By the end of the 1980s, it seemed that totalitarianism was a thing of the past. Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika, or “restructuring,” brought Russia closer to Western democracy than ever before. The economy was primed to boom. The citizens of Soviet Russia expected a liberated, free, transparent republic. What they got was a violent and imperial mafia state.

Why did the Restructuring fail? How did Russia reject democracy in favor of satisfying the interests of the people in power? What was Vladimir Putin's role in Russia’s transformation into a gangster state? Co-authored by anonymous experts, Putin’s Mafia State is a brave collaborative effort exposing the chilling turn of events that laid the foundation for Putin’s ironclad hold on Russia’s political system.

The result is a political manifest that allows a rare insider’s glimpse into the Kremlin’s culture of organized crime: how a tight-knit group of loyalists managed to amass control of national resources, exert their influence over public opinion through government-owned media and religious institutions, and subsequently managed to rewrite historical events via war and propaganda, suppressing their resistance in the process.

With current global events influenced directly by Russia or its proxies, it is becoming more and more crucial to understand Putin’s Mafia State and, through it, understand Russia’s failure to become a true democracy – a process that began with the fall of Perestroika and ended in the latest invasion of Ukraine.