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...

Vladimir Putin, fuelled by distrust and his years as a KGB officer, has maintained an iron grip on the Kremlin for two decades (Getty)

This weekend, 100 million Russians and a further six 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, meant that the opposition has already been dealt a death blow before the polls even opened. Literally so, in the case of Alexei Navalny, the charismatic dissident who died of mysterious causes in an Arctic prison camp last month.

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”.