I read this before Russia invaded Ukraine and was struck by how enlightening this book seemed then. It has only become a more pressing read since. Putin’s Russia is a graphic depiction of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, starting from his childhood. As a graphic novel, space dictates that it will never be quite as deep of a dive as you’ll get from something like Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face, but this thrives in its desire to communicate our gaps in knowledge about the Russian leader and where his motivations might lie. Putin’s Russia follows the style of similar books from Cunningham, like Billionaires. The art is sparse, bringing you swiftly from place to place. At its best, it connects the country’s history and its leader’s motivations to what we see in the news. It uses touchstone images—Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank or dancing, the Berlin Wall coming down, Putin on a jet ski, a shirtless Putin riding a horse, Pussy Riot in balaclavas—to connect the dots from Putin’s time in the KGB to the leader who ordered an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, interferes in foreign elections, and has refused to let go of his stranglehold on power in Russia.

Graphic novels don’t get more timely than this. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, here’s a frankly disturbing guide to how Vladimir Putin’s career began, and it draws a clear path from the Cold War KGB to the current regime.

This heart-rending narrative presents, in a stark, factual style, mass killings, atrocities and shady dealings that will be familiar to anyone who follows the news. Meanwhile, it shows Russia’s super-rich becoming even richer by legal acquisitions of state-owned assets … unless they offend the wrong person, and the state comes for them.

English cartoonist Cunningham threads the journalism into a compelling, horrifying narrative that constantly links back to Putin and his inner circle. It reads like an old-style spy novel but it’s simple news reporting.

This book will keep you reading to the end, and keep you up at night, but not necessarily in a good way.

Darryl Cunningham’s timing is dangerously good. He’s just published a graphic novel about the life and crimes of the world’s most reviled living leader.

Putin’s Russia: The Rise of a Dictator begins with brief stories about a small boy who grew up poor and took ‘vengeance on anyone who attempted to humiliate him.’

From there, Cunningham carries readers through Russia’s complex modern history of reform and corruption with bold blocky illustrations and straightforward explanations. In well-drawn asides, he laments Obama’s weak response to the annexation of Crimea and explores Trump’s ‘ceaseless fealty’ to the foreign leader who sought to subvert the U.S. presidential election.

But Cunningham’s book is most effective in dramatizing the poisonings, bombings, heart attacks and shootings that Putin’s critics have suffered as his dark star has risen. Some of these horrors will be familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention, but having them all laid out here in black and white and pools of red is tremendously powerful.

Cunningham, who lives in England, tells me it’s been ‘kind of alarming’ to see his predictions about Putin play out over the past few weeks. He upbraids Western leaders for missing Putin’s transformation from a bureaucrat into ‘a megalomaniacal dictator.’ And in the final pages of his book, he writes that ‘Putin and his cronies are deserving of the most crushing sanctions and political isolation.’

The author-illustrator has been encouraged to see that advice become reality, but he cautions that Western nations must still do more: They should stop relying on Russian oil and gas, and they must stop allowing members of the Russian kleptocracy to store their billions in glitzy real estate and legitimate banks.

For people (like me) unused to the graphic novel format, it’s strange to cover such consequential real-life material this way. ‘That’s one of the beauties of the comic medium,’ Cunningham says in his soft, lilting voice. ‘You can take a lot of information and then boil it down. And if you’re good at it, you can show it in a clear and concise manner.’ Cunningham is very good at it. ‘Putin’s Russia’ is illuminating and chilling.

In this blistering broadside of a graphic biography, Cunningham (Billionaires) outlines the life of the modern world’s most powerful autocrat. Acknowledging that Vladimir Putin’s early history is sketchily documented, Cunningham still provides a timeline for the rise of an unlikely czar. Born in 1952 in war-ravaged Leningrad, the young Putin dreamed of joining the KGB, which he did in 1975. Returning from East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he “mysteriously found” government jobs that positioned him to take advantage of the 1990s post-Soviet chaos. Attaching himself to powerful men, Putin became president in 2000 and leveraged crises like the 2004 Beslan terrorist attack to “further consolidate his power” with xenophobic and homophobic appeals to nationalism and masculinity. Presented as an unknowable cipher—Cunningham’s bright, flat art creates a kind of blank of his subject—Putin emerges here as corruptly self-enriching (stealing perhaps $200 billion) and amoral, and connected to numerous murders (attempted and successful) of journalists and politicians. After chronicling the shadow wars (Ukraine, Syria), disinformation campaigns, and the interference in the 2016 U.S. election that Putin has used to keep rivals off-balance, Cunningham castigates American leaders for having “missed Putin’s transformation” from bureaucrat into “megalomaniacal dictator.” It’s an infuriated and eye-opening guide to a real-life supervillain.

