The new consensus is that Vladimir Putin's regime is finished. And yet last week the former KGB spy was overwhelmingly "re-elected" as Russia's president. By May he will be back in the Kremlin for the third time  poor old Dmitry Medvedev booted into the job of prime minister, and soon to shuffle off the stage. By this summer Putin will be in Britain, his least favourite European country, sitting in the Olympics VIP box.

As Masha Gessen acknowledges in her luminous study of Russia's forever leader, getting rid of Putin will be tough. For sure, over the past three months, middle-class Russians have risen up against him in unprecedented numbers. The trigger was December's blatantly falsified Duma elections; on Monday thousands gathered again in Pushkin Square to protest against his election victory. Russia is now divided into three camps: those who passionately oppose Putin; those whose support him, seeing not much of an alternative; and those who don't care.

The problem for the demonstrators, as Gessen writes, is that there is no simple mechanism for forcing Putin out, no "obvious cause-and-effect relationship between street protests and the ultimate fall of the regime". Like the Soviet Union, Russia lacks independent institutions such as a supreme court that could conceivably broker a deal between the ruling camp and the swelling opposition. Over the past 12 years democracy in Russia got squashed.

And yet Gessen is an optimist. In her book's epilogue she describes the sudden snowballing of December's protests. She is convinced the regime is "doomed" and that "Putin's bubble will burst". It "may take months or it may take a few years," she writes, predicting that the street movement will continue "until those in power realise that they are a tiny and despised minority". Well, maybe.

But for the moment nobody knows when, or indeed how, Putin will be forced out. In his tearful victory speech he made out he had just foiled a western-backed coup. Nor is there agreement on what is the best metaphor to evoke the dramatic events underway in Moscow. (It's too cold to chatter about a "Russian Spring"; the "Snow Revolution" is better. But there's no revolution: the mood among the crowds is more playful and mocking than tear-down-the-barricades.)

And there are plenty of depressing reasons to think that Putin will boa-constrict his enemies. Gessen is an accomplished Russian-American journalist who lives in Moscow, and was 24 when Putin's beloved Soviet Union collapsed. A dogged researcher, she has written a brave book, demolishing the numerous myths and legends that have accumulated around her subject.

Grey, ordinary and seemingly incorruptible, Putin is the man without a face, on to whom others can project whatever they want. Boris Berezovsky, the country's former shadow ruler, picked Putin almost at random from a series of possible candidates to lead Russia, believing him to be malleable. Western leaders thought him at first to be a liberal reformer. And after the doddering Yeltsin, many ordinary Russians saw Putin as a saviour who would rescue the country from its foes.

But according to Gessen, Putin's real compulsions are quite primitive. He was born to a working-class family in Leningrad that only just survived the Nazi siege. This "miracle child" determined from an early age to join the KGB. In a fascinating chapter Gessen sheds light on what Putin was really up to in Dresden, where he worked in the late 1980s as an undercover spy.

In East Germany Putin was a "pen-pusher"; he added to the useless mountain of information produced by the KGB. But Gessen also tracks down a former member of the Red Army Faction who met Putin during this murky period. The radical West German presented Putin with gifts: a state-of-the-art Grundig radio, and a Blaupunkt stereo for his car. The Stasi spooks who received similar goods were grateful. But Putin never said thank-you  an early example of his "strikingly selfish" relationship with money.

Gessen digs up further examples of Putin's personal corruption. These date back to the immediate post-Soviet period when Putin  now home with only some cash and a second-hand washing machine to show for his East German adventures  worked as an assistant to the glamorous mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak. Sobchak is usually seen as a "democrat". But he hedged his bets when KGB hardliners tried to topple Gorbachev; he talked about democracy not because he believed in it but because he realised it was the key to the good life.

As deputy mayor for international relations, Putin masterminded a scheme whereby the city exported raw materials to Germany in return for badly needed food imports. The materials were delivered, but the food mysteriously never arrived. Money from the Germans  at least $92m  also disappeared. From this early stage, Gessen alleges, Putin was embezzling state funds, and by the end of the 90s he was no doubt "a millionaire".

