In the summer of 2012, Vladimir Putin returned as Russia’s president, after four years of playacting as a pliant prime minister. I spent time in St Petersburg trying to sift through his murky myth. Everyone who knew him, everyone who had worked with him – I wanted to track them down. My calls usually rang unanswered. When old voices picked up they abruptly hung up on hearing my requests.
It was like chasing a ghost. The old, hard-bitten police chief who worked with him in St Petersburg in the 1990s was still a little stunned by Putin’s rise. “I thought he was just an insignificant official at the time.” The city’s town-hall orator, another former colleague of Putin’s, also remained baffled. “When he became president I threw open my photo album to see us together. But he wasn’t in a single one. He’d slipped out of every frame. I sometimes wonder if he even has a reflection in the mirror.”
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