Vladimir Putin
From Metapedia
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (born October 7, 1952, in Leningrad, U.S.S.R., now Saint Petersburg, Russia) is a Russian politician who was the second President of the Russian Federation from 2000 to 2008 and is the current Prime Minister of Russia. He became acting President on December 31, 1999, succeeding Boris Yeltsin, and then won the 2000 presidential election. In 2004, he was re-elected for a second term lasting until May 7, 2008. The Russian Constitution does not allow serving more than two consecutive presidential terms. Putin is a chairman of United Russia, a party that has 70 percent of the seats in the State Duma, the lower house.
Putin was chosen by Yeltsin to succeed Sergei Stepashin as prime minister in August, 1999. Putin quickly became popular in Russia for his September 1999 Invasion of Chechnya in response to the War in Dagestan followed by the Russian apartment bombings. After parties aligned with Putin won solid support in the December 1999 parliamentary elections, Yeltsin resigned, and Putin became acting president. In the elections of March 2000, he bested ten other candidates to become Russia's president.
As president he was commonly credited in the media with having restored order to the country after the chaos of the Yeltsin years.[1][1][1] During his eight years in office, the economy bounced back from the crisis of the 1990s seeing Russia's GDP grow by 72 percent, poverty more than halve[1][1][1] and average monthly salaries increase from $80 to $640, or by 150% in real terms, according to Putin.[1][1] According to the Federal State Statistics Service, the middle class grew from 8 million to 55 million between 2000 – 2006.[1] During his presidency, some human rights activists, western opinion-makers and some of Russia's liberals expressed their concerns about the state of democracy, media freedom and human rights in Russia. This was seen by the Kremlin as a series of anti-Russian propaganda attacks orchestrated by western opponents and exiled oligarchs.[1] During his first term in office, he moved to curb the political ambitions of some of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs such as former Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky, who had "helped Mr Putin enter the family, and funded the party that formed Mr Putin's parliamentary base."[1][1] A new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy, such as Gennady Timchenko, Vladimir Yakunin, Yuriy Kovalchuk, Sergey Chemezov, with close personal ties to Putin, emerged.[1][1][1][1][1][1] Corruption grew by the magnitude of several times and assumed "systemic and institutionalised" form, according to a report by Boris Nemtsov as well as other sources.[1][1][1][1][1][1]
Following the success of his preferred successor, Dmitry Medvedev, in the 2008 presidential elections, he was then nominated by the latter to be Russia's Prime Minister and took the post on May 8, 2008.
