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It's hard to write about modern Russia without access to internal documents and/or people directly connected to the regime and ready to disclose classified information. The narrative inevitably deviates into the field of assumption rather than fact; borders between hypothetical and real become obsolete. To complicate the matter, events of the ground and, thus, our broader perspective constantly shift by an hour. When Mark Galeotti and Anna Arutunyan started to work on DOWNFALL: PRIGOZHIN, PUTIN AND THE NEW FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE OF RUSSIA, they couldn't have predicted that the very object of their research, Yevgeny Prigozhin, would be assassinated soon after.

My last sentence arouses yet another question with no answer: was he assassinated or died in an accident?

In the first, chronologically organized part of DOWNFALL, Mark Galeotti and Anna Arutunyan trace the origins and formative years of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was sometimes called Putin's henchman and who dared to challenge the regime, though in a very awkward way. Growing up poor and getting his final education in prison, Prigozhin learned to survive by any means possible. One of the ways was to establish a network of useful contacts of the powerful ones. He played roles everybody expected of him: an accommodating restaurant owner, a silent yes-man, a real estate owner, and a film producer. Later - in life and in the second part of this book - he became a condottiere and a father figure for his illegal-legal bandits. Contrary to popular belief in the West, he has never extorted much influence over Putin. He was a servant who went astray in an attempt to get his master's attention and paid dearly for his mistake.

Despite the somewhat chaotic retelling of events starting from the 2000s, DOWNFALL illuminates interesting aspects of Putin's policy rarely talked about. For me, the part about Russia's intervention in African affairs was a kind of new viewpoint that expanded my understanding of current Russian politics. As per the prevailing position on Putin's standing, he is a cold-blooded dictator who calculates his every step to make Russia great again. Mark Galeotti and Anna Arutunyan propose a different perspective, of a gambler who takes all opportunities at once. Not restrained by money and public opinion at home, he can allow himself to wait for a lucky combination of events that will eventually destabilize the West.