Putin's Russia is a non-fiction book by the late Russian journalist
Anna Politkovskaya about life in modern
Russia.
Politkovskaya argues that Russia still has aspects of a
police state or
mafia state, under the
leadership of
Vladimir Putin. In a review, Angus Macqueen wrote:
Politkovskaya describes an army in which conscripts are tortured and hired out as slaves. She described judges who are removed from their positions or brutally assaulted on the street for not following instructions "from above" to let criminals go. She describes particular areas in Russia dominated and operating under insensitive companies or cold
oligarch that resemble brutal mafia bosses, with ex-military and special services personnel to aid them. She condemns routine kidnappings, murders, rape, and torture of people in
Chechnya by Russian military, exemplified by
Yuri Budanov. She mentions the decayed state and minimally financed conditions of the
Russian Pacific Fleet and nuclear arsenal in Vladivostok. She describes the persistence of the infamous
Moscow Serbsky Institute of psychiatry and Dr.
Tamara Pechernikova, who was notorious for torturing
Soviet dissidents in "
psikhushkas" of 1960s and 1970s, often using drugs such as
haloperidol. She tells the story of
Pavel Fedulev, a petty criminal who became "the leading industrialist and deputy of the legislature", as a prototype "
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