In their idle hours, Russia's leaders have always devoted themselves to literature, and Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that he too is eager to bequeath the nation a permanent written legacy - one that will survive when he leaves the fickle world of politics.
While Vladimir Lenin was fond of dashing off works on dialectical materialism, Josef Stalin wrote historical analyses of the Communist party, Leonid Brezhnev tackled the second world war and Mikhail Gorbachev mused on the meaning of perestroika (rebuilding), Mr Putin has chosen a different path.
Eschewing abstract political theory, Russia's president has published a more practical tome: Judo: History, Theory, Practice.
Readers searching for a new understanding of Mr Putin's governmental initiatives will be disappointed. For although Moscow's Kremlin watchers have scoured the text of the book in search of secret combat tactics that may have been used by Mr Putin against political enemies such as the country's regional governors or the media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, they have done so with little success.
Even the section headed Why Does an Opponent Fall? fails to provide any insight into how Mr Putin saw off his two main presidential rivals earlier this year. The answer, like the rest of the text, is disappointingly banal: "A person falls if he loses his balance."
The book ends with a passionate call to arms. "Put on your kimono," the president (a pan-USSR judo finalist) writes. "Fasten your belt. The mysterious world of judo awaits you." It is a call that has already elicited a response. The general secretary of Russia's judo federation, Vladimir Lobintsev, said the organisation had noted a sudden rise in the number of judo enthusiasts since Mr Putin came to power.
