The Man Without a Face The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin A
chilling and unflinching portrait of one of the most fearsome
figures in world politics. His early life has the ring of legend
about it—the legend of a postwar thug. It starts in Leningrad in
1952, just eight years after the end of the Siege of Leningrad.
His parents, Maria and Vladimir Putin, had survived the siege in
the city. The elder Vladimir Putin had joined the Army in the
early days of the Soviet-German war and had been wounded
seriously in battle. These were the future president’s parents:
a disabled man and a woman who had come very close to dying from
starvation and who had lost her children (a second son died in
infancy several years before the war). But by the measure of the
postwar Soviet Union, the Putins were lucky: they had each
other. To have lived not only through the war but through the
siege, and to still have your spouse—and your home—was,
essentially, a miracle. Because Vladimir Putin was catapulted to
power from obscurity, an