MOSCOW, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- Moscow bookstores can't keep up with sales of a journalist's book about the secret life of Russian President Vladimir Putin, news reports said Wednesday.
The irreverent "Tales of a Kremlin Digger" is by Yelena Trebugova, a journalist expelled from the presidential press pool in 2001, the London Telegraph said.
The book has upset the Kremlin and prompted more charges that censorship is increasing under Putin. Trebugova claims Putin has introduced a system by which all questions put to him have to be cleared with his press officials, whom she contemptuously calls "mutants."
The book also catalogues a series of slip-ups during Putin's election campaign in 2000.
He is said to have told a boy who was hospitalized after being run over by a car, "I suppose you won't be violating the traffic rules again!"
According to Trebugova, Putin's spin doctors stepped in to make sure the comment did not appear in print.
