VLADIMIR PUTIN came to power on May 7th 2000 under the banner of economic reform, modernisation and anti- corruption. In a bow to Russian history he ordered that “The Gulag Archipelago”, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book about Stalin’s Soviet forced-labour camp system, be made a set text for Russian schoolchildren, a radical move as the book is both searing and unrelenting and had been banned in the Soviet era.

Now three very different new books illustrate how misguided such hope in Mr Putin’s modernisation turned out to be.

Read Here – The Economist