"In 1999 the ailing Yeltsin anointed a former Leningrad KGB boss, Vladimir Putin, as his successor. The contrast was total. Putin was the epitome of a tough, communist-era apparatchik. The ex-intelligence officer had no time for the niceties of democracy, but a keen sense of the need to restore Russian pride. He would issue pictures of himself hunting and bare-chested on horseback. His court of oligarchs made sure he secured as much overseas wealth as they had. Putin’s politics, endorsed at increasingly rigged elections, made no mention of civil rights or market economics. He was a populist and a nationalist, his pledge merely to restore Russia’s integrity and self-confidence. Opponents were bribed, imprisoned or killed. The west might have felt able to humour and torment Yeltsin. It now faced the pastiche tsar of a macho state. That Russia’s economy was debilitated was irrelevant. Dictatorship thrives on poverty."
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ConservativesPresidents of RussiaPeople from St. PetersburgEastern Orthodox ChristiansPrime Ministers of Russia
Original Language: English
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Sources
Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin (2018)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin
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Vladimir Putin
judoka, intelligence agent, spy
1952 · Soviet Union
373 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Vladimir Putin →
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