Some men are shaped by their cities. Vladimir Putin was shaped by a city of ghosts, where starvation and siege were not history but breakfast-table conversation, and where a small boy learned that a willingness to throw the first punch was worth more than size. That boy grew up to hold the fate of nations in his hands.

There is a moment in a Dresden villa, late in 1989, when a crowd surges toward the gates and a mid-level intelligence officer picks up the phone to call for help. The answer he receives will define the rest of his life, and arguably the rest of ours. Everything that has happened since, from the burning of Grozny to the tanks rolling toward Kyiv, traces back to what he heard, or failed to hear, on that line.

How does a man remake a nation of 140 million in his own image? Not all at once. It happens in a televised meeting with billionaires who leave believing they still matter. It happens in a Siberian courtroom, in a hostile takeover of a news desk, in a quiet decree signed on New Year's Eve. It happens in the choreography of a shirtless horseback ride, and in the silence that follows a journalist's final byline.

Step inside a world of body doubles and open windows, of tea cups that kill and balconies that beckon, of a ruler who grows more paranoid as his circle narrows and his wars grow larger. This is the story of how the quiet man nobody noticed became the most consequential and dangerous figure of the twenty-first century, and why the world he is building will outlast him in ways we are only beginning to understand.