A lady named Masha Gessen came out with a book this year titled "The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin." It confirmed what most of us have surmised: Russia's latest tsar is a thug.
Well, what else would you expect of someone who came up through the ranks of the KGB? Let's just say his dossier is worthy of his background.
Vladimir Putin isn't exactly Ivan the Terrible, much as he tries, but he could be an ordinary tyrant like Alexander III, if only he were a little more human.
Gessen's book touches on a few lowlights of Comrade/Gospodin Putin's thuggish times. Like the highly suspicious death of one Alexander Litvinenko, a whistleblower who wound up dying in Britain of radiation poisoning. (Who says the Russians don't have modern technology?)
Then there was Tsar Vlad's pocketing a Super Bowl ring that belonged to Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. The presidential career of this former KGB agent has been marked by equally low thievery, graft and corruption as he proceeds to break campaign laws. The man steals elections the way he does Super Bowl rings. You'd think he was a product of Chicago politics.
If you cross Vlad the Terrible, you could find yourself behind bars for years on trumped-up charges. For approximately forever. See the unending case of decidedly former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Other critics of the Russian regime tend to come down with lead poisoning, not surprisingly. V. Putin's reign seems to have combined the traditional Russian legal nihilism with a characteristically modern brutishness.
The most head-scratching part of Masha Gessen's book may come at the end. Literally. On the back cover. It says the author lives in Moscow.
And -- this is a stunner -- she's still alive.
And not even in prison.
Be careful, ma'am. Maybe you ought to take a different route to work each day. Keep your visa updated. And your bags packed. Accidents tend to happen to journalists in Russia. At least the real kind rather than what we used to call Sovjournalists.
A confession: We get what little we know of the spy world from old Tom Clancy novels. But you, ma'am, live in a more dangerous world, Gospozha Gessen. Namely, Russia. Unlike a spy novel, it can be dangerously real. Such as reality always is in surreal Russia.