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Background On Russian President Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин (help·info)) (born October 7, 1952) is the current President of Russia. He became Acting President of Russia on December 31, 1999, succeeding Boris Yeltsin, and was sworn in as President following the elections on May 7, 2000. In 2004, he was re-elected for a second term, which expires in 2008. The current Constitution of Russia imposes consecutive term limits that prevent Putin from running for reelection again in 2008.
Early years and KGB career
Putin was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) on October 7, 1952.[2] His biography, От Первого Лица[3] (Romanization: Ot Pervogo Litsa, translation: From the first person), translated into English in 2000 and paid for by his election campaign, speaks of humble beginnings, including early years in a communal apartment. According to his biography, in his youth he was eager to emulate the intelligence officer characters played on the Soviet screen by actors such as Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Georgiy Zhzhonov.
His mother, Maria Ivanovna Putina, was a factory worker and his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, was conscripted into the Soviet Navy, where he served in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. His father subsequently served with the NKVD in a sabotage group [2] during the Second World War. Two elder brothers were born in the mid-1930s; one died within a few months of birth; the second succumbed to diphtheria during the siege of Leningrad. His paternal grandfather, Spiridon Putin, had been Vladimir Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s personal cook.[4]
Putin graduated from the International Branch of the Law Department of the Leningrad State University in 1975 and was recruited into the KGB. In the University he also became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which he remained until the ban on it imposed in August 1991.
He worked in the Leningrad and Leningrad region Directorate of the KGB, where he got acquainted with Sergei Ivanov. [5]
In 1976 he completed KGB retraining courses. In 1978 he entered other foreign intelligence in Moscow. After completing the training he served in the First Department of the Leningrad Directorate (foreign intelligence) until 1983. In 1983-1984 he studied at the KGB High School in Moscow. In 1984 Putin was promoted to Major.
From 1985 to 1990 the KGB stationed Putin in Dresden, East Germany,[6] in what he regards as a minor position. Following the collapse of the East German regime, Putin was recalled to the Soviet Union and returned to Leningrad, where in June 1990 he assumed a position with the International Affairs section of Leningrad State University, reporting to Vice-Rector Yuriy Molchanov. In his new position, Putin got reacquainted with Anatoly Sobchak (1937-2000), then Mayor of Leningrad. Sobchak served as an Assistant Professor during Putin’s university years and was one of Putin’s lecturers. Putin formally resigned from the state security services on August 20, 1991, during the KGB-supported abortive putsch against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Early political and business career
In May 1990 Putin was appointed Mayor Sobchak’s advisor on international affairs. On June 28, 1991, he was appointed head of the Committee for External Relations of the St. Petersburg Mayor’s Office, with responsibility for promoting international relations and foreign investments. The Committee was also used to register business ventures in St. Petersburg.[7] During the time Putin led this Committee, Alexei Miller the current CEO of Gazprom, also served on it from (December 15, 1991 – 1996) and was a Deputy Head of the Committee from 1992 – 1996. [8]. Less than one year after taking control of the committee, Putin was investigated by a commission of the city legislative council. Commission deputies Marina Salye and Yury Gladkov concluded that Putin understated prices and issued licenses permitting the export of non-ferrous metals valued at a total of $93 million in exchange for food aid from abroad that never came to the city.[9][10][11][12][13][14] The commission recommended Putin be fired, but there were no immediate consequences. Putin remained Head of the Committee for External Relations until 1996. While heading the Committee for External Relations, from 1992 to March 2000 Putin was also on the advisory board of the German real estate holding St. Petersburg Immobilien und Beteiligungs AG (SPAG) which has been investigated by German prosecutors for money laundering.[15][16][17][18][19][20][7]
From 1994 to 1997, Putin was appointed to additional positions in the St. Petersburg political arena. In March 1994 he became First Deputy Head of the Administration of the city of Saint Petersburg. In 1995 (through June 1997) Putin led the St. Petersburg branch of the pro-government Our Home Is Russia political party.[21][14] According to Clifford G Gaddy, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institute, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Putin’s work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, written by US professors William King and David Cleland and translated into Russian by a KGB-related institute in the early 1990s.[22]
On May 25, 1998 Vladimir Putin was appointed First Deputy Chief of Presidential Staff for regions, (replacing Viktoriya Mitina), and on July 15 of the same year – the Head of the Commission for the preparation of agreements on the delimitation of power of regions and the federal center attached to the President (replacing Sergey Shakhray). After Putin’s appointment, the commission completed no such agreements, although during Shakhray’s term as the Head of the Commission there were 46 agreements signed.[23]
On July 25, 1998 Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin Head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on October 1, 1998 and its Head on March 29, 1999. In April 1999, FSB Chief Vladimir Putin and Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin held a televised press conference in which they discussed a video that had aired nationwide March 17 on the state-controlled Russia TV channel which showed a naked man very similar to the Prosecutor General of Russia, Yury Skuratov, in bed with two young women. Putin claimed that expert FSB analysis proved the man on the tape to be Skuratov and that the orgy had been paid for by persons investigated for criminal offences.[24][25] Skuratov had been adversarial toward President Yeltsin and had been aggressively investigating government corruption.
