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NY TIMES: Vladimir Putin

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Updated: Dec. 27, 2012

Vladimir V. Putin has been Russia’s leader since 2000, a strongman who has helped stabilize the country’s economy and politics while gradually deepening an authoritarian regime.

He was appointed prime minister in 1999 by the ailing president, Boris N. Yeltsin, and became president of Russia in 2000. Arising from obscurity, Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, proceeded to consolidate control over almost every aspect of society and business and marginalize what opposition still existed. He remained president until 2008, when he handed the office to his chosen successor, Dmitri A. Medvedev, while making himself prime minister — and keeping ultimate authority.

In March 2012, Mr. Putin was handily elected to another six-year term as president, but found himself facing an increasingly assertive opposition movement ignited by his announcement in 2011 that he planned to return to the presidency.

After being sworn in as president, Mr. Putin nominated Mr. Medvedev as the country’s prime minister.

Mr. Putin’s return as president ushered in a frostier relationship with the United States, freighted by an impasse over Syria. Russia has been the lifeline for President Bashar al-Assad throughout the conflict, providing weapons and diplomatic support to help keep his government afloat. In turn, Russia has castigated the United States for its support of opposition forces.

Russian officials have used a juggernaut of legislation and executive decisions to curtail United States influence and involvement in Russia, undoing major partnerships that began after the fall of the Soviet Union. The most significant step was a ban on American adoptions of Russian children, which Mr. Putin announced in late December that he would sign.

Pushing a New Ideology: Patriotism

Six months into his third presidential term, after a wave of unsettling street protests, Mr. Putin began a public search for an ideology — some idea powerful enough to consolidate the country around his rule.

One of the few clear strategies to emerge is an effort to mobilize conservative elements in society. Cossack militias are being revived, regional officials are scrambling to present “patriotic education” programs and Slavophile discussion clubs have opened in major cities under the slogan “Give us a national idea!”

Ideas are changing inside the ruling class, as well. The pro-Western, modernizing doctrine of Mr. Medvedevhas been replaced by talk about “post-democracy” and imperial nostalgia. Leading intellectuals are challenging the premise, driven into this country 20 years ago, that Russia should seek to emulate liberal Western institutions. “Western values” are spoken of with disdain.

Events of the last year have breathed life into this anti-Western argument. The debt crisis stripped the euro zone of its attraction as an economic model, and then as a political one. The Arab uprisings have left Russia and the United States divided by an intellectual chasm. The Russian Orthodox Church casts the West as unleashing dangerous turbulence on the world.

Background

Born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, on Oct. 7, 1952, Mr. Putin grew up in a communal apartment in a typically modest Soviet environment. He joined the K.G.B. and served as a counterintelligence officer in East Germany from 1985 to 1990. He retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

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He left the service in 1990 and joined the St. Petersburg reformists, led by the city’s mayor, Anatoly A. Sobchak, a leader of Russia’s early democratic movement.

It is a résumé that for better or worse many cite as the foundation of his ideas and personality.

Mr. Putin moved to Moscow in 1996, holding a series of posts in Mr. Yeltsin’s government, including head of the K.G.B.’s successor, the Federal Security Service. He became acting president on Jan. 1, 2000, and was formally elected that March. He battled with some wealthy business executives who controlled the economy, asserted power over disloyal regional governors and imposed state control over the media.

By the time he faced re-election in March 2004, it was hardly a race. He defeated a field of second-tier politicians with more than 70 percent of the vote. As prices for oil and natural gas continued to soar, Mr. Putin appeared to grow ever more confident, and his grip on power grew steadily firmer.

Mr. Putin is married to Lyudmila Putin, who keeps a low profile, and they have two grown daughters.

Grip on Political Power

In 2008, Mr. Putin handed the presidency over to his personally chosen successor, Mr. Medvedev, though he showed no sign of relinquishing control.

The September 2011 announcement brought to an end years of uncertainty, inside and outside Russia, about whether Mr. Putin intended to loosen his grip on power. Mr. Putin said the deal had been made years ago. As a result, Mr. Medvedev’s presidency, and the tension that accompanied its end, looked like an orchestrated political drama.

Mr. Medvedev had called for political and judicial reforms, and his rhetoric won him the backing of many in the West and in progressive circles. But he was widely viewed as a weak executive whose initiatives were subject to veto by Mr. Putin.

At the outset of the “tandem” government in 2008, Mr. Medvedev made modernization his political brand, while Mr. Putin stood for stability.

A far bigger question was whether Mr. Putin would tolerate pluralism. In his first presidency, he wrested control of television stations that criticized his policies, and he eliminated direct elections of governors and senators.

