The Man Without a Face

Masha Gessen watched Putin’s rise from inside Russia as a journalist, and this account carries that proximity. It follows an undistinguished KGB officer from the Leningrad streets through the chaotic 1990s to an accidental presidency, then shows how quickly he dismantled the young democracy that produced him. Gessen writes about murdered journalists and poisoned dissidents with the anger of someone who knew several of them. The book was published in 2012, and its warnings have aged with terrible accuracy.