A small fragment from the summary "The man without a face"

Life difficulties, first aggressions and a desire to work for KGB.

Vladimir Putin was born on 7 October 1952. These were the years after World War II. He was born in Leningrad, which is now Saint Petersburg. The city looked terrible after World War II with its bombings, it was heavily damaged. You could see all of it reflected in people’s eyes and lives. These were the very first factors that caused Putin’s violent behavior in future.

As for his family: his mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, where he served in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. Early in World War II, he served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD. Later he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942. Vladimir was the youngest of three boys, his two elder brothers, Viktor and Albert, were born in the mid-1930s; Albert died within a few months of birth while Viktor succumbed to diphtheria during the siege of Leningrad in World War II. 

Their life was hard and challenging. Although they had a place to live in and it was a real luxury at those times, this place was a small room where Putin lived with his parents till he was 25.

Little Putin had a lot of aggression that he would implement in backyard fights and brawls. That is why he practiced Sambo, but it still didn’t keep him away from fighting so one day he got excluded from The Young Pioneers (the Communist youth organization).

As we have already mentioned Putin’s father had ties in NKVD, which was the state secret police, so he preserved factory job, which helped him to get extra money for the information he would give to NKVD.

That was one of the reasons Putin became interested in all the things connected with being a spy. So he reached KGB and asked them for a job, the answer was obviously no, as he had to have a degree or army experience in the first place. So Putin went to Leningrad University. 

You can read the whole summary "The man without a face"  here.