependable obedience. He described the candidate as no genius who would do what he was told. The choice exposes the oligarchs’ miscalculation at the moment it is made: they treat a record of loyalty to superiors as evidence that the new leader will remain their subordinate.

Berezovsky flew by private jet to Biarritz, where Putin was vacationing with his wife and children at a moderately priced hotel, and offered him the job. Putin modestly questioned whether he was capable of it. Berezovsky reassured him that determination would be enough and that the oligarchs would help. The unassuming scene becomes, in retrospect, the threshold of a reversal: the wealthy patrons believe they are recruiting a useful instrument, while the narrative foreshadows that he will become the power capable of dismantling their influence.

Power, war, and contested suspicion

Yeltsin presented Putin to the public as his heir apparent six months before the presidential election. The election seemed almost a formality, but the narrative describes the political usefulness of a war in making the new arrival appear to be a savior. In the autumn of 1999, bombings in apartment buildings in Moscow’s suburbs killed more than three hundred civilians. The attacks were blamed on Chechen terrorists, although the book stresses that proof for that attribution was lacking.

A theory that circulated widely in Russia held that the Federal Security Service had carried out the bombings. The account identifies General Alexander Lebed, journalist Artyom Borovik, former security-service officer Alexander Litvinenko, and Paul Klebnikov as public proponents of the theory, and notes that all four later died violent deaths: Lebed and Borovik in suspicious accidents, Litvinenko by polonium poisoning, and Klebnikov by gunfire. The narrative presents the theory as both paranoid and not entirely implausible, not as a proven explanation. It also emphasizes a disturbing political contradiction: many Russians could believe Putin guilty, or at least capable, of such a crime and still vote for him overwhelmingly on several occasions.

Within months of his promotion, the restrained candidate’s public manner changed. He declared that terrorists would be pursued and killed in their hideouts, using a coarse phrase that set the tone for his presidency. The line soon became an inside joke among Limonov’s followers, who adapted it to mock one another over vodka. Their joking carried an irony the group did not yet recognize: neither Limonov nor his companions understood what Putin’s accession would mean for them.

The patron becomes the target

The book gives the Biarritz encounter a pointed aftermath. Three years after Berezovsky helped elevate Putin, Berezovsky and Gusinsky would be forced into exile, while Khodorkovsky would be arrested and, after what the narrator calls a rigged trial, sent to Siberia. The oligarchs who had pooled their money and media power to secure Yeltsin’s reelection had helped establish a successor who would take them down one by one. Berezovsky’s confidence in his own maneuver thus turns into the defining reversal of his political career; the others learn to watch their step and recognize who now commands the state.

This reversal also clarifies the contrast between economic power and political power in the narrative. The oligarchs had gained wealth through the chaotic transfer of public assets and had used their newspapers, radio stations, and television channels to press the slogan that the choice was Yeltsin or chaos. But the resources that had helped them shape an election did not guarantee their security once the new ruler no longer needed them. Their initial ability to influence succession becomes a demonstration of their vulnerability to the state they helped empower.

Narrative role and significance

Putin functions as both a personal reversal and a political hinge in the account. His humble presentation—as a returned officer, cab driver, and hesitant candidate—makes his subsequent consolidation of authority more striking, but the narrative does not treat obscurity as innocence. The qualities that made him attractive to Berezovsky, especially his apparent loyalty, become part of the misreading that enables his rise. His story is not a simple passage from poverty to power: it moves from the disintegration of Soviet authority through a bargain with newly wealthy private actors to their subordination under a stronger state.

His parallel with Limonov sharpens the book’s political tension. Both men resent the post-Soviet order and mourn the lost empire, yet their routes diverge: Putin becomes the national leader, while Limonov remains in opposition and later organizes demonstrations under Strategy 31, invoking the constitutional right to assemble. The comparison does not erase that difference or imply a shared political project. It places two responses to the same collapse beside each other: one transforms grievance into state power; the other confronts that power from the street. The account’s lasting emphasis is the unsettling gap between the public image of a modest successor and the remorseless ruler who emerges, as well as the unresolved suspicion surrounding the violence that helped make his rise appear necessary.