Very timely [and] well worth diving into… lots to learn from it. It has an agenda, but there is a truth to it.

Horror and a strange type of capering comedy suffuse Putin’s Russia, making it a deeply compelling, wildly entertaining read. Cunningham’s spare drawings, filled with blank space, allow for the unspoken to be revealed. Often this unveiling occurs in Putin’s face — blank, inscrutable, with an odd, sinister smile plucking the corners of his mouth.

Despite the dark historical materials he reviews, Cunningham… ensures readers will be kept engaged with a dry sense of wit and a knack for historical storytelling. Whether you've always been curious about who exactly Vladimir Putin is or are just looking to catch up on foreign affairs, it's likely Putin's Russia will prove to be an invaluable and surprisingly entertaining starting point.

A timely contribution to the discourse… this is an important book. Cunningham’s thoroughly researched and chilling accounting of Putin’s bloodstained career is a necessary reminder of the kind of man the world is dealing with. It’s hard to imagine a prose book on the topic with a similar payload of facts, research and insights that could do the same.

Considering how many times American Presidents have appeared in comics during the 21^st century, it’s surprising that until now there’s been no substantial graphic novel devoted to the man who’s controlled the world’s largest country for longer than all of them put together. While Vladimir Putin is a familiar global bogeyman, the intricacies of his rise and methods aren’t anywhere as well detailed as say, Donald Trump’s progress. While much remains secretive, Darryl Cunningham is able to piece together a forensic and annotated piece of reportage from accredited sources. It’s a truly terrifying account of opportunism and ruthless consolidation.

Putin’s rise to power is one of corruption on an almost unimaginable scale, and the speculation is that strong ties to the upper echelons of those who ran the KGB, feared Soviet secret police during the Soviet era, enabled his manipulation of a failing system. Whether influence or plain good luck led to his being named Boris Yeltsin’s successor in 1998 is unknown. Once in power, though, Putin learned from mistakes such as attempting to meet the public following a tragedy, and was shameless in changing the parliamentary process to give him greater control. Cunningham lays all this out as an easily understood succession of events accompanied by his simple, but well considered illustrations, always supplying an ideal representation for the issue. His use of official logos and flags representing people and organisations as shortcuts sticks in the memory.

A number of atrocities attributed to Chechen freedom fighters marked Putin’s first decade in power, with the response of the authorities always merciless and prioritising the deaths of those responsible over the lives of hostages. In one instance there’s credible evidence suggesting the state responsible rather than terrorists. These, invasions of neighbouring countries and the poisonings of state critics in exile are well publicised, but not as well known are the continuing assaults on and killings of independent journalists and prominent critics, while minorities respected throughout Europe are ruthlessly repressed in Russia. Cunningham lays out the vindictive nature of Putin’s domestic terror along with evidence of how many events denied by Russia could only have been carried out with Russian support. It makes for a blood-boiling read long before Cunningham begins contemplating more recent cyber crimes and complicity in heavily influencing the 2016 US Presidential election.

This is no biography with a happy ending for anyone other than Putin, who remains in power with a fortune believed to be the greatest in the world, although via organisations registered in the names of others. Of course, the possibility remains that when Putin dies the climate of fear he’s created will result in circumstances as ridiculous as the death of his Soviet predecessor Stalin, which would be the slimmest satisfaction to his many victims.

Forensic and dispassionate, Putin’s Russia is powerful reportage and an eye-opening laying bare of the world’s largest ever criminal organisation.

British cartoonist Darryl Cunningham turns his pen to Russia’s perennial strong man in his latest graphic novel, a sharp and sprawling narrative that hurtles through everything from Brexit to Litvinenko in its telling of ‘the biggest espionage scandal in history’.

