“Life is such a simple thing, really,” a man who retold the story decades later would say, with a characteristic fatalism. The German soldier escaped, leaving Putin for dead. It landed near Putin, killing his comrade and riddling his own legs with shrapnel. The German reacted first, unpinned a grenade and tossed it. A German suddenly rose, surprising all three of them. He and another soldier approached a foxhole along a dug-in front, carved with trenches, pocked with shell craters, stained with blood. The last tanks in reserve in the city had crossed the Neva a week before, and Putin’s commanders now had orders to break through heavily reinforced positions defended by 54,000 German infantrymen.

It was November 17, 1941, 1 already bitterly cold, and the Soviet Union’s humiliated army was now desperately fighting to avoid its complete destruction at the hands of Nazi Germany. He was to reconnoiter the German positions and, if possible, capture a “tongue,” slang for a soldier to interrogate. Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin edged forward through the cratered battlefield beside the Neva River, roughly thirty miles from Leningrad. The New Tsar is a staggering achievement, a deeply researched and essential biography of one of the most important and destabilising world leaders in recent history, a man whose merciless rule has become inextricably bound to Russia's foreseeable future. On the other, Putin has ushered in a new authoritarianism - unyielding in its brutal repression of dissent and newly assertive politically and militarily in regions like Crimea and the Middle East. He came to office in 2000 as a reformer, cutting taxes and expanding property rights, bringing a measure of order and eventually prosperity to millions whose only experience of democracy in the early years following the Soviet collapse was instability, poverty and criminality.

As the world struggles to confront a newly assertive Russia, the importance of understanding Putin has never been greater.Vladimir Putin rose out of Soviet deprivation to the pinnacle of influence in the new Russian nation. A gripping, page-turning narrative about Russian power and prestige, the book depicts a cool and calculating leader with enormous ambition and few scruples. Former New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief Steven Lee Myers has followed Putin since well before the recent events in the Ukraine, and gives us the fullest and most engaging account available of his rise to power.

The epic tale of Vladimir Putin's path to power, as he emerged from obscurity to become one of the world's most important and dangerous leaders.

The new tsar by steven lee myers