Russian President Putin must leave office early next year. Yet his policies and his posture are those of a man building an empire, rather than merely a legacy. It's clear he intends to hang onto power. What does this mean for the EU, the United States, China and Southern Asia?
by Cecil E. Maranville
When Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held the famous 1986 summit in Reykjavik that began the end of the Cold War, a major in the Russian KGB named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was quietly going about recruiting spies in East Germany. He passionately believed in the Soviet Union, convinced that Communism could and should have modernized it.
But being a politician was the furthest thing from his mind. "[To be a politician] one had to be insincere and promise something which you cannot fulfill. So you either have to be a fool who does not understand what you are promising, or deliberately be lying" (Putin in 1998 interview, quoted by David Hoffman, "Putin's Career Rooted in Russia's KGB," Washington Post Foreign Service, Jan. 30, 2000, p. A1).
Putin was recruited for the KGB out of college. He spent 17 years as a mid-level agent in foreign intelligence, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He left the KGB in 1991 to work as an aide to the first post-Soviet elected mayor in St. Petersburg, a job he fulfilled with purposeful anonymity.
From St. Petersburg, he went to Moscow in 1996 to a series of jobs that propelled him with startling speed to the premiership and then, the presidency. His first job was on the Kremlin staff; then he was named head of the Federal Security Service (successor to the KGB). Boris Yeltsin appointed him prime minister in 1999, resigning shortly thereafter, making Putin acting president.
Putin was elected to his first full term as president in March 2000 and reelected in 2004. Initially, he appeared to continue putting Russia on the path toward becoming a Western-style democracy. But as the Russian economy recovered its muscle, he began steering the country back under powerful Kremlin control.
One illustration is the federalizing of regional governors. When a botched terrorist takeover of a school in Beslan in 2004 resulted in the death of over 350 people, 156 of them children, Putin declared it an attack on the entire country. Shortly thereafter, in the name of national security, he suspended the then decade-long practice of electing governors, declaring that the Kremlin would appoint them throughout the country.
