Boris Yeltsin predicted five months ago that the Russian people would soon get to know Prime Minister Vladimir Putin well. They would like Putin, Yeltsin said. They would like him so much that Putin would become Russia’s next president.
The political elite chuckled and shook its collective head. Yet Yeltsin had it right–mostly.
By resigning as president Friday, Yeltsin made Putin acting president. Putin is, indeed, extremely popular, the heavy favorite to be elected as Yeltsin’s successor this spring.
Yet the Russian people hardly know the man.
His tight-lipped style, his expressionless eyes, his prosecution of the war in Chechnya have given Putin a tough-guy image. But he has remained hard to read–not unusual for a former KGB spy.
Now Putin has begun to open up. Last week, the 47-year-old “bureaucrat,” as Putin calls himself, released a manifesto on the kind of Russia he would like to lead.
On Saturday he took his wife on a campaign-style trip to bolster the morale of troops fighting separatist rebels in Chechnya, awarding medals and telling the soldiers they were helping keep the Russian Federation together.
“I want you to know that Russia highly appreciates what you are doing,” Putin said to officers and soldiers in remarks broadcast live on TV from Gudermes, east of the Chechen capital of Grozny. The visit came as Russia launched a major air attack on the capital.
A former KGB agent in East Germany who became an administrator in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, Putin has tried to soften his image with appeals for Russia to help its poorest citizens. He tries to avoid rhetoric that might offend the West and speaks of developing Russia’s partnership with Europe and the United States. Most of all, Putin talks about stability.
“Putin is an unbelievable piece of luck for Russia,” said Leonid Ionin, a Moscow political analyst. “He is a professional who takes his responsibilities seriously. He knows how to complete his tasks. He knows how to make decisions.”
“There are many apprehensions about Putin,” Ionin said. “They say, `Well, this is KGB, this is a return to authoritarian rule.’ But I’m not so sure that a little bit of authoritarianism isn’t needed in Russia. Maybe Russia does need it.”
Putin is sometimes called the “gray cardinal,” a tag from his days in St. Petersburg, when in the early and mid-1990s he was a key aide to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.
Putin helped Sobchak institute free-market reforms and filled in for the mayor when he traveled and dealt with foreign governments and investors on behalf of the city.
“He is not a KGB man. He is my pupil,” Sobchak would say to critics of Putin’s KGB past.
Putin’s work in St. Petersburg caught Moscow’s eye, and he was brought to the capital by Anatoly Chubais. He joined Yeltsin’s administration, then rose in July 1998 to lead the Federal Security Bureau.
When Yeltsin turned to Putin in August, naming him his fifth prime minister since March 1998, Putin was a political nobody. Now he consistently tops voter opinion polls, and more than half of Russians say they would vote for him for president, compared with about 15 percent for his closest rival.
Perhaps more astounding, Russians consider Putin one of the most influential Russian political leaders of the century. In a recent poll, Putin outpaced Leonid Brezhnev, Yeltsin, Czar Nicholas II and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Putin’s climb and Yeltsin’s exit have dealt a serious blow to the chances of Yevgeny Primakov, Yuri Luzhkov and other candidates who over the last year seemed capable of challenging for the presidency. Some analysts believe that Primakov will pull out of the race. Luzhkov, who never formally declared his candidacy, is expected to beg off as well.
Yeltsin’s resignation six months before his term was to expire gives Putin the status of incumbency plus the sweeping power of the Kremlin. All the Kremlin’s money and media control can be thrown behind Putin as he tries to become only the second democratically elected president of the Russian Federation.
Andrei Piontkovsky, a Moscow political analyst, said Yeltsin resigned in large part to make it easier for Putin. According to Russia’s constitution, Yeltsin’s departure means presidential elections must be held before the end of March, rather than in June as originally scheduled.
There remains the Chechnya question. Even though the war might be going according to plan, as the Russian military insists, it remains unpredictable. The conflict still could go horribly awry.
“Putin has shortened the electoral campaign period down to three months from six months,” Piontkovsky said. “For three months they can keep up this story of success in Chechnya.
“Each week they can take another village in Chechnya and say that everything is going along fine,” Piontkovsky said. “But in six months it will become clear that we have gotten ourselves into a multiyear war.”