Cunningham deftly weaves together the events that have come to characterise Putin’s reign, tracing his rise to the top of Russian politics from his early days as a ‘street thug’. Broader geopolitical themes inevitably enter the mix too.

Crisply illustrated and clocking in at just under 150 pages, the author’s gift is that he doesn’t sacrifice detail at the altar of concision: Rise of a Dictator is as informative as it is lively and entertaining.

Darryl Cunningham’s last book we reviewed on here was the superb Billionaires – a searingly factual look into the lives of the ultra-rich like Jeff Bezos and Rupert Murdoch. His new book continues this analytical style of narrative and focuses its attention on Russian supremo Vladimir Putin and it follows a similar in depth, yet very approachable style.

Tracing Putin’s life from his early days in the Russian secret service, to his rise to power in the 90s and 00s through to the lengths he goes to in order to hold on to power in the present day, it’s a fascinating and most importantly very readable book. What makes Cunningham’s books so great it that he doesn’t attempt to fictionalise the story in order to make the events more sensational, he simply displays the facts in a logical sequence and allows their extraordinary nature speak for itself. This means you find yourself taking in events like the Skripal poisonings or Kursk submarine disaster in the context of a lengthy power struggle and an attempt to keep hold of his authority at all costs. It also allows Cunningham to juxtapose this thirst for power against the rise of the Russian oligarchs which gets us into similarly territory to Billionaires.

Cunningham’s cartooning style is gloriously simple and so never over clutters the page. His characterisation is both photo real and brilliantly simplistic with only a few lines often used. Yet, he manages to get likenesses and a realism to his characters that are just superb. This means he can use real life images from newspapers that you recognise and so legitimise this story.

The book is quite text heavy in places, but Cunningham balances text and pictures perfectly, giving the story room to breathe and being more info heavy when required. It also isn’t a very preachy read, and like Billionaires Cunningham presents the facts in such a way that you find yourself immersed in his point of view – after all how could you disagree when confronted with such compelling evidence. Putin isn’t portrayed as a cartoonish villain or pantomime bogeyman, and the factual representation of him is much more sinister as a result.

Overall this is a wonderful read, that will leave you better informed at the end of it and wishing that all major world figures had a Darryl Cunningham biography in order for you to learn the most about them you can!

Darryl Cunningham, for my money Britain’s finest non-fiction comics creator, returns, following up his previous, fascinating and insightful books such as Graphic Science and Billionaires, here turning his studied gaze upon the despotic Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s Russia: the Rise of a Dictator takes us from his birth in Leningrad (now back to its pre-Soviet name of Saint Petersburg) in 1952. As with many from that generation, his parents were veterans of the Second World War (or Great Patriotic War, as Russians often refer to it), and he would, like many across Russia and Europe, grow up in a city still bearing the very visible scars of that grinding, global conflict. A relatively small child, he was picked on, and learned not just to fight back, but to fight dirty, something he has clearly carried with him throughout his adult life. One is moved to wonder how very different the world may have been if his childhood had been filled with happier moments with better friends.

By his mid-teens, young Putin had already decided he wanted to be a part of the dreaded KGB, at the height of the Cold War. This is an era where the KGB spent at least as much time spying on and dealing with their own citizens as it did in spying on and taking covert actions against Western powers, with a vastly inflated number of informers prepared to rat out their own neighbours and colleagues; the fact a young lad was so keen to join such an agency at that time doesn’t speak very well of his intentions or characters.

Cunningham takes us through Putin’s early KGB career, much of which is still murky and hidden, and his supposedly post-KGB life (I say supposedly, because there’s a strong likelihood he was still secretly on the active reserve list), and his early brushes with political power, as an advisor to the Leningrad city council, and even at this very early stage there is both indicators that the intelligence services may have been involved in influencing his appointment, and also of massive corruption (and subsequent cover-ups by any means).

While I was aware of his KGB past, I had no idea of these early political appointments for Putin, or the way he and his cronies misused their growing powers even back then – this was still in the era of Glasnost and Gorbachev, then the attempted coup in Russia,by die-hard Communists, the rise of Yeltsin, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the once formidable Soviet Union, all the related changes in what had been the effectively occupied Eastern Bloc.