Demonstrations After the Parliamentary Elections

In December 2011, United Russia’s loss of 77 parliamentary seats confirmed, for anyone who doubted it, that Russian voters were cooling toward Mr. Putin’s government. At least one nationwide exit poll suggested that United Russia probably only won about 43 percent of the vote in the parliamentary elections.

This came as Mr. Putin began his three-month campaign to return to the presidency — a decision he revealed with the expectation that voters would be reassured, easing the path to re-election for both United Russia and himself.

Mr. Putin’s response to the parliamentary elections was to accuse the United States, particularly Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, of serving as instigators.

Even so, demonstrations sprang up, drawing tens of thousands of mainly middle-class protesters into the streets of Moscow.

Two prominent figures stepped forward to fill a void in the opposition leadership. Mikhail D. Prokhorov, a billionaire who owns the New Jersey Nets basketball franchise in the United States, said he would run for president, while Russia’s former finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin, said he would form a new political party to push for liberal reforms.

Even Mikhail Gorbachev weighed in with sharp criticism, calling on the Kremlin to invalidate the disputed results and schedule another vote.

Putin’s Victory Not in Doubt, But With Challenges

In March 2012, Mr. Putin won 64.7 percent of the vote, the Central Election Commission said, comfortably above the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff and extending his claim on power to 18 years, which would equal the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader for much of the cold war.

Though Mr. Putin’s victory never seemed in doubt, he faced a range of challenges to his legitimacy, including charges of fraud from international observers and a defiant opposition that vowed to keep him from serving his full six-year term. While he was still celebrating his victory, thousands of antigovernment protesters gathered in a city square to blast it as illegitimate, chanting “Russia without Putin,” and “Putin is a thief; we are the government!”

Facing a Russia That’s Changed

And while Mr. Putin easily claimed the presidency, the emerging threat to his rule slid beneath the surface. With his popularity waning, Mr. Putin will have to find other ways to guarantee his legitimacy.

According to Olga V. Kryshtanovskaya, a member of Mr. Putin’s United Russia party, Mr. Putin risks upheaval in the coming years if he does not find a way to become a more democratic leader. His reflexes, she said, are authoritarian; if he chooses a liberal path, it will be “with his intellect, and not with his heart, and under pressure, because he is afraid.”

Some say openly that Mr. Putin may not be able to hold on to power for the full six years. Among them is the television host Kseniya Sobchak, who has had a warm relationship with Mr. Putin since she was 11 and he worked for her father, then the mayor of St. Petersburg.

“My forecast is the following: The regime we have now cannot last six years,” said Ms. Sobchak, who has joined the protest movement. If Mr. Putin ignores complaints from the opposition, she said, “this movement will pick up force and eventually it may lead to quite tragic events, like revolution or a coup.”

“I want you to understand that I don’t want it to happen,” she added. “I just realize that this Titanic will hit an iceberg if it doesn’t change course.”

As Mr. Putin tries to understand what has changed, old instincts are at work. He reaches out to Russians who have drifted to the opposition but cannot help casting them as dumb instruments of a shadowy foe. He accepts the need for political competition but resists giving up his power. And he is surrounding himself with unquestioningly loyal aides, as if building a defensive wall against some advancing army.

A Chill in U.S. Relations

Mr. Putin’s return as president ushered in a frostier relationship with the United States, freighted by an impasse over Syria and complicated by fractious domestic politics in both countries. In June 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly accused Russia of supplying attack helicopters to the Syrian government. Russia, in turn, castigated the United States for its support of opposition forces battling President Bashar al-Assad and his military.

The souring relations came as Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin were preparing to meet for the first time as presidents on the sidelines of a summit meeting in Mexico. With Mr. Obama accused by Mitt Romney, his Republican presidential opponent, of going soft on Russia and Mr. Putin stoking anti-American sentiment in response to street protests in Moscow, neither leader is going to Mexico with arms open wide.

Adding to the tension have been moves in Congress to block visas and freeze assets of Russians implicated in human rights abuses. The bipartisan legislation, named for Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer whose corruption investigation led to his death in prison, passed a House committee in June and will be taken up by a Senate panel.

The Obama administration, seeking to avoid a rupture, opposes the bill on the grounds that the State Department has already banned visas for Russians implicated in Mr. Magnitsky’s death.

Instead, the administration is highlighting legislation introduced on June 12 to repeal decades-old trade restrictions on Russia known as Jackson-Vanik. The complication for Mr. Obama is that lawmakers like Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, want to link the Jackson-Vanik repeal to the Magnitsky legislation, angering Russian officials, who were shocked to learn that the White House apparently cannot block it.

Mr. Obama is focusing on enlisting Russia’s help on issues like stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons. The next round of talks between Iran and international powers takes place in Moscow, and the administration hopes that Russia’s role as host will prompt it to use its influence with Tehran to extract more concessions.

