AUT: Putin "pisses" on Chechens

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Typical mainstream journalism, not terribly insightful. Good quotes though.
Will look for that 14 pg. essay on the website of the Russian Federation,
and post any revealing soundbites on Putin's political philosophy.
                                   Michael Pugliese

Source:  Agence France Presse
http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?
s=asia/headline/s/991231/world/afp/Putin_rocked_Russians_with_ruthlessness.h
tml
Friday, December 31 6:28 PM SGT

Putin rocked Russians with ruthlessness

MOSCOW, Dec 31 (AFP) -

Vladimir Putin, the poker-faced ex-KGB spy, once tried to westernize a
crumbling Soviet Union but has since galvanized a new Russia and is
vowing
to annihilate the rebels of Chechnya.

"We'll get them anywhere -- if we find terrorists sitting in the
outhouse,
then we will piss on them there. That's it. The matter is settled,"
barked
Putin shortly after Russia launched its Chechen war in September.

Such talk could have cost his predecessors their job. But it boosted
Putin's career.

He became acting president Friday when Boris Yeltsin suddenly announced
he
was stepping down, and is likely to retain the Kremlin hot seat for years
to come.

Yeltsin, ailing and being edged out of power by his closest advisers,
named
the then virtually unknown security chief as prime minister last August.

He had been running the secretive but omnipotent Security Council.

He has since turned into one of the most admired figures Russia has seen
this decade, even his opponents singing his praises.

"Putin has enchanted Russia," wrote Vyacheslav Kostikov, a former Kremlin
spokesman and current board member of a Media-MOST empire that has
campaigned heavily against the government.

"I honestly believe that Putin is capable of heroic deeds in the name of
our humiliated Russia," Kostikov said.

Yet the 47-year-old prime minister and acting president remains a
political
enigma.

He helped found a new party, Unity, which rode into the State Duma (the
lower house of parliament) on the back of his popularity in December 19
elections.

The party is described as "centrist." But the respected Moscow Times said
in an editorial: "There is no particular reason to believe that Unity is
'centrist,' unless 'centrist' is another word for 'unknown.'"

The English-language newspaper added: "But what seems clear is that the
Kremlin has been dealt a winning hand -- or the Kremlin has dealt itself
a
winning hand, depending on one's point of view."

What can be gleamed from Putin's bare biography suggests that he is
intelligent and cunning, trusted enough by peers to be handed some of the
most sensitive assignments.

Putin "was shaped by the single greatest mission in the history of the
KGB," wrote the US-based private global intelligence firm Stratfor.

That mission was the "systematic restructuring of the Soviet economy,
Soviet society and Soviet relations with the West in the hope of
preserving
the state and the regime."

Putin spent the 1980s in Berlin, where intelligence observers believe he
slipped into West Germany to learn trade secrets of such companies as US
computer giant IBM.

Observers believe KGB officers knew the Soviet Union was in ruins and
could
be preserved only by revolutionising its lagging technology and
attracting
investors from the West.

It remains unclear how successful Putin was. But he became the chief
liaison for foreign investors after joining the pro-reform team of Saint
Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sabchak in 1994.

Local journalists report that it was impossible to make foreign
investments
in Russia's second city without first contacting Putin.

He then also became a trusted ally of economics chief Anatoly Chubais,
who
brought Putin to Moscow in 1996 and made him responsible for monitoring
regional leaders who were seeking greater independence from Moscow.

One political analyst reported that Putin was told to collect so-called
"compromising material" on governors which could then be used as an
"incentive" for them to toe the Kremlin line.

Analysts suggest the Kremlin is now repaying Putin by making him the star
of a well orchestrated media public relations campaign, one which has put
his presidential rating at an unheralded 46 percent.

The latest Public Opinion Foundation poll said Russians were three times
as
likely to vote for Putin in presidential election due in June than his
nearest rival, Communist Party boss Gennady Zyuganov.

"Russia was and will remain a great country," Putin wrote in a 14-page
essay entitled "Russia on the Threshold of a New Millenium" published
this
week on the government's Internet web site.

The message, at once an outline of policy objectives and a philosophical
expose, was striking both in its relaxed tone and a novel content that
mixed Western democratic and market ideals with traditional Russian
mores.

"Russia is never going to be another USA or England, where liberal values
have deep historic roots," Putin asserted.

"It is a fact that in Russia the attraction to a collective way of life
has
always been stronger than the desire for individualism."

At the same time, though, the country and its people understand better
than
many the dangers that a government -- particularly an executive branch --
endowed with excessive power can pose to people's freedom, he said.

"The global experience prompts the conclusion that the main threat to
human
rights and freedoms, to democracy as such, emanates from the executive
authority," Putin wrote.

"The state must be where and as needed; freedom must be where and as
required."




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