Russians have agreed with Putin’s view that the Chechen war is necessary to wipe out terrorism, to protect Russia’s national integrity and to restore order to the Caucasus region.
Perhaps more important, the military and the Kremlin are managing news of the war with uncharacteristic skill. With national television stations reporting only successes, the Chechen conflict has become a popular salve on Russia’s wounded pride.
All this points to a Putin victory, even if Chechnya in the long term remains as troubled as it was before the war. “Of course Putin will be elected, even in the first round,” Piontkovsky said.
Putin, meanwhile, is making his case for the job. In describing his vision of where the giant nuclear power is headed in the 21st Century, Putin draws much on Russia’s past. He calls for a paternalistic state, a hallmark of Russian civilization for centuries. He criticizes the radical economic reforms that have helped transform much of Russian society this decade but have left many in poverty.
He appeals to Russian patriotism. He hammers on the theme that Russia must find its own way to stability and prosperity. Enough of trying to “transplant to Russian soil abstract models and schemes derived from foreign textbooks.”
“Russia will not soon, if ever, become a second copy of the U.S. or, say, England, where liberal values have deep historical roots,” Putin wrote in his manifesto released last week.
“Among us the state, its institutions and structures have always played an exclusively important role in the life of the country and the people,” Putin wrote. “A strong state for Russians is not an anomaly, not something that must be fought against. On the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and main driving force of all change.”
The Putin document is by no means an ode to the Soviet era. Putin criticized the Communists for their political and economic sins. He also acknowledged that too strong an executive can threaten freedoms. “This is not a call for a totalitarian system,” he said.
But if any Russians or Western observers were hoping Putin would show himself as a liberal wrapped in a KGB leather coat, his manifesto will be disappointing .
“Russia has exhausted its limit of political, social and economic shocks,” he said. “We can count on a worthy future only if we manage to naturally combine the principles of market economy and democracy with Russia’s realities.”
Those realities are a nation overrun by corruption and, Putin said, threatened by terrorism and disorder. It is a nation in which people are not ready to rely on themselves, a nation in which communal ties take precedence, he said.
“The collective form of lifestyle has always dominated over individualism,” Putin said. “There is no point in speculating whether this tradition is good or bad. . . . It remains dominant for now.”
The document could provide the Unity political party with something it still lacks: a platform. The party was created just a few months ago, basically to support Putin and the Kremlin.
It came from nowhere to take second place in parliamentary elections, trailing only the Communist Party in the next Duma, as the lower house is known.
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RUSSIA’S LEADING PRESIDENTIAL CONTENDERS
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Vladimir Putin
Russia’s prime minister and acting president after Boris Yeltsin’s abrupt resignation Friday is the country’s most popular politician, with a strong edge over other presidential contenders. Putin, 47, a former KGB intelligence officer and Russian security chief, was appointed prime minister less than five months ago. Putin appeals to a populace longing for a strong leader capable of pulling the country out of its economic morass and uprooting widespread official corruption.
Yevgeny Primakov
Primakov, 70, a former prime minister, led the popularity ratings last summer but has seen his popularity falling steadily because of hostile coverage in government-controlled media. During his eight-month tenure, which ended with his ouster in May, Primakov concentrated on efforts to establish stronger state control over the economy and pledged to fight corruption. He is now lagging far behind Putin in opinion polls.
Yuri Luzhkov
The powerful Moscow mayor was once seen as a leading presidential hopeful but later dropped out of the race, saying he would support Primakov. While Luzhkov said Friday he would again consider running, he would find it hard to challenge Putin. The mayor is popular in Moscow because of a construction boom in recent years but has limited support in the provinces, where many people resent the capital’s relative prosperity.
Before Yeltsin
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) ceased to be in 1991 and was succeeded by the Russian Federation, of which Yeltsin was the first president.
KEY – USSR + Russian Federation
– Vladimir Lenin 1917-24
– Josef Stalin 1924-53
– Georgi M. Malenkov 1953-55
– Nikolai Bulganin 1955-58
– Nikita Khrushchev 1958-64
– Leonid Brezhnev 1964-82
– Yuri V. Andropov 1982-84
– Konstantin Chernenko 1984-85
– Mikhail Gorbachev 1985-91
+ Boris Yeltsin 1991-99
Source: AP, AP photos
Chicago Tribune.
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