However, one of the biggest successes of the “reset” in relations has also made the United States more dependent on Russia. With Pakistan cutting off supply lines to Afghanistan, the so-called northern distribution network through Russia is the primary reinforcement route for America’s war on the Taliban.

Protesters Defy a Harsh New Law

On June 8, 2012, Mr. Putin signed into law a measure imposing heavy fines on people who organize or take part in unsanctioned demonstrations, giving the Russian authorities powerful leverage to clamp down on the large antigovernment street protests ignited by his decision that he intended to return to the presidency and re-energized by his inauguration in May.

Four days later, an estimated 10,000 protesters gathered in central Moscow in defiance of the Kremlin ban. As the demonstrators began to march, many said their resolve was deepened by the new law, which levies fines of $9,000 for individuals participating in rallies that cause harm to people or property — a devastating penalty in a country whose average yearly salary is around $8,500. For organizers of rallies, the penalty would be $18,000, and for groups and companies, $30,000.

Mr. Putin flexed substantial political muscle to have the law adopted, brushing aside any concerns about being seen as restricting free speech or assembly and ignoring reservations even among some of his allies and supporters. Supporters of the measure said it was needed to stem what they called a rising tide of radicalism.

Opposition groups and rights advocates reacted swiftly and angrily to the new law, which includes provisions that would bar individuals from acting as protest organizers if they were found to have previously violated the law in two cases and allow local authorities to compile a list of central locations where public protests are prohibited entirely. It also provides for a sentence up to 200 hours of mandatory work as an alternative to financial penalty on individuals.

Further Efforts to Squelch Dissent

In June and July, Mr. Putin signed two new laws, one stiffening the penalties for libel and the other giving the government new authority to shut down Web sites that publish content deemed harmful to children.

At the same time, Russian prosecutors charged the anticorruption activist Aleksei Navalny with embezzlement, a statute that carries a sentence of five to 10 years in prison.

The State Investigative Committee accused Mr. Navalny of organizing a scheme to steal timber from a state-owned company called KirovLes when he was acting as an unpaid adviser to the governor of the Kirov region, resulting in losses of just under $500,000 to the regional budget.

The charge marks a threshold for Mr. Putin, who for 12 years as paramount leader has refrained from criminal prosecutions of activist leaders, sidelining them with softer methods like short-term detentions and limited access to television. The charges suggest that the Kremlin’s eagerness to limit Mr. Navalny’s impact now outweighs the risk of a political backlash.

Mr. Navalny said he believed the case had been revived in the wake of a large demonstration on May 6, on the eve of Mr. Putin’s inauguration, that culminated in clashes between riot police and members of the crowd. He said the Kremlin was calculating that the protest movement was weakening and testing the waters with a series of actions against participants, like continuing arrests of participants in the May march.

Punk Rock Group’s Conviction Becomes a Free Speech Cause

In late July 2012, three young female members of a punk rock group, Pussy Riot, went on trial in Moscow, charged with inciting religious hatred for performing a crude anti-Putin song on the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

On August 17, they were convicted of hooliganism and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Human rights groups and Western governments, including the United States, immediately criticized the verdict as unjust and the sentence as unduly severe. They had faced a maximum sentence of seven years in prison. Prosecutors had urged a three-year sentence.

While Russia has seen an upwelling of dissent since disputed parliamentary elections in December 2011, the Pussy Riot case morphed into an international sensation, and focused intense attention on the efforts of Mr. Putin to clamp down on the opposition.

This was partly because of the sympathetic appearance of the defendants — two are mothers of young children — and partly because their group uses music to carry its message. But it also set them in a David-and-Goliath struggle against a formidable power structure: the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church.

When their trial opened, the women apologized, saying they had never intended to offend the Orthodox church but rather sought to make a political statement against Mr. Putin and against the church patriarch, Kirill I, for supporting Mr. Putin’s campaign for a third term as president.

But the judge’s decision said that the political comments were spliced into the video later, and that the action in the church was therefore motivated by religious hatred. The defendants, Ms. Tolokonnikova, 23, Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, and Maria Alyokhina, 24, smiled to each other as the sentences were announced and rolled their eyes.

Outside the courthouse, supporters of the group chanted “Free Pussy Riot!” and clashed with the riot police. Dozens were arrested, including the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who is active in the Russian political opposition.

A Presidency Rich in Perks

Mr. Putin is rumored to be among the world’s wealthiest men, with an oil-fed fortune worth tens of billions of dollars. He denies that, vehemently, but a report published in August 2012 suggests that the dispute may be beside the point.

In the report, sarcastically titled “The Life of a Galley Slave,” after the president’s own description of his tenure in office, Russian opposition leaders describe what they call an extraordinary expansion of presidential perks during the 12 years since the start of Mr. Putin’s first term as president — palaces, a fleet of jets and droves of luxury cars.