Sobchak, meanwhile, abolished the city council and bugged the offices of leading St Petersburg journalists. He developed a fierce hatred for democratic politics. All this provided Putin with a model of authoritarian governance he would put to good use later. Once in the Kremlin, he wheeled out his own "closed system", Gessen argues, built on "total control"  particularly over the flow of money and information.

Much of the second half of Gessen's book covers familiar territory: the smashing up of Yukos, the country's largest private oil company; the jailing of its owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky; and the polonium murder of Alexander Litvinenko. By this point, most people had woken up to what Putin actually is  a "small and vengeful man", in Gessen's words, prone to furious vendettas, fond of helping himself to other people's property, and the "godfather of a mafia clan ruling the country".

Gessen remains optimistic that Putin will soon be receding into Russia's tsar-and-despot littered history. My sense is that he will be with us for some time yet.

 Luke Harding's Mafia State is published by Guardian Books.

The new consensus is that Vladimir Putin's regime is finished. And yet last week the former KGB spy was overwhelmingly "re-elected" as Russia's president. By May he will be back in the Kremlin for the third time  poor old Dmitry Medvedev booted into the job of prime minister, and soon to shuffle off the stage. By this summer Putin will be in Britain, his least favourite European country, sitting in the Olympics VIP box.

As Masha Gessen acknowledges in her luminous study of Russia's forever leader, getting rid of Putin will be tough. For sure, over the past three months, middle-class Russians have risen up against him in unprecedented numbers. The trigger was December's blatantly falsified Duma elections; on Monday thousands gathered again in Pushkin Square to protest against his election victory. Russia is now divided into three camps: those who passionately oppose Putin; those whose support him, seeing not much of an alternative; and those who don't care.

The problem for the demonstrators, as Gessen writes, is that there is no simple mechanism for forcing Putin out, no "obvious cause-and-effect relationship between street protests and the ultimate fall of the regime". Like the Soviet Union, Russia lacks independent institutions such as a supreme court that could conceivably broker a deal between the ruling camp and the swelling opposition. Over the past 12 years democracy in Russia got squashed.

And yet Gessen is an optimist. In her book's epilogue she describes the sudden snowballing of December's protests. She is convinced the regime is "doomed" and that "Putin's bubble will burst". It "may take months or it may take a few years," she writes, predicting that the street movement will continue "until those in power realise that they are a tiny and despised minority". Well, maybe.

But for the moment nobody knows when, or indeed how, Putin will be forced out. In his tearful victory speech he made out he had just foiled a western-backed coup. Nor is there agreement on what is the best metaphor to evoke the dramatic events underway in Moscow. (It's too cold to chatter about a "Russian Spring"; the "Snow Revolution" is better. But there's no revolution: the mood among the crowds is more playful and mocking than tear-down-the-barricades.)

And there are plenty of depressing reasons to think that Putin will boa-constrict his enemies. Gessen is an accomplished Russian-American journalist who lives in Moscow, and was 24 when Putin's beloved Soviet Union collapsed. A dogged researcher, she has written a brave book, demolishing the numerous myths and legends that have accumulated around her subject.

Grey, ordinary and seemingly incorruptible, Putin is the man without a face, on to whom others can project whatever they want. Boris Berezovsky, the country's former shadow ruler, picked Putin almost at random from a series of possible candidates to lead Russia, believing him to be malleable. Western leaders thought him at first to be a liberal reformer. And after the doddering Yeltsin, many ordinary Russians saw Putin as a saviour who would rescue the country from its foes.

But according to Gessen, Putin's real compulsions are quite primitive. He was born to a working-class family in Leningrad that only just survived the Nazi siege. This "miracle child" determined from an early age to join the KGB. In a fascinating chapter Gessen sheds light on what Putin was really up to in Dresden, where he worked in the late 1980s as an undercover spy.

In East Germany Putin was a "pen-pusher"; he added to the useless mountain of information produced by the KGB. But Gessen also tracks down a former member of the Red Army Faction who met Putin during this murky period. The radical West German presented Putin with gifts: a state-of-the-art Grundig radio, and a Blaupunkt stereo for his car. The Stasi spooks who received similar goods were grateful. But Putin never said thank-you  an early example of his "strikingly selfish" relationship with money.

