Vladimir Putin's rise gets traced from a cramped St. Petersburg apartment to the Kremlin, using archival footage, news clips, and interviews with journalists, former officials, and Kremlin watchers who knew him at different stages of his career. The film follows his years as a KGB officer stationed in Dresden, his return to a collapsing Soviet Union, and his climb through St. Petersburg city politics under mayor Anatoly Sobchak, a relationship that gave him his first real foothold in power. From there it tracks his sudden elevation to the presidency, the wars in Chechnya, the dismantling of oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the consolidation of state control over media and business. Crimea's annexation and Russia's growing confrontation with the West close out the narrative. Rather than psychoanalyzing Putin directly, the film lets the pattern of events, alliances made and broken, rivals sidelined, make its case about how a mid-level intelligence officer became the country's dominant figure for two decades.