\u201cIt is Putin\u2019s behavior away from the cameras that speaks much more about his real worldview than speeches,\u201d Badanin said in an interview with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.\u201cPutin\u2019s private life, to put it simply, is many times more important than his public life.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Book](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Tsar-Putin-book-cover.jpg\")
\n The Tsar in Propria Persona. <\/p>\n
The Tsar In Propria Persona is the culmination of Badanin and Rubin\u2019s reporting at investigative media outlet Proekt<\/a>, an ICIJ media partner that, since its launch in 2018, has repeatedly exposed the commercial and personal relationships that underpin the Putin regime.<\/p>\n Crucially, and at great personal risk, Badanin and Rubin manage to penetrate Putin\u2019s inner circle of friends and family in their forensic account of the former KGB agent\u2019s rise to power, violating a decades-long Kremlin-imposed taboo on any mention of the Russian leader\u2019s private life.<\/p>\n In doing so, The Tsar In Propria Persona \u2013 so far only available only in Russian \u2013 fills the void around Putin left by official biographies and silenced sources, and can claim its place alongside such key works as Catherine Belton\u2019s Putin\u2019s People<\/a> and Karen Dawisha\u2019s Putin\u2019s Kleptocracy<\/a>. To do so, the book draws on (often anonymous) human sources, documents, news clips and memoirs to piece together one of the most in-depth portraits of Putin and his circle so far.<\/p>\n Thanks to the Kremlin\u2019s creeping control of Russian courts and independent media, Badanin told ICIJ, \u201cmost people in Russia know and remember very little of what happened under Putin, say 15 or 20 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMedia have been destroyed, archives are closed and inaccessible, many witnesses are already dead, the rest do not remember the details,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is important context whenever we talk about dictatorial countries. The bad guys are erasing our memory of them [\u2026] Oblivion is Putin\u2019s main ally.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Apetite for risk\u2019<\/p>\n In 1970s Leningrad, Putin, then in his 20s, was an awkward young man who found a guiding voice in his judo coach, Leonid Usvyatsov, a career criminal who witnesses found by Proekt recall had a penchant for violence. It was from Usvyatsov, Badanin and Rubin write, that Putin likely found his \u201cappetite for risk and belief in [in the use of] force.\u201d<\/p>\n As they report, Usvyatsov may have even used his connections to help Putin get into the highly competitive Leningrad University\u2019s Law Faculty \u2013 a reach for a student who had finished school with a focus on natural sciences.<\/p>\n Putin fell under Usvyatsov\u2019s influence between the latter\u2019s two prison sentences before he was finally killed in a gangland shooting in 1994. Usvyatsov\u2019s headstone reads: \u201cAt last I have died, but the mafia lives forever.\u201d<\/p>\n Aside from sketching his relationship with gangland figures, The Tsar In Propria Persona shines a light on the previously off-limits relationships and spaces that shaped Putin.<\/p>\n Badanin and Rubin take readers inside Putin\u2019s favoured strip club in St Petersburg, Luna, where, as deputy to St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, he held regular meetings and attended strip shows. The club was then under the protection of Putin\u2019s personal bodyguard at the time, organized crime figure Roman Tsepov, Proekt reports. A photo of the club shows a signed Putin photograph, dated December 1999, hanging on the wall.<\/p>\n By the time Putin had become a Luna regular in the mid-1990s, Proekt writes, his marriage to Lyudmila Putina, whom he married in 1983, had already begun to break down.<\/p>\n A key piece of evidence comes from a memoir by a German friend of Lyudmila, Irena Pietsch, who says that, by 1998, Lyudmila was experiencing \u201cunimaginable pain\u201d from \u201cconstant humiliation\u201d and \u201ctreachery\u201d in her marriage. Indeed, Pietsch\u2019s memoir paints a new picture of Putin in the 1990s: a man focused on lavish interiors, comfortable living, expensive whisky and discussing the prospect of \u201cadditional income\u201d after joining the Russian presidential administration.<\/p>\n One potential source of the marriage\u2019s breakdown, Badanin and Rubin report, could have been Putin\u2019s affairs \u2013 conducted, one of their sources alleges, in a state-owned apartment.<\/p>\n The affairs did not, however, prevent Putin from overseeing a honeytrap operation against the Yeltsin family\u2019s number one enemy at the time: Russian General Prosecutor Yuri Skuratov.<\/p>\n In a case hard to imagine today, Skuratov at the time was investigating corruption allegations involving Yeltsin family members and top officials in his administration.<\/p>\n As Badanin and Rubin write, Putin\u2019s role in destroying the career of Skuratov \u2013 whose tryst with prostitutes was captured on surveillance video and shown on televisions across Russia in March 1999 \u2013 was effectively a show of loyalty to the Yeltsin family, sealing Putin\u2019s bid to be the ailing president\u2019s successor.<\/p>\n A few hours after Skuratov\u2019s honeytrap video was shown on national TV, Putin, then director of the FSB security agency, was put in charge of a commission on the Skuratov affair, and the prosecutor \u2013 who had also started a corruption investigation known popularly as the \u201cPutin Case\u201d \u2013 was fired from his position, despite suspicions over the video.<\/p>\n \u2018This book cost us our homeland\u2019<\/p>\n In addition to revealing the forces and relationships that shaped Putin to this day, The Tsar In Propria Persona reveals how the Russian Orthodox Church became a powerful political instrument, how the Kremlin organized creeping control over Russian media and how family and friends came to benefit from Putin\u2019s rise to power.<\/p>\n The book can be seen as a companion to Dawisha\u2019s 2014 exploration of how Putin turned once-powerful and quasi-independent oligarchs into his subordinates \u2013 his outer circle, in a sense \u2013 and Belton\u2019s 2020 work, which tracks how former KGB officers, often with the help of organized crime, took control of post-communist Russia.<\/p>\n The Russian government persecuted us for digging into Putin, his friends and their bad deeds. \u2014 Author and journalist Roman Badanin<\/p>\n![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Putin-Putina-GettyImages-113119247-1138x640.jpg\")
\n Vladimir Putin with his wife Lyudmila Putina, at Orthodox Easter celebrations in Moscow in 2011. Image: Natalia Kolesnikova\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n