The Russia of President Vladimir Putin is both wearyingly familiar and appallingly unique. A corrupt pseudo-democracy run for personal enrichment by its leader and his cronies? Hardly enough to raise an eyebrow in our sadly flawed world. But one that also happens to be a nuclear-armed leviathan, which gave personal and economic freedom a whirl, but has been yanked back into authoritarianism – not so common.

In my novel, The Senility of Vladimir P, I have tried to convey some sense of the catastrophe that Putin has inflicted on Russia. Set in an isolated dacha outside Moscow, where the now senile ex-president wiles away his days in imaginary conversations, while the staff busily milks him for every last kopeck, it is a tragicomedy from which not even one honest man can emerge uncorrupted.

There are numerous factual books exploring the impact of Putin’s rise and rule over Russia. In the list below I have included a sample of those that I have found most revealing – but others could just as well have made the cut. I have included a couple of contemporary novels to pass the lens of fiction over the society that has evolved under the Russian leader.

Inevitably, the selection is idiosyncratic. Another confession: my linguistic limitations mean that the list is restricted to books that have appeared in English.

1. First Person by Vladimir Putin

Start with the man himself. This is an account of six interviews given by Putin to a trio of handpicked Russian journalists. The outstanding impression that emerges is of blankness – a moral vacuum at the core of Putin’s being. You understand that this isn’t incidental, but utterly integral to his personality, only when you realise that this book was commissioned and released to help Putin become known when he was first running for president. In other words, he wanted to present himself like this. The emptiness at his core is so profound that it can’t even see itself.

2. One Soldier’s War in Chechnya by Arkady Babchenko

If a measure of a society is the way it treats its children, then it is also, at least in part, the way it treats its soldiers. Written by an ex-soldier who fought in both the first Chechen war and Putin’s second Chechen campaign, it sketches a world of unrelieved brutality within the ranks of the Russian army, a vicious microcosm in which the officers, or “jackals”, relentlessly assault the expendable soldiers, or “vouchers” under their command. Here is a spotlight into one corner of the alienated, demoralised society on which Putin set to work.

3. Babylon by Victor Pelevin

Tatarsky, the hero of Pelevin’s novel, is a failed poet who finds himself earning unimaginable sums as a copywriter plagiarising western advertisements for Russian clients in post-Soviet Moscow – and sinking into a world of drugs, guns, gangsters, and more drugs. Reality becomes thinner and finally seems to tear away altogether. Although the hallucinogenic quality of some of the writing won’t be to everyone’s taste, Babylon captures the disorientation of a society cut free from its moorings in which old certainties have been replaced by naked opportunism and aggression.

4. The Man without a Face by Masha Gessen

One of many books tracing the rise and crimes of Putin, Gessen’s appeals for the interweaving of her personal story with Putin’s progressive domination of Russian society. In one unforgettable scene, Gessen, a journalist, is called in for a meeting by Putin, who is unaware that her excoriating critique of him has already been published abroad. Her account of the brief flowering of hope after the disputed parliamentary elections of December 2011 – followed by the inevitable crackdown – is particularly poignant.

A clear, brave book ’: Masha Gessen at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2014.

5. Mafia State by Luke Harding

Another journalist writing about Putin’s Russia from a distinctively personal standpoint, Harding was a British correspondent [for the Guardian] posted to Moscow during Putin’s second term in office. He soon became the subject of a campaign of harassment and intimidation by the FSB – the successor organisation to the KGB – culminating in his deportation from the country. Harding’s experiences at the hands of the Russian security services give a glimpse of the world in which the opponents of the Putin regime struggle to survive.

6. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev

Pomerantsev relocated from London to Moscow to work in television and ended up writing an account of the characters he met during his years in the Russian capital. We meet the provincial girls, or “cattle”, looking for their sugar daddy (or “Forbes”); the entrepreneur who found her business confiscated and herself in jail because she happened to be on the wrong side of an intra-Kremlin dispute; a gangster turned novelist; the super-rich on planes out of Putin’s Russia to London – and many others in between. A patchwork tapestry that leaves you shaking your head in disbelief.

7. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin

Sorokin’s dystopian satire is set in the Russia of 2028, which is now ruled by a tsar. Andrei Komiaga, the hero of the novel, is an Oprichnik, one of the tsar’s security operatives whose main role is state-sponsored terrorism against uncooperative elements of society. This blood-spattered novel of brutality and decadence pushes political satire to its limits but is a sharp reflection on the corruption and authoritarianism of Putin’s Russia.

8. Fragile Empire by Ben Judah

Journalist Ben Judah’s book is the fruit of extensive travels and interviews within Russia. Judah seeks to set the country that he finds on his journeys against the stated intentions of Putin at the time of his rise to power and the propaganda of the Putin regime in the years that have followed. The picture that emerges is of a society pervaded by corruption and instability, and divided between the urban elites of Moscow and St Petersburg and grim reality in the provinces.

9. Putin’s Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha

Published in the US but not in Britain – for fear of the UK’s tyrant-friendly libel laws – American academic Karen Dawisha’s book provides a dispassionate, extensively researched account of Putin’s early criminality and the descent of the Russian government into an engine of organised crime. A must-read for anyone asking if the Putin regime is really as corrupt as people say and who wants to see the balance of evidence for themselves.

10. The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith

Finally, a book that is not about Russia at all, but a classic work of political science that lays bare the reality of how political leaders acquire and retain power. The book goes a long way to explaining how a man like Putin came to power at a unique moment in Russian history – and why the only way he’ll be got rid of in the foreseeable future is if the Russian security establishment loses faith in his ability to feed their insatiable greed for graft.