On June 15, 2000, The Times reported that Spanish police discovered that Putin had secretly visited a villa in Spain belonging to the oligarch Boris Berezovsky on up to five different occasions in 1999.[26]
Family and personal life
On July 28, 1983 Putin married Lyudmila Shkrebneva, at that time an undergraduate student of the Spanish branch of the Philology Department of the Leningrad State University and a former airline stewardess, who had been born in Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg) on January 6, 1958. They have two daughters, Maria Putina (born 1985) and Yekaterina (Katya) Putina (born 1986 in Dresden). The daughters attended the German School in Moscow (Deutsche Schule Moskau) until his appointment as prime minister.
Since 1992, Putin had owned a dacha of about 7 thousand square meters in Solovyovka, Priozersky district of the Leningrad region, which is located on the eastern shore of the Komsomol’skoye lake on the Karelian Isthmus near St. Petersburg. His neighbours there are Vladimir Yakunin, Andrei Fursenko, Sergey Fursenko, Yuriy Kovalchuk, Viktor Myachin, Vladimir Smirnov and Nikolay Shamalov. On November 10, 1996, together they instituted the co-operative society Ozero (the Lake) which united their properties. This was confirmed by Putin’s income and property declaration as a nominee for the presidency in 2000.[7][3] However, this real estate was not listed in his income and property declaration for 1998 – 2002 submitted before the 2004 elections. (Full text of the declaration in Russian: .doc)
Putin’s father was “a model communist, genuinely believing in its ideals while trying to put them into practice in his own life”[27]. With this dedication he became secretary of the Party cell in his workshop and then after taking night classes joined the factory’s Party buro.[27] Though his father was a “militant atheist”[28], Putin’s mother “was a devoted Orthodox believer”.[27] Though she kept no icons at home, she attended church regularly (despite the government’s persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church at that time). She ensured that Putin was secretly christened as a baby, and she regularly took him to services.[27] His father knew of this but turned a blind eye.[27] Putin himself is a practicing member of the Russian Orthodox Church. His religious awakening followed the serious car crash of his wife in 1993, and was deepened by a life-threatening fire that burned down their dacha in August 1996.[28][29] Right before an official visit to Israel his mother gave him his baptismal cross telling him to get it blessed “I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since.”[27]
Putin has been hailed by Patriarch Alexius II of the Russian Orthodox Church as instrumental in healing the 80-year schism between it and the ROCOR in May 2007.[30]
Putin speaks German with near-native fluency. His family used to speak German at home as well.[31] He also speaks English but uses interpreters when conversing with native speakers of English.
Foreign policy
In international affairs, Putin has been trying, with some success, to re-establish the strong and independent role once played by the Soviet Union. However, this has been done without returning to the Cold War-like relations with the West. For example, on February 2007 at annual Munich Conference on Security Policy, he criticised the United States’ unipolar dominance in global relations, and pointed out that the United States displayed an “almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations”. He said the result of it is that “no one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them. Of course such a policy stimulates an arms race.” [49]
Instead he called for a “fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all”. He proposed certain initiatives such as establishing international centres for the enrichment of uranium and prevention of deploying weapons in outer space.[49] In his January 2007 interview Putin said Russia is in favor of democratic multipolar world and strengthening the system of international law.[50]
At the same time, Putin’s Russia has been seeking stronger and more constructive ties with Europe and the United States. Thus, Russia became a fully fledged member of the G8 and chaired the group in the calendar year of 2006 (which has now passed on to Germany). At the same time, Putin’s attention was equally focused on Asia, in particular China and India.
While President Putin is criticized as an autocrat by some Western politicians [4] [5], his relationships with US President George W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, former French President Jacques Chirac, and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are reported to be friendly. Putin’s relationship with Germany’s new Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is expected to be “cooler” and “more business-like” than his partnership with Gerhard Schröder [6].
Putin surprised many Russian nationalists and even his own defense minister when, in the wake of the September 11 attacks in the United States, he agreed to the establishment of coalition military bases in Central Asia before and during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Russian nationalists objected to the establishment of any US military presence on the territory of the former Soviet Union, and had expected Putin to keep the US out of the Central Asian republics, or at the very least extract a commitment from Washington to withdraw from these bases as soon as the immediate military purpose had passed.