Gessen digs up further examples of Putin's personal corruption. These date back to the immediate post-Soviet period when Putin  now home with only some cash and a second-hand washing machine to show for his East German adventures  worked as an assistant to the glamorous mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak. Sobchak is usually seen as a "democrat". But he hedged his bets when KGB hardliners tried to topple Gorbachev; he talked about democracy not because he believed in it but because he realised it was the key to the good life.

As deputy mayor for international relations, Putin masterminded a scheme whereby the city exported raw materials to Germany in return for badly needed food imports. The materials were delivered, but the food mysteriously never arrived. Money from the Germans  at least $92m  also disappeared. From this early stage, Gessen alleges, Putin was embezzling state funds, and by the end of the 90s he was no doubt "a millionaire".

Sobchak, meanwhile, abolished the city council and bugged the offices of leading St Petersburg journalists. He developed a fierce hatred for democratic politics. All this provided Putin with a model of authoritarian governance he would put to good use later. Once in the Kremlin, he wheeled out his own "closed system", Gessen argues, built on "total control"  particularly over the flow of money and information.

Much of the second half of Gessen's book covers familiar territory: the smashing up of Yukos, the country's largest private oil company; the jailing of its owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky; and the polonium murder of Alexander Litvinenko. By this point, most people had woken up to what Putin actually is  a "small and vengeful man", in Gessen's words, prone to furious vendettas, fond of helping himself to other people's property, and the "godfather of a mafia clan ruling the country".

Gessen remains optimistic that Putin will soon be receding into Russia's tsar-and-despot littered history. My sense is that he will be with us for some time yet.

 Luke Harding's Mafia State is published by Guardian Books.

In an article for the website slon.ru, Alexander Baunov recently recalled an old Soviet joke about a dissident arrested for handing out blank pieces of paper on a city square. Asked why there's nothing written on the leaflets, he says: "Why bother? Everyone knows everything."

In today's Russia, what is it, exactly, that everyone knows? When protesters denounce Vladimir Putin's puppet political party, United Russia, as "the party of crooks and thieves", who is it they're thinking of? For sure, they're addressing the mass of office holders and contractors feeding from the bribe-taking, deal-skimming, nepotistic money machine the Russian state has become. But who, in the party of crooks and thieves, is the chief thief?

The Russian protesters think they know. As a service to the rest of us, Masha Gessen makes their belief (which she shares) quite clear. It is one V Putin, prime minister of the Russian Federation, president of the country from the turn of the millennium to 2008, and likely winner of the presidential election on 4 March, which would give him six more years as head of state.

Russian government officials don't pretend the state isn't rotten; sometimes their cynical acceptance can be breathtaking. In an interview in El País in October, Viktor Cherkesov, one of the ex-KGB goons from St Petersburg whom Putin brought to power, described the attitude of the man who was, until recently, his close associate. "Putin doesn't pay much attention to theft, because he reckons everyone steals," he said.

But Gessen's clear, brave book makes a strong case that Putin is not merely turning a blind eye to embezzlement and skimming. He is, she asserts, an arch-practitioner. Gessen tracks down Marina Salye, one of the leaders of the democracy movement in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) in the last years of the Soviet Union. Salye was a witness to the still-mysterious rise of Putin, in less than a decade, from low-ranking KGB nonentity to Kremlin master; she now lives in self-imposed internal exile in a near-dead village in the far Russian boondocks, afraid she knows too much.

Salye investigated Putin's work as head of the committee for external relations in the office of the Leningrad mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, just before and after the 1991 coup that precipitated the USSR's collapse. In those days Moscow, lacking money to support the basic functions of society, handed out chits to local authorities that gave them the power to grant export licences. The idea was that licensed Russian firms would export raw materials  oil, nickel, diamonds  in exchange for food and medicine, or the money to buy them.

