ABSTRACT
The rapid rise and staying power of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as the second president of the Russian Federation, followed after two terms by his transfer to the position of prime minister, surprised many observers. As Eugene Huskey observed at the start of his presidency (2001, 82), “Few leaders in modern times have risen to power more quickly or improbably than Vladimir Putin.… Putin moved from political obscurity to the presidency of a great nation in little over a year.” After a career in the Soviet state security agency, the KGB, including service in the German Democratic Republic, followed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, by administrative work in the office of the mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, Putin moved into the presidential administration in Moscow, was then appointed head of the FSB (successor to the KGB), and then nominated as prime minister by President Boris Yeltsin in August 1999.When Yeltsin announced his retirement on the eve of the new millennium, Prime Minister Putin became acting president, which placed him in prime position to win the presidential election on 26 March 2000; he duly did so and was inaugurated as President of the Russian Federation on 7 May 2000. Derided in the West as a low-grade intelligence officer and a tool of the security services, he possessed unsuspected qualities that subsequently allowed him to stamp a formidable mark on the emerging Russia (see Sakwa 2008, 15-17; Putin discusses his early years in Putin et al. 2000).
