Narrator: In late 1999, a series of terrifying explosions ripped through apartment buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities, killing hundreds of sleeping civilians. In the ensuing panic, a little-known, steely-eyed prime minister named Vladimir Putin appeared on television. He vowed to hunt the perpetrators, who were blamed on Chechen terrorists, down to the very last man. "We will rub them out in the outhouse," he promised, using coarse language that resonated with a frightened public. His approval ratings skyrocketed. The man who just months earlier was a political nobody, a gray bureaucrat, was suddenly the nation's savior. But was this the full story? How did this obscure former KGB agent, a man seemingly without a face or a past, ascend to become one of the most powerful and enduring leaders on the world stage?

In her gripping investigation, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, journalist Masha Gessen pieces together the puzzle of Putin's ascent. She argues that his rise was not an accident, but the chillingly logical outcome of a decade of chaos, corruption, and the quiet, persistent power of the Soviet security services.

Narrator: Putin's journey to the presidency began not with a grand plan, but with a desperate search. By 1999, President Boris Yeltsin was a shadow of his former self—ailing, erratic, and deeply unpopular. His inner circle, known as the "Family," was terrified of what would happen when he left office. They feared prosecution for the rampant corruption that had defined the era and sought a successor who would guarantee their safety.

They found their man in Vladimir Putin, then the head of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. He was chosen precisely because he seemed to have no ambition, no personality, and no agenda of his own. The influential oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who acted as a key kingmaker, saw Putin as a loyal and direct man who could be easily controlled. Berezovsky later recalled his first impression of Putin was that he was the first bureaucrat he'd met who didn't take bribes. They fundamentally misjudged their candidate, seeing a disciplined executor when they should have seen a man with a deep-seated desire for control. They weren't looking for a visionary leader; they were looking for a puppet who would protect them. They got a master puppeteer instead.

Narrator: The "man without a face" needed an image, and a national crisis provided the perfect forge. The 1999 apartment bombings created a wave of terror across Russia. Putin seized the moment, projecting an image of ruthless strength that stood in stark contrast to the ailing Yeltsin. His promise to hunt down and destroy the terrorists was exactly what a terrified nation wanted to hear.

However, Gessen highlights a deeply disturbing event that casts a shadow over this narrative. Just days after the last bombing, residents of a building in the city of Ryazan discovered sacks of explosives in their basement. Local police confirmed the substance was hexogen, the same explosive used in the Moscow attacks. But the next day, the head of the FSB announced it had all been a "training exercise." This explanation was widely disbelieved, fueling speculation that the security services themselves may have been involved in the bombings to create a pretext for war in Chechnya and catapult Putin to power. Whether orchestrated or merely exploited, the crisis worked. On New Year's Eve 1999, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned, making Putin acting president and all but guaranteeing his victory in the upcoming election.

Narrator: Once in the spotlight, Putin's team hastily constructed a public persona, detailed in his official biography, First Person. The book paints a picture of a tough, street-smart kid from the courtyards of post-siege Leningrad, a city defined by poverty and violence. The narrative is filled with stories of Putin as a boy who, though small, would never back down from a fight, learning early that "if a fight is inevitable, you must strike first."

This mythology of a resilient brawler was a deliberate choice. It masked a more mundane reality. Putin's lifelong ambition was to join the KGB, inspired by romantic spy novels. Yet his actual career was unremarkable, culminating in a disappointing post in Dresden, East Germany, where he mostly collected press clippings. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall left him feeling profoundly betrayed. He watched from Dresden as the empire he served simply dissolved, with "Moscow is silent" being his key takeaway. This sense of humiliation and abandonment would become a core driver of his political ideology: to restore the power and prestige of the Russian state.

Narrator: Before rising to national prominence, Putin honed his methods in the corrupt political world of 1990s St. Petersburg. Working as a deputy to the city's democratic mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, Putin was put in charge of foreign economic relations. It was here that he first faced major allegations of corruption.

A city council investigation led by a politician named Marina Salye uncovered a massive scheme. Putin had been issuing licenses to export raw materials like timber and rare earth metals in exchange for food supplies that the city desperately needed. The investigation found that the raw materials were shipped and sold, but the food never arrived. Salye concluded the scheme was a deliberate fraud to enrich its participants. Yet, when she presented the evidence, Mayor Sobchak protected his deputy. Putin faced no consequences, and Salye was politically marginalized, eventually fleeing the city in fear for her life. This episode was a microcosm of Putin's future rule: using state power for personal and network enrichment, ensuring loyalty, and neutralizing any and all opposition.

Narrator: Once in the Kremlin, Putin applied the St. Petersburg playbook on a national scale. He moved methodically to dismantle the fragile democratic institutions of the 1990s and centralize power. His first targets were the two forces that could challenge him: the independent media and the powerful oligarchs.

After the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000 exposed his government's incompetence, Putin moved to seize control of the national television networks, forcing media moguls like Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky into exile. Next, he took on the oligarchs. The richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested in 2003 after he began funding opposition parties and speaking out about corruption. His oil company, Yukos, was dismantled and its assets absorbed by state-controlled firms run by Putin's allies. The message was clear: no one was untouchable. Tragedies were also exploited to consolidate control. After the horrific Beslan school siege in 2004, Putin used the need for security as a pretext to cancel the direct election of regional governors, placing them under Kremlin appointment instead.

Narrator: With all independent power centers crushed, the regime revealed its true nature as a kleptocracy—a state run by thieves—enforced by terror. Gessen documents how challenging the system became a death sentence. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who relentlessly exposed human rights abuses in Chechnya, was murdered in her apartment building in 2006. That same year, former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who had accused Putin of orchestrating the apartment bombings, died a slow, agonizing death in London after being poisoned with a rare radioactive isotope, polonium-210, which could only have come from a state facility.

This rule of fear was paired with insatiable greed. Gessen recounts the story of Sergei Kolesnikov, a businessman who revealed the existence of a secret, billion-dollar palace being built for Putin on the Black Sea, funded by a slush fund disguised as a medical charity. This, Gessen argues, is evidence of Putin's "pleonexia"—an ancient Greek term for the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others. This compulsion to take, whether it be a company, an election, or a life, became the defining characteristic of his regime.

Narrator: Masha Gessen's The Man Without a Face presents a chilling and convincing portrait of Vladimir Putin's rise. The book's most powerful takeaway is that Putin is not an aberration but the natural product of a system that never fully broke from its Soviet past. He is the embodiment of the security services' revenge, a man who succeeded by restoring the old KGB ethos of control, conspiracy, and corruption to the heart of the Russian state.

The book leaves us with a haunting question about the nature of power. It challenges us to look beyond the constructed image of a leader and examine the system that creates them. While the 2011 protests that close the book offered a glimmer of hope that a civil society was reawakening, Putin's enduring grip on power forces a difficult reflection: what does it take for a society, so thoroughly atomized and ruled by fear, to truly reclaim its future?