Among the 20 residences available to the Russian president are Constantine Palace, a Czarist-era estate on the Gulf of Finland restored at the cost of tens of millions of dollars, a ski lodge in the Caucasus Mountains and a Gothic revival palace in the Moscow region. The president also has at his disposal 15 helicopters, 4 spacious yachts and 43 aircraft, including the main presidential jet, an Ilyushin whose interior is furnished with gold inlay by artisans from the city of Sergiyev Posad, an Airbus and a Dassault Falcon. The 43 aircraft alone are worth an estimated $1 billion, the report says.

The authors are Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister who has been jailed a number of times on various pretexts, and Leonid Martynyuk, a member of the Solidarity movement.

In response to a written query, the Kremlin’s press office said Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, was on vacation and unable to respond to the substance of the report. In a response reported by Kommersant, however, Mr. Peskov said the residences, aircraft and cars were government property used lawfully by the president.

Hitting the ‘Clear’ Button on the Medvedev Era

Less than five months after Mr. Putin assumed the presidency, it seemed there was no decree of Mr. Medvedev’s too small to be overturned.

Right away, Mr. Putin reversed his predecessor’s decision to decriminalize slander. He raised the retirement age for top officials to 70, foiling Mr. Medvedev’s attempt to “rejuvenate” Russia’s government by imposing an age limit of 60, or 65 in special cases.

And in September, lawmakers began the process of revisiting yet another modest change from Mr. Medvedev’s constrained presidency: his decision in 2011 to end the practice of changing the time twice a year, moving Russia permanently to summer time. The bill’s sponsor did not mince words, saying Mr. Medvedev’s decision was “absolutely unacceptable for a huge part of” Russia.

Back in the days of the Soviet Union, journalists could tell a political figure had fallen out of favor by deciphering a sort of bureaucratic code: an article in Pravda would appear, pointing at “drawbacks” in his rule, or his spot on the Red Square receiving line would drift toward the back. If it got really bad, he would be airbrushed out of group photographs.

While it has not reached that point for Mr. Medvedev, there has been a pointed departure from the course he set. The words “reset” or “modernization” are seldom mentioned, privatization of state-owned companies is in doubt and the direct gubernatorial elections Mr. Medvedev reinstated as a parting gesture have been weakened by the insertion of a Kremlin-controlled screening process for the candidates.

It is too early to write off Mr. Medvedev, who recently turned 47. He is now prime minister and remains the leader of the governing United Russia party and the second-most-important politician in the country. In 2011, he demonstrated his loyalty to Mr. Putin by walking away from a second term, and Mr. Putin is known to reward loyalty.

Still, there were clear signs that Mr. Medvedev was being cut down to size, starting on the fourth anniversary of the August 2008 war with Georgia. That event had lifted his popularity greatly, and each anniversary he reminisced on television about the tough, solitary decision he made to send the army into Georgia while Mr. Putin was away in Beijing.

The 2012 retrospectives were driven by the appearance of an anonymous documentary film in which retired generals excoriated Mr. Medvedev as timorous and cowardly. Mr. Putin, asked about the video, responded by turning Mr. Medvedev’s narrative upside down, telling journalists that he had personally approved plans for the assault in advance, and that during the crisis he spoke repeatedly by phone to Mr. Medvedev and the Defense Ministry.

Alexander Rahr, a Russia scholar and author of a biography of Mr. Putin, said hard-liners around Mr. Putin blamed Mr. Medvedev for the burst of dissent that has shaken the Kremlin. According to this critique, Mr. Medvedev’s presidency ended the “climate of fear” created during Mr. Putin’s second presidential term.

Dismissing Russia’s Defense Minister

In early November 2012, Mr. Putin fired Russia’s defense minister, Anatoly E. Serdyukov, after the police raided the offices and an apartment of a real estate company involved in the privatization of valuable ministry land near Moscow.

The firing of Mr. Serdyukov, a longtime Putin ally, was one of the highest-level dismissals connected to a corruption case in recent memory in Russia. It was also a departure for Mr. Putin, a leader who has been reluctant to dismiss members of his inner circle. Mr. Putin announced the decision to fire Mr. Serdyukov in a meeting with another longtime political ally, Sergei K. Shoigu, the former minister of emergency situations, whom he appointed the new defense minister.

In the past, officials within the tight coterie of ministers and state company managers who have been close to Mr. Putin for years have typically circulated between jobs rather than been summarily fired.

Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, said the firing was necessary to allow the police to continue their investigation of wrongdoing within the ministry, which would not be possible if Mr. Serdyukov remained. Mr. Serdyukov has not been charged with a crime.

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