Situating Putin

increase had his authentic voice: “New regional and local wars are being sparked before our very eyes. We see new areas of instability and deliberately managed chaos. There are attempts to provoke such conflicts in the immediate vicinity of the borders of Russia and our allies,” he said. “Under these circumstances, Russia cannot rely on diplomatic and economic methods alone

The 2011 parliamentary election, despite United Russia’s unprecedented poor showing, was widely seen as rigged in its favor. Putin’s abrupt decision, announced without much ceremony months before, that he would reassume the presidency for another six years, left a general impression that all talk of Medvedev’s supposed reformism had been pure sham. Then too there was the bad taste left by the second Khodorkovsky trial, which had a much sharper public impact than the first.

” Put somewhat benignly, “This is a market-compatible form of taking over strategic assets throughout the regions. The goal is to stop the faulty mechanisms of tax evasion. Pensions for civil servants throughout the regions should be paid out on time [after all].” Less benignly, “It works like a vacuum cleaner that sucks up the assets of companies into a structure which soon turns into a state corporation. Those assets are then passed on to the professional leaders. The measures applied are both voluntary and mandatory. People understand… .”

“Incomes in the public sector for government officials still do not correspond to the nature of the decisions that they have to make.” The

: One survey found that of 1,016 senior figures in the government, 26 percent came from the KGB and its successor agencies; of the very top people, 76 percent were ex-KGB. Siloviki in top positions have included Igor Sechin, chairman of Rosneft, the state oil company; Sergei Ivanov, deputy prime minister, and Viktor Ivanov, deputy chief of administration; and the heads of the state telecommunications group, railways, and pension fund.

The FSB alone came to number about two hundred thousand; expenditures on all the state security services grew from $4 to $25-26 billion, from the end of the 1990s to 2007.

By 2006-07, the number of public officials working for Putin had grown to about 1.5 or 1.6 million, as compared to six hundred thousand or seven hundred thousand working for Brezhnev or Gorbachev (and bear in mind that Putin’s government has been running a much smaller country

Putin’s instinctive and total loyalty to Sobchak—a man with whom he appears to have had little in common—and the efficiency with which he solved Sobchak’s legal problem, profoundly impressed Yeltsin. Soon, Yeltsin would make him head of the FSB, premier, and president.

” Putin’s style of government, an expert with the Carnegie Moscow Institute would tell the Financial Times eight years later, “emphasizes the paternalistic nature of the regime. It is a style of government in which the most important thing is the rapport between the top decision-maker and the people.”

In a canned television statement, quoted by Politkovskaya, Putin said: “Anyone who says ‘Russia for the Russians’ is an idiot or in trouble. Russia is a multinational country. What do they want, partition? The dismemberment of the country?” Primakov, despite having lost out to him politically, credited him in an early assessment with having reacted temperately to western snubs, such as his exclusion from a Middle East summit meeting in 2000.
In the interviews published as a book by the three Russian journalists in 2000—interviews with family members, friends, and professional associates as well as with Putin himself—Russia’s new leader made complex and not uninteresting impressions. He described his university education as having been in “the humanities” (rather than sciences or engineering), and his Soviet-era work as a KGB officer as “human relations