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 being inaugurated for a fifth term as Russian President (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

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”.