Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. By Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy. Brookings Institution Press; 400 pages; $29.95 and £19.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance. By Alena Ledeneva. Cambridge University Press; 310 pages; $32.99 and £19.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. By Ben Judah. Yale University Press; 379 pages; $30 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

VLADIMIR PUTIN came to power on May 7th 2000 under the banner of economic reform, modernisation and anti- corruption. In a bow to Russian history he ordered that “The Gulag Archipelago”, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book about Stalin’s Soviet forced-labour camp system, be made a set text for Russian schoolchildren, a radical move as the book is both searing and unrelenting and had been banned in the Soviet era.

Now three very different new books illustrate how misguided such hope in Mr Putin’s modernisation turned out to be. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy both work for the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank. Mr Gaddy has been a prolific writer, first about the Soviet economy and now about the Russian one. In the 1990s he advised the Russian government on fiscal federalism. British-born Ms Hill oversaw Russia at America’s National Intelligence Council in Washington, DC.

The authors have met and talked with Mr Putin, and they respect him up to a point. Here is a man who rose from a mid-level, dead-end job, working for the KGB in East Germany, and reinvented himself as a reformist deputy to St Petersburg’s liberal mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. Moving to Moscow in the late 1990s, the efficient Mr Putin was quickly promoted until he was governing Russia, a burden that had nearly crushed his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

According to this intriguing book, Mr Putin’s success can be ascribed to a series of transformations in which he has posed, first as a he-man, then as a sportsman or military man, with appropriate costumes for each. When he is not posturing, Mr Putin uses his KGB training to cultivate those who might be of use to him. He likes to quote a remark once made to him by Henry Kissinger, whom he greatly admires: “All decent people started their careers in intelligence.”

Mr Putin’s chief ambition, the authors say, was to impose order and authority on Russia after the chaos of the Yeltsin years. Ms Hill and Mr Gaddy quote a manifesto that Mr Putin wrote and published in December 1999, just before he became president. In it he argued that, “For Russians, a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Quite the contrary, it is a source and guarantor of order.” Mr Putin issued an ultimatum to the oligarchs in 2000, ordering them to remember that their business was business, his was politics, and they should not presume to mix the two. The move was of critical importance and explains much of what has subsequently happened, including the furious exile of the late Boris Berezovsky.

Alena Ledeneva, a Russian-born sociologist at University College London, has a broader view about the relationship between petitioners and the petitioned. In her book, “Can Russia Modernise?”, she explains the difference between blat, low-level corruption in which the economy runs on an exchange of favours, and the full-blown sistema of the modern Kremlin.

In the 1990s biznes in the form of the oligarchs captured the state and dictated policy to Mr Yeltsin. By contrast, the first decade of this century witnessed the return of a more historic model of governance in which “the state captured business”. Mr Putin, Ms Ledeneva argues, does not really believe that Russia’s former state corporations belong to their new owners. Instead, he regards those who took control of the commanding heights of the Russian economy—its oil and gas resources mainly—as crooks who got lucky in the 1990s. Now they are mere managers-on-a-leash.

Ben Judah, a young freelance writer, paints a more journalistic—and more passionate—picture in “Fragile Empire”. He shuttles to and fro across Russia’s vast terrain, finding criminals, liars, fascists and crooked politicians, as well as the occasional saintly figure. Mr Judah meets so many drunks along the way that he comes to conclude that Russian men are drinking themselves and their country to death. Mr Judah believes that corruption has become so endemic that it is no longer just about theft, but about power. “The Russian economy is so distorted to the advantage of the [Putin] group that they cannot be accused of corruption—but of state capture.”

Ms Ledeneva, in her relentlessly careful way, itemises the tariffs of Russian corruption: $10m for a minister’s seat or $100,000 a month to officials as “the basis of good relations”. Her interviewees remind her that this is the system; “Once you’re in,” says one, “you can’t change it.”

Ms Hill and Mr Gaddy borrow a phrase from Alexei Navalny, a blogger and opposition leader, who said: “Putin’s system truly is ‘a party of swindlers and thieves’.” Several of the people arrested in recent demonstrations have been given jail sentences. Mr Navalny too faces jail; he is on trial on trumped-up embezzlement charges. Ms Ledeneva thinks the sistema she describes is incapable of reform without a “fundamental change in morals, social norms and individual incentives”. Mr Judah is in no doubt that Mr Putin is a dictator in the making. The answer to the old question, Kud a idyot Rossiia (“whither Russia?”), is down—and further down.