Many of us of a certain age will remember these tumultuous, world-changing events, and reading here brought much of it rushing back to me, not least that fragile then slowly blooming hope so many of us had, that this was it, the Cold War was over, Russia was becoming a democracy, we were all going to be friends, the terrifying spectre of Mutually Assured Destruction by nuclear war was fading. You have to remember that back then we had lived for years with the monstrous thought that our entire shared civilisation could be annihilated with only the notice of the five minute warning, before the nukes started dropping. It was one of the most insane periods in human history, and here we were, thinking my gods, we’ve made it through and it’s going to get better.

Of course it didn’t work out that way, and that optimism was so sadly misfounded. And while we may not have quite returned to the hair-trigger, stand-off days of MAD, the world’s great powers have again been badly divided, and with quite clear intent of aggression and harm being directed against us. And the rise of Putin is a part and parcel of this. Cunningham explores this rise, the new Russia where a few become obscenely rich through massive corruption, dining out on the nation’s resources, all with Putin’s connections. The way this spreads across the globe as this dirty money enters the global financial system, not least the greedy financial centres of London and New York which were happy to take oligarch’s money, letting them buy property, connections, influence in Western countries, with Putin always behind this growing, sinister network.

That baleful influence has spread throughout the world, not just in terms of dodgy finance and dealings (no surprise to those of us who read Cunningham’s excellent and informative Supercrash), but in openly hostile, physical acts beyond Russia’s borders. Not content with “accidents” befalling critics at home, Putin has overseen both large-scale military interventions, such as in the continuing horror of the civil war in Syria, with its massive butcher’s bill of civilian casualties, or the illegal annexing of the Crimea, to the intimate but just as nakedly aggressive assaults, such as the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the poisonings in Salisbury, or the despicable shooting down of the civilian airliner MH17, or attempts to influence the US presidential elections.

Behind it all, Putin. Who, naturally, spins out some obvious fabrications to blame someone else, not really caring if anyone believes him, because even if they don’t, it spreads more confusion and mistrust in the West. It’s quite sobering, not to mention terrifying to see Cunningham so effectively laying out this rise from corrupt advisor in a city council to one of the most powerful men in the world, all, as always with his work, drawing on a huge amount of in-depth research that Cunningham somehow distils down into accessible, understandable narratives.

While much of the artwork here is familiar in style to some of his earlier work, there was also here, I feel, a more mature, finer-detailed aspect to some of the panels, especially those depicting some of the people. I felt as if he were trying to convey more not just of the emotion but also to do justice to the people he was depicting here. I felt this particularly strongly in the segment dealing with the downing of the MH17 airliner, where Cunningham doesn’t just cover the events, he takes some of the innocent victims and names them, draws their faces, tells us about some of them. They’re not numbers, not statistics, they are people, and clearly Cunningham wanted to make that clear: these are people, affected by the whims of a madman in another country, with living family and friends still mourning their loss and angry at the lack of justice for them.

Some panels on the Syrian conflict switch to a black and white, much heavier inked-line style, taking us through ruined cityscapes, in a style very different from the rest of the book, or indeed Cunningham’s more regularly-used styles I’ve seen before, and it is highly effective. It’s only a few panels, but their effect is powerful, it’s some superb cartooning work, conveying so much with just a few panels, and, like the MH17 pages, it packs a very strong emotional punch.

This is a story that really doesn’t yet have an ending – Putin is still in power, those who oppose him, even in the supposed security of another sovereign state, have a habit of dying mysteriously, he makes aggressive moves on the international stage, and is making plans to cling onto power for as long as he can (even rewriting the constitution) and to take steps to make himself legally unaccountable even if he leaves office. Where this complex, fascinating, disturbing history leads to, I do not know, but I will finish with some word from Cunningham, drawn from his conclusions:

“Murder and corruption should be punished, never rewarded. Either we support democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law everywhere, or we will see these values wither away.”

A highly accessible cartoon history, this is also a well-researched, and serious account of Putin's life and career, and deserves to be influential and to reach a wide audience. It stresses Putin's KGB roots and shows the devastating influence that institution's successors still have on present day Russia, with their use of poisonings and assassinations to deal with political enemies and opponents, and their hold on political power. It details all the main events of Putin's period in control, from Yeltsin and Chechnya to the Crimea and Navalny. It is to be hoped that its call for the West to recognize the dangers of what has been called ‘toxic politics’ will be taken seriously.