"By 1996, Yeltsin, ill and isolated, faced a new election that he seemed likely to lose: his billionaire cronies, the Oligarchs, mobilized their fortunes to help him win reelection but even democracy was tainted. The next three years saw economic meltdown and Yeltsin’s personal decline as he sacked prime ministers with imperial whimsy and embarrassed his country with acts of drunken buffoonery. In 1999, he chose a young, ambitious and severe ex-KGB officer and cabinet minister named Vladimir Putin to be his successor, dramatically resigning the presidency. Putin proved more than equal to the task: he restored the power of the state and the prestige of Russia as a great power, crushed mafia corruption and broke the influence of the Oligarchs. At the same time he demonstrated his discipline and vigour by again attacking Chechnya with brutal and bloody competence, crushing the rebellion at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. Putin promoted his colleagues from the security services who dominated Russian government and business, diminished democracy and press freedom, ended the election of local governors and personified a new Russian form of authoritarian government that he called sovereign democracy. Putin utterly dominated Russia in a way Gorbachev and Yeltsin had never done, probably the dominant Russian leader of the early twenty-first century."