Putin Rises to Power in Russia
Vladimir Putin was an unknown official in January 1999 and acting president of Russia by the end of it. He had been a KGB officer in Dresden, had worked for the reformist mayor of St Petersburg, and had come to Moscow in 1996 into the presidential administration; Yeltsin made him head of the FSB in 1998 and prime minister in August 1999, the fifth in seventeen months. Nobody expected him to last either. What changed within weeks was Chechnya. Apartment blocks were bombed in Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing some 300 people; the attacks were attributed to Chechen terrorists, and a fourth device found in Ryazan was said by the FSB to have been a training exercise — an episode that has never been satisfactorily explained and that critics have raised ever since. Putin ordered the second Chechen war, promised to pursue terrorists wherever they were found in language that was deliberately coarse, and his approval rating went from single figures to over seventy per cent in three months. Yeltsin resigned on 31 December 1999 and handed him the presidency, with a decree granting the outgoing president immunity signed the same day. He won the election in March 2000. What followed was the restoration of central control over the regions, the media and the oil companies, and a presidency that has now lasted longer than Brezhnev's. The transfer itself was the first in Russian history in which a leader handed power to a chosen successor while alive and at liberty. Every previous one had involved death, a coup or a collapse, and the mechanism has not been used since.
- Year: 1999 CE
- Category: Political
