Vladimir Putin and the ‘Petersburg set’: The secret life of Russia’s longest-serving leader
What is Vladimir Putin like behind closed doors? Anne McElvoy takes a closer look at the mind and mood of the Russian president, how he lives and loves, and who has made it into his inner circle...
In March, 100 million Russians and a further 6 million living in occupied Ukrainian territory got a taste of what democracy, Vladimir Putin-style, looks like – which is, as the droll Russian saying has it, “an election without a choice”.
The sense of inevitability of the result, alongside the near-total concentration of power in the Kremlin, means that the opposition had already been dealt a death blow. Literally so, in the case of Alexei Navalny, the charismatic dissident who died of mysterious causes in an Arctic prison camp in February.
The intimidation is spreading: Navalny’s close ally Leonid Volkov was attacked last week with a hammer in Lithuania, in what he termed a “gangster greeting from the Kremlin” who “wanted to make a schnitzel out of me”.
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