Current Affairs: Under Stalin, the disappearance of innocent citizens was a fact of life. Two million Soviet army chiefs, priests, professors and other "enemies of the people" were murdered during the Great Terror of 1937-38.
The arbitrariness of tsarist authority had found its grotesque mirror image, it seemed, in Stalin's purges. The current Russian president, Vladimir Putin, continues to exercise power arbitrarily and is indeed nostalgic for the Soviet era. For Putin, as it was for Stalin, the state is more important than individual liberty. Anything which threatens the state - the media, Chechen rebels, recalcitrant regional governors - must be neutered.
Born in 1952, Putin grew up in Leningrad (St Petersburg) during the last years of the Stalin dictatorship. His parents had high hopes for their clever son, who studied law at Leningrad University. After years of working for the shadowy secret police, Putin finally came to power in March 2000. His ambition was to recreate the "Great Nation" of Russia as it had been under his hero, President Andropov, but he faced an insuperable task.
The rise of the American market in post-Communist Russia (McDonald's, Nike, Microsoft) had already created a greedy class of "oligarchs" who were a law unto themselves. Money had puffed up these Noviye Russkie (new Russians) with more privilege and self-importance than any Stalinist apparatchik, and the motto of Russia's dispossessed, "Things were better before", was increasingly heard. Putin was no sooner installed in the Kremlin than he forced many of these "oligarchs" into exile and imprisoned (on corruption charges, though without trial) the former head of the giant Yukos oil company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. To most Russians these tycoons were thieves and parasites and Putin's action was met with general approval. To the West, however, their punishment looked like old-style political persecution, and Putin was deemed a hardliner in a democrat's clothing.
Andrew Jack, chief Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, has written an excellent book, Inside Putin's Russia, which draws on interviews with Putin himself to build a picture of post-Soviet chaos and enterprise. Putin's ill-fated attempts to quell the restive Islamic republic of Chechnya are at the heart of Jack's analysis. After the USSR collapsed, Chechnya was brutally fought over by Russian troops and Muslim separatists, and it remains a stew of fundamentalist custom and gangster enterprise. Earlier this month, Chechnya's Kremlin-backed president, Akhmad Kadyrov, was assassinated in a bomb attack. Putin immediately increased the republic's police force by more than 1,000 men, but commentators wonder if life there can ever return to normal. Central Asia has always been a burden to Moscow. During the 70 years of Communism Stalin closed down 26,000 mosques but, as Jack reports, he failed to penetrate Chechnya's secret Sufi networks. The Red Star never shone very brightly over Chechnya, and now the population is reportedly infiltrated by Al-Qaeda. Putin's brutal treatment of Chechen separatists - "We'll wipe them out in the shit house" - is popular in Russia, but condemned as ruthless and short-sighted in the west. But then Putin's priority has always been to prevent the break-up of Russia, and not curry favour abroad.
In Peter Truscott's lively biography of the Russian president, Putin's Progress, Putin is the antithesis of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, whose boozy antics and ripe-flavoured jokes were not exactly statesmanlike. Putin, by contrast, prefers to remain inscrutable and is known to be a master of stealth and Machiavellian adroitness. "He doesn't know how to smile", one Kremlin official said of Putin, and indeed Putin was a KGB agent for 15 formative years. According to Truscott, Putin is a typical product of the "middle-ranking" Soviet intelligence operative. His ruthlessness was evident throughout the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000, when all 118 of the vessel's crew were drowned. "What happened?" an American TV presenter asked Putin. "It sank," came his brutal reply.
Putin's sense of loyalty and devotion to friends is well-known, and both Jack and Truscott are quick to praise these attractive qualities. Now in his second term, Putin presides over a Russia of uncontrolled private enterprise and booze-inflamed nostalgia for the tsars. By any standards his presidency is not a happy one, though one has to admire his phlegm. Corruption has long been a part of Russian life, and the civil service, especially, is riven by crookedness. To his credit, Putin has clamped down on bribe-taking among bureaucrats and discouraged them from supplementing their (meagre) wages with "gifts". Stalin once decreed that anyone guilty of threatening the unity of the Russian state by deeds or even thoughts would be "punished"; Putin's stern policies are inseparable from that legacy.
Both of these books have the immediacy of journalism, combined with impressive scholarship and thoroughness. Jack's is the more serious of the two, with clear, well-written analyses of Putin's social and economic strategies, but Truscott's is more accessible (if occasionally too slangy in tone). Truscott, a leading British commentator on modern Russia, is particularly amusing on Putin's passion for judo, which is apparently shared by many ex-KBG officers. (In 1976, at the age of 24, Putin became judo champion of Leningrad, and he has often since posed in white kit for photo shoots.) In spite of their differences in approach, Peter Truscott and Andrew Jack agree on the essentials. In a country such as Russia, which has scarcely known Western-style democracy, Vladimir Putin could hardly be an upright, even-handed parliamentarian. His valiant attempts to modernise Russia must be seen against the background of a collapsed political ideology - Communism - and the millions of Russians who have been so cruelly displaced by it.
• Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi won the W.H. Heinemann Award 2003. His book on Haiti, Bonjour Blanc, is reissued this month with a new preface by J.G. Ballard