BURNING QUESTIONS

'This is the story of how the world's largest country, with all its nuclear warheads, all its oil, all its tragic history, and all its unfulfilled hopes, ended up in the hands of a small man and a large machine." So wrote Masha Gessen in "Dead Soul," her gripping 2008 Vanity Fair profile of Russia's Vladimir Putin. This month, as Russia hurtles toward presidential elections amid mounting protest against Putin's autocratic rule, Riverhead Books will publish Gessen's full-scale biography of the Russian leader, The Man Without a Face. Gessen was born in Russia and immigrated with her parents to the U.S. in 1981. She eventually returned to Moscow as a journalist, covering Putin's improbable rise from K.G.B. obscurity. Gessen is currently the editor in chief of the (somewhat) ironically titled magazine Snob, which has been described as "a kind of Vanity Fair for Russia's political elite."

CULLEN MURPHY