According to Salye, Putin signed off on a billion dollars' worth of export licences. Less than one-tenth of that, $92m, was documented; although Putin was a trained lawyer, the contracts were legally invalid, the exporting firms were hand-picked by him, the commissions they earned averaged more than a third of the value of the contracts, and none of the food arrived. As for the other $900m, it simply disappeared. Salye recommended Putin's dismissal and a criminal investigation, but nothing happened and, six years later, she fled to the mud and silence of the deep Russian countryside in the face of a threat so terrifying that she refuses to tell Gessen what it was.

As editor of the Russian magazine Snob, Gessen was one of the first to report the allegations of the businessman Sergei Kolesnikov that Putin had personal control of a nested set of Swiss companies, funded by millions of dollars creamed off charitable donations to buy medical equipment, which he was using to build an estate on the Black Sea coast. Pictures of the main building published recently show a neo-baroque palace replete with ornate gold mouldings and bad paintings of hunting scenes.

Wondering how this squares with contradictory testimony of moments where Putin flaunts his honesty, Gessen recalls the bizarre moment in 2005 when Putin tried on a 124-diamond Super Bowl ring belonging to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and then literally pocketed it. Perhaps, Gessen speculates, the Russian prime minister suffers not so much from kleptomania as pleonexia, "the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others He compensates for his compulsion by creating the identity of an honest and incorruptible civil servant."

Of the three characteristics of the Putin years  pilfering, pettiness and poison  it is the last which stands out for the west. The assassination body count in general is high, and can't be tied directly to Putin. When poison replaces bullets, the suspicion of state involvement becomes higher. The dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya was poisoned before she was shot dead (on Putin's birthday); the candidate Moscow wanted to lose Ukraine's 2004 election was poisoned with dioxin; Yuri Shchekochikhin, the liberal MP and investigative journalist, was poisoned and died; Gessen suggests that the death of Anatoly Sobchak may also have been poison.

With the case of a defector from the Russian secret service murdered on foreign soil, using an isotope of a radioactive metal called polonium only produced in tightly controlled conditions in Russian state factories, Gessen argues there is no room for doubt: Putin, she says, must have personally sanctioned the poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko.

All this, incidentally, underlines the courage of Masha Gessen, born in the Soviet Union, emigrating with her family to the US when she was 14, and now raising a family of her own in Moscow. But both her book and the tenor of reports from Russia over the past years suggest that if Putin's power is challenged it will not be because his enemies die mysterious deaths but because the scale of the plundering he has enabled becomes intolerable.

In English, "crooks and thieves" sound like synonyms. In Russian, there's a subtle opposition. The word for thief, vor, represents someone ruthless, strong, fair to those who don't cross him, personally generous, even patriotic, a muscular, wise, tattooed king of the underworld  a made man, the villain who's a diamond geezer. In the prison camps of the Stalin era, Putin's secret police predecessors worked with the criminal inmates, the community of thieves, to keep the political prisoners, the intellectuals, in check.

It's that image of the street-fighting, motherland-loving tough guy that Putin cultivates, and Gessen offers intriguing details of the scratching, biting, hair-tearing, undersized, brawling boy Putin, refusing to be bullied in the grubby back yards of Leningrad, nursing grievances. He remains proud of his youthful violence  he often picked fights in the street as a young KGB officer  and it's that yearning for noble vor-like toughness that unites his obsession with posing stripped to the waist in PR shots with his penchant for public displays of scatological menace  threatening to "wipe terrorists out in the toilet" or to have a French journalist castrated.

The other word, zhulik, usually translated as "crook", is quite different: the zhulik is mean, treacherous, a cheat, a sneaky hooligan, a small-time rip-off merchant of primitive appetites without loyalties or wisdom. Nobody, not even a vor proud of his vorness, wants to be called a zhulik. As Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Silvio Berlusconi and many others have found, the perceptive transition can be sudden and politically fatal. The man on the Volgograd trolleybus might support a tough, patriotic vor long after the liberals of Moscow had marched against him, but not a shifty, swindling zhulik only out for himself.

James Meek's new novel, The Heart Broke In, will be published this autumn.