When public figures try to construct a public image through an autobiography, the result is usually boring self-flattering. Putin's biography is highly unusual for this genre, since he portrays himself as a bully and bureaucrat.

It requires a lot of background knowledge and suspicion to sort out which of the stories he telles that are likely true, and which ones are cover stories to hide the tracks of a being KGB mole inside the newly created, but hardly functional democratic institutions of the Yeltsin era.