How Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia

When Vladimir Putin took over as acting president of Russia in early 2000, the former spy was a mystery to many. History is about how the surprise leader survived a difficult childhood to rise to power in the Kremlin.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin made the shocking announcement of his resignation on December 31, 1999. tell television viewers that Russia needs “new politicians, new faces, new intelligent, strong and energetic people”. Given widespread corruption and enormous political and social problems, Yeltsin’s presidency had become increasingly unpopular and unpredictable. Although he played a key role in the overthrow of the Soviet Union in 1991, his time in office was a traumatic time for Russia as it transformed from a communist state economy to a free market economy.

At midnight, Yeltsin’s heir to the throne, Vladimir Putin, gave his first televised address incumbent president. “There will be no power vacuum,” he promised. There was also a warning. “Any attempt to exceed the limits of the law and the Russian constitution will be resolutely suppressed,” he said. Slim, fit and sober, Putin proved popular in a country used to it erratic behavior from Yeltsin, who was like that damp and unhealthy that sometimes it was a news story when he barely made it to the office.

When Putin became prime minister in August 1999, he was a former KGB man brought back from relative obscurity. When he took over as acting president at the end of the year, he had gained popularity in the breakaway republic for his hard line during the war Chechnya. When elections took place in March 2000, Putin was there confirmed as president after receiving almost 53% of the vote in the first round. Polls suggested that most Russians wanted economic stability above all else. Putin’s basic message to voters was that he would make Russia strong again.

The new leader of the largest country in the world had risen to the top without leaving any trace. It was clear that the 47-year-old was a man who liked to look and talk tough – a judo black belt who made statements such as calling lawbreakers “rats that should be squashed.” But what was he really like?

Putin grew up in St Petersburgthen known as Leningrad. Founded by Tsar Peter the Great, it was a city full of Western influences, but also echoes of Russia’s great imperial past. The BBC spoke to Putin’s elders in 2001 Judo trainerwho said he was a star student who had the potential to make the Olympic team. Anatoly Rakhlin explained that Putin was always determined to win, if not by brute force, then by outsmarting his opponents: “He could throw in both directions, left and right, with equal skill. And his opponents, expecting a throw from the right, would do it.” “I didn’t see the left one coming, so it was pretty difficult for his opponents to beat him because he was always kind of outsmarting them.”

Putin was born in 1952, seven years after the end of World War II, after the siege of Leningrad in which his older brother died and which his parents barely survived. He grew up in a crowded shared apartment with a shared kitchen and bathroom, infested with rats and cockroaches. In his autobiography, he recalled having to fight rats on his stairs as a boy. He wrote: “Once I spotted a huge rat and chased it down the hallway until I drove it into a corner. Suddenly she struck and threw herself at me. She jumped down the landing and down the stairs.”

The tone of his famous Anecdote about a cornered rat becomes more or less aggressive depending on the audience, according to Prof. Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev. Speaking of 2023 BBC Putin podcastShe said: “He tells it all the time to show his humble upbringing and how far he has come and what kind of enemies he has had to endure in his life; how he began to endure the lowest form of the creature, and then rose to face all sorts of enemies, at home and abroad.

Childhood friend Maria Osorina, a psychologist, told the BBC in 2003 that it was “survival of the fittest” in the harsh environment in which they grew up. “He was short, thin and quite weak because he was born to such old parents, and so it was very important for him to be strong so he wouldn’t get beaten up,” she said.

She said the family had strong values ​​such as duty, patriotism and loyalty. “His parents loved him very much. He was the center of their world, the son they longed for. But their character was very reserved in nature – they didn’t really show their emotions. The father was very cold on the outside, and so was his mother. They wouldn’t even think about kissing their son in public – it would never have occurred to them.

Friends and acquaintances remembered the young Putin as a clever but independent person. He was “never the center of attention,” his schoolmate Sergei Kudrov told the BBC in 2001. “He preferred to influence events from afar, a sort of ‘grey cardinal’, as the saying goes. Completely different from Boris Yeltsin. “Remember how.” He climbed onto a tank and motioned for everyone to follow him? You just couldn’t imagine that Putin would do that. He’s an introvert – a man of actions, not words.”

He had a romantic desire to become a KGB agent and serve his country incognito – perhaps the perfect job for someone who likes to avoid the spotlight. According to his own statements, his inspiration was the 1968 Soviet spy film. The shield and the sword. It was about a Russian double agent in wartime Germany who stole documents to sabotage Nazi operations while posing as a chauffeur.

Throughout his university and KGB training, Putin never deviated from his childhood dream of becoming an intelligence officer. When he was 16, he walked into the local KGB headquarters and asked for a job. They told him to study law and then wait. Six years later he was recruited by the agency. For more than 16 years, Putin led the double life of a secret service agent. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was him Service in East Germany. He returned to a Russia in which all old certainties were collapsing.

In 1991, Putin became deputy to the new mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak. When Sobchak was voted out, the Kremlin recruited Putin. As the Yeltsin government teetered toward its end, Putin quietly rose through the ranks until he was named prime minister in 1999. The man from nowhere was suddenly everywhere at once.

For Putin’s old friend Maria Osorina, his leadership in 2003 was a breath of fresh air: “I was born in 1950, and since that time we have never had a leader who was pleasant to look at. I didn’t like any of them.” “Putin is the first person to rule Russia since the revolution that I really like. He is the first normal person, the first one we are not ashamed of.”

Putin has been in power for a quarter of a century, longer than any other Kremlin leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Now that he is 72 years old and in his fifth term as president, wrote the BBC’s Paul Kirby Earlier this year, “any semblance of resistance to his rule has disappeared and there is little to stop him staying in office until 2036 if he wants.”

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