Now freed, working as a pro-democracy campaigner in enforced exile, Khodorkovsky brings us the insider's battle to save his country's soul. Offering an urgent analysis of what has gone wrong with Putin, The Russia Conundrum maps the country's rise and fall against Khodorkovsky's own journey, from Soviet youth to international oil executive, powerful insider to political dissident, and now a high-profile voice seeking to reconcile East and West. The separatist uprising in Chechnya was another challenge that Putin faced early on in his tenure as the President. Islamic terror had raised its ugly head in the Muslim dominated province conveniently camouflaged as a fight for independence. The western nations found this to be a perfect situation to destabilise the Putin regime and they left no stone unturned in trying to foment trouble in the restive province. The Beslan hostage-taking incident by Chechen separatists led to the death of almost 300 children primarily due to the inept handling of the situation by the Russian Government. But Putin used this tragedy to ensure a stranglehold on the provinces where he installed his cronies to head the local governments. And the history of where he started is as dramatic as his exploits have been so far. This audible series is not all that detailed, but it gives you a very good introduction of how someone installed as a puppet, can refuse to be one and end up taking the power that was not meant to be his. Some of the anecdotes just show how Putin does indeed live up to the Bond villain persona attributed to him.

Putin: The explosive and extraordinary new biography of Putin: The explosive and extraordinary new biography of

Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years’: Putin speaking at a rally in Moscow, February 2012. Photograph: Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images On New Year's Eve 1999, a young Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian TV screens - awkward, self-conscious. . .and the new President. Two decades later, Putin is still in power, standing self-assured and at ease on the world stage. How did a once little known KGB bureaucrat become one of the most dominant figures of 21st-century politics?After the fall of the erstwhile Soviet Union, Russia went into a spiral of violence and dire financial straits under the bumbling leadership of Boris Yeltsin. Russia transformed itself into an era of the free market economy after decades of tight governmental control on the economy, entrepreneurship and finance in the country. But this transformation was far from smooth, and during the reign of Yeltsin, crony capitalism held sway over the country. Rampant crime and corruption were commonplace. Yeltsin’s hold on the country was dithering all the more because of the scourge of addiction to alcohol that he was suffering from. It was at this juncture that the ruling elite decided that a newcomer who would firmly remain in their control should be brought to the helm of affairs in the country. I did not know snipers shot more than 100 student protestors in the Ukraine in 2014. Little green men, the locals called the soldiers that suddenly appeared in the city. Mr Aslin wrote Putin's Prisoner with John Sweeney, the legendary British war reporter who for over 20 years has documented how the Kremlin's troops have tortured both civilians and POWs.

Putin: Prisoner of Power by Russell Finch | Goodreads Putin: Prisoner of Power by Russell Finch | Goodreads

Mikhail Khodorkovsky has seen behind the mask of Vladimir Putin. Once an oil tycoon and the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky spoke out against the corruption of Putin's regime - and was punished by the Kremlin, stripped of his entire wealth and jailed for over ten years. In a disturbing exposé of Putin's sinister ambition, Sweeney draws on thirty years of his own reporting - from the Moscow apartment bombings to the atrocities committed by the Russian Army in Chechnya, to the annexation of Crimea and a confrontation with Putin over the shooting down of flight MH17 - to understand the true extent of Putin's long war. And then the other side of it, that was very heavy on me because I didn't want to say any of this stuff because anyone who's ever followed me for years, they know that I'm extremely pro-Ukrainian and pro-freedom." In Killer in the Kremlin, award-winning journalist John Sweeney takes readers from the heart of Putin's Russia to the killing fields of Chechnya, to the embattled cities of an invaded Ukraine.In April 2021, Putin changed the law to allow himself to be President until 2036. So, I guess he doesn't plan to be going anywhere. I'm not sure that is a good thing for the world, or for Russians who are in dire straits; suicide is rampant. When some of the hardest people on earth are driven to that, there is something very wrong. The result is a step-by-step journey, whose penultimate chapter is a little surprisingly called “The Endgame”, hobbled by being published as the climax approaches, not after the event. Short, let alone history, has not had time to judge the success or failure of the latest horrifying act in Putin’s astonishing drive to make Russia great again.