During the Iraq crisis of 2003, Putin opposed Washington’s move to invade Iraq without the benefit of a United Nations Security Council resolution explicitly authorizing the use of military force. After the official end of the war was announced, American president George W. Bush asked the United Nations to lift sanctions on Iraq. Putin supported lifting of the sanctions in due course, arguing that the UN commission first be given a chance to complete its work on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
In 2005, Putin and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder negotiated the construction of a major gas pipeline over the Baltic exclusively between Russia and Germany. Schröder also attended Putin’s 53rd birthday in Saint Petersburg the same year. The end of 2006 brought strained relations between Russia and Britain in the wake of the murder of a former FSB officer in London by poisoning. Press reports suggest that Putin’s government is providing only limited cooperation with the investigation.[citation needed]
During his time in office, Putin has attempted to strengthen relations with other members of the CIS. The “near abroad” zone of traditional Russian influence has again become a foreign policy priority under Putin, as the EU and NATO have grown to encompass much of Central Europe and, more recently, the Baltic states.
During the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, Putin visited Ukraine twice before the election to show his support for Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and congratulated him on his alleged victory before the official election results had been announced. Putin’s direct support for pro-Russian Yanukovych was widely criticized as unwarranted interference in the affairs of post-Soviet Ukraine. More recently, a crisis has emerged in Russia’s relations with Georgia and Moldova, both former Soviet republics accusing Moscow of supporting separatist entities in their territories.
In his annual address to the Federal Assembly on April 26, 2007, Putin announced plans to declare a moratorium on the observance of the CFE Treaty by Russia until all NATO members ratify it and start observing its provisions, as Russia has been doing so far on a unilateral basis. Putin argues that as new NATO members have not even signed the treaty so far, disbalance in presence of NATO and Russian armed forces in Europe creates a real threat and an unpredictable situation for Russia.[51]
The months following Putin’s Munich speech were marked by tension and a surge in rhetorics on both sides of Atlantic. So, Vladimir Putin said at the anniversary of the Victory Day, “these threats are not becoming fewer but are only transforming and changing their appearance. These new threats, just as under the Third Reich, show the same contempt for human life and the same aspiration to establish an exclusive dictate over the world.”[52] This was interpreted by some Russian and Western commentators as comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany. On the eve of 33rd Summit of G8 in Heiligendamm, American historian Anne Applebaum wrote that “Whether by waging cyberwarfare on Estonia, threatening the gas supplies of Lithuania, or boycotting Georgian wine and Polish meat, he [Putin] has, over the past few years, made it clear that he intends to reassert Russian influence in the former communist states of Europe, whether those states want Russian influence or not. At the same time, he has also made it clear that he no longer sees Western nations as mere benign trading partners, but rather as Cold War-style threats.” [53] British historian Max Hastings prior to 2007 G8 Summit also described Putin as a “Stalin’s spiritual heir” in his article “Will we have to fight Russia in this Century?“, and said that although “a return to the direct military confrontation of the Cold War is unlikely”, “the notion of Western friendship with Russia is a dead letter” [54] However, both Russian and American officials always denied the idea of a new Cold War. So, the US defence secretary Robert Gates said yet on the Munich Conference: “We all face many common problems and challenges that must be addressed in partnership with other countries, including Russia. … One Cold War was quite enough.”[55] Vladimir Putin said prior to 33rd G8 Summit, on June 4: “we do not want confrontation; we want to engage in dialogue. However, we want a dialogue that acknowledges the equality of both parties’ interests.” [56]
Putin, bitterly opposed to a U.S. missile shield in Europe, presented President George W. Bush with a surprise counterproposal on June 7, 2007 of shared use of Soviet-era radar system in Azerbaijan rather than building new system in Czech Republic. Putin expressed readiness to modernize Gabala radar station, which operates since 1986. Putin proposed it would not be necessary to place interceptor missiles in Poland then, but interceptors could be placed in NATO member Turkey or Iraq. Putin suggested also equal involvement of interested European countries in the project. [57]
Martial Arts
One of Putin’s favorite sports is the martial art of judo. Putin began sambo (a Soviet martial art developed for the Red Army and the NKVD) at the age of 14, before switching to judo, which he continues to practise today.[65] Putin won competitions in his hometown of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), including the senior championship of Leningrad. He is the President of the Yawara Dojo, the same St. Petersburg dojo he practised at when young. Putin co-authored a book on his favorite sport, published in Russian as Judo with Vladimir Putin and in English under the title Judo: History, Theory, Practice.[66]
Though he is not the first world leader to practice judo, Putin is the first leader to move forward into the advanced levels. Currently, Putin is a black belt (6th dan) and is best known for his Harai Goshi, a sweeping hip throw.[67] Vladimir Putin is Master of Sports (Soviet and Russian sport title) in Judo and Sambo. After a state visit to Japan, Putin was invited to the Kodokan Institute and showed the students and Japanese officials different judo techniques.[67]
Putin is also an fan of mixed martial arts. He attended the BODOG Fight event in St.Petersburg.
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