Word: chechnya
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...mixture of derision and dismay, rating his popularity at a measly 2%. Most considered Yeltsin's blessing the kiss of death for any would-be President. But Putin coolly exploited the greatest opportunity he was ever handed. He says he expected his decision to go to war in Chechnya, made virtually that August day, would ruin his political career. But his cold-blooded prosecution of the war to stamp out Chechen "terrorism" and bring the recalcitrant republic back under Russian control struck a chord among the country's dispirited electorate...
...Chechnya had come to symbolize all that troubled the nation--all the failures and humiliations, real and imagined, of the past decade. "A leader must feel the pain of the country," says Sergei Stepashin, the Prime Minister dismissed in Putin's favor when he looked too soft to satisfy Yeltsin's demands. "Putin knew we had no alternative. Otherwise we'd have lost all authority in the country." Suddenly the gray-suited bureaucrat wore tough-guy garb, displaying the iron hand that Russians craved. When Putin coarsely proclaimed that his army would "wipe the terrorists out wherever we find them...
...Acting President since New Year's Eve, when Yeltsin's resignation effectively handed him election victory, Putin has not quailed or faltered in pursuit of victory in Chechnya. When Western officials complain about human-rights abuses, he politely but firmly explains that they do not understand the problem. "Chechnya," says Robert Service, a lecturer at Oxford University and author of an upcoming biography of Lenin, "is the military tip of a general political campaign against the license enjoyed by non-Russian republics to produce a firmly unified political system again...
...take Putin at face value--his best face. Albright called him "a leading reformer" even before she met him. British Prime Minister Tony Blair went to the opera with Putin in St. Petersburg earlier this month and, in order to strike a friendly note, soft-pedaled Western concerns over Chechnya. Even though nothing substantive was accomplished, London declared that Putin was "a man we can do business with," an echo of what Margaret Thatcher famously said about Mikhail Gorbachev after she met the then rising Soviet star...
...photographed in the refugee camps. In 1994 he worked in Rwanda and Zaire during the unsupervised ferocities of the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis and the regional chaos it set in motion, including what may have been the largest refugee exodus in history. Two years later he went to Chechnya when Russia made its first ham-fisted attempt to suppress the breakaway republic that it has recently bombed into submission again. He went to Bosnia and Kosovo, where words have failed over and again to convey the sheer sadism of what neighbor did to neighbor...