Putin’s Russia: The Rise of a Dictator

Cunningham (Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful) details Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s rise to become one of the most powerful—and potentially dangerous—men on the planet in this riveting, thoroughly researched biography. Born in 1952, Putin’s spent his childhood in St. Petersburg, where he developed a reputation as a vicious street fighter. In 1975 he was recruited by the KGB and sent to Dresden, where he recruited assets to smuggle Western technology into the Eastern Bloc. After ascending the KGB’s ranks, he left the intelligence service to become a government bureaucrat, and in 1991 found himself well-positioned to exploit, for personal gain, the economic and political turmoil created by the Soviet Union’s demise. Putin amassed a personal fortune before being elected president in 2000. From there, Cunningham details the many cases in which Putin’s opponents have been killed and examines his administration’s foreign policy; Cunningham finally concludes that his subject represents a threat to global democracy.