What does Putin do next? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take a deeper look at the future for the Russian leader.

• Putin is getting more desperate. It won’t end well
• Furious Putin is trapped in a gilded cage. Only death will free him
• Putin and Xi’s bromance could fall apart – and it’s all down to Trump
• I’m an Eastern European – I know what Putin plans for my country

Vladimir Putin grew up in an environment that was particularly brutal and menacing, even for post-Second World War Russia.

While there is a great deal we don’t know about the first 10 years of his life, what we do know suggests that during his adolescent years he grew up in a very stark environment.

The courtyard of the apartment building in St Petersburg in which he grew up was a centre of daily life. This had the potential to be a terrifying place, especially for a boy short in stature.

As his biographers, such as Philip Short, have documented, many denizens of this courtyard went on to pursue criminal careers of one kind or another in their later lives. It’s not hard to imagine that their younger selves must have been pervaded by the despair occasioned by growing up in the impoverished environment of post-Second World War Russia.

In Short’s account, abundant alcohol and drugs appear to have been relied upon by the others in the courtyard. Most likely they were used to ease the desperation which informed their existence, but one can imagine that in many ways it only compounded the precariousness and threat which defined their day-to-day encounters with one another.

The reality of being physically small would surely have impressed itself upon Putin,........

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