Putin's Russia

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 "New......
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