Word: putin
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...traditionally a presidential attribute. Yet Russians woke up to their New Year?s day hangovers to find themselves ruled by a man who has never given a press conference and whose official biography is only eight lines long. Even those who have probed the background of acting President Vladimir Putin have turned up little about his days in the KGB, his attitude to political and economic reform in Russia and his relationship with the country?s shadowy financial oligarchy...
These things we do know about Putin: He's 47, married, joined the KGB?s foreign intelligence directorate after graduating college in 1975, and - officially, at least - spent most of his KGB career stationed in East Germany monitoring political attitudes there. He returned to Leningrad in 1989, where he took up a position at the State University and developed a close relationship with key reformist figure Anatoly Shobchak, who in 1991 became the city?s mayor and appointed Putin to various key administrative posts. Having proved himself a capable manager in St. Petersburg (Leningrad?s original name, restored after...
Soon after assuming his new office, Putin flew unexpectedly to the Chechen town of Gudermes, where he awarded hunting knives to troops who had distinguished themselves in the fighting. Meanwhile, as word of the resignation spread across Moscow, the Russian stock market jumped about 20%; politicians paid their predictable tributes, and ordinary citizens responded largely with indifference. Gorbachev, who is spending the New Year's holiday in Paris with his children and grandchildren, told the French press agency that Yeltsin should have resigned earlier. Human-rights activist Elena Bonner--Yeltsin nominated her husband Andrei Sakharov as TIME's Person...
...Yeltsin's designated successor, Vladimir Putin, must be the custodian of Russia's democracy while running for its presidency in March. If Russia is successful in passing power from its first democratically elected President to its second, then the country's direction will be in the hands of a new elected President and Duma, as well as the thousands of elected officials who now run local governments. Multiple parties vie for power through the ballot box. There are some 65,000 nongovernmental organizations and approximately 900,000 private businesses where there were none a decade ago. A pluralist political system...
...better than expected, the parties worked best in the locations that were able to provide a backdrop of history: Greece's Acropolis, Egypt's Pyramids, the Vatican, London, Versailles and Moscow's Red Square, which partied just hours after Boris Yeltsin handed a briefcase of nuclear codes to Vladimir Putin. Instead of the futurism that all these zeroes seem to command, the event was best celebrated by looking back, partially because futurism always comes off as incredibly stupid. So Seattle, Wash., a symbol for technology as well as troublemakers in sea-turtle costumes, canceled its main party...