Putin, after all, is noted for being one of the coldest, most ruthless of Soviet-era intelligence agents, and he has put the security apparatus in charge of Russia.
Georgie Anne Geyer, Universal Press Syndicate, “Trip reveals standards for NATO, Europe”, 22 June 2001, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2001-06-22/news/0106220080_1_president-putin-nato-expansion-russia
The world cannot develop effectively and positively if one state has a monopoly on taking and implementing whatever decisions it wants… In the history of mankind, such a drive for a monopoly has never ended well. For that reason, we are constantly proposing a different democratic world structure.
Geoffrey York and Chrystia Freeland: “We are not looking for enemies”, Globe and Mail, 14 Dec 2000 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/we-are-not-looking-for-enemies/article1086359/
Putinism is no more than the impoverished philosophy of absolute power shared by the security services and the oligarchs close to them. It is yet another road to nowhere followed by Russia across the endless snow-swept plains of its history.
Andrei Piontkovsky, “So much for the year of RF President Putin”, Globe and Mail, 28 Dec 2000. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/so-much-for-the-year-of-putin/article771694/
If we’re looking at a mechanism for settling complicated issues such as these, our position is clear: this mechanism exists in the form of the United Nations and its Security Council. There is no other such universal mechanism in the world today. I believe that only through the United Nations can we resolve these kinds of problems, by being patient, working together, taking each other’s interests into account and acting in accordance with international law.
Putin, Press conference, 20 June 2003, answering question about Iraq,
http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2003/06/20/1712_type82915_47467.shtml
The Putin regime is beginning to resemble that of Leonid Brezhnev, who never stirred the waters and always maintained the status quo – while sending troops into Afghanistan in a show of might that turned out to be illusory. The Putin administration may be remembered in a similar way – for having maintained the status quo at a very high price, including a bloody war in Chechnya.
The Russia Journal, “An empty address” 18 May 2003 http://russiajournal.com/node/15335
Putin, of course, is no Peter. The KGB lieutenant colonel who was abruptly bumped into the presidential throne of a nation in total disarray comes nowhere near “the Great” in ambition, potential, drive or physical height.
Serge Schmemann, “THE WORLD: Czar Peter, Meet Putin; Eastern or Western? Both. And Neither.”, New York Times, March 12, 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/12/weekinreview/the-world-czar-peter-meet-putin-eastern-or-western-both-and-neither.html
It will take us approximately fifteen years and an annual growth of our Gross Domestic Product by 8 percent a year to reach the per capita GDP level of present-day Portugal or Spain, which are not among the world’s industrialised leaders.
Vladimir Putin, “Russia at the turn of the millennium”, 1999 http://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/Putin.htm
Communism vividly demonstrated its inaptitude for sound self-development, dooming our country to a steady lag behind economically advanced countries. It was a road to a blind alley, which is far away from the mainstream of civilization.
Vladimir Putin, “Russia at the turn of the millennium”, 1999 http://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/Putin.htm
Today there is a new president, Vladimir Putin. It is not at all clear if democracy is his ultimate goal. What is clear is that his authoritarian methods are focused on restoring a centralized Russian state whose power relies on fear, not persuasion or education. He presides over a group of criminal oligarchs, former KGB and military men, and old communist apparatchiks, most of whom would have been right at home in the higher echelons of the Soviet government. Intelligence agents are now part of the presidential directorate; special military counterintelligence departments have been restored. ‘You can’t get anywhere without secret agents,’ Putin has said. Putin expresses pride in his own KGB background, without seeming to understand how the KGB made the Soviet Union a place of fear, even terror, for most of the past century.
Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief, “A Great Step Backward”, U.S. News & World Report, October 9, 2000 http://www.russialist.org/archives/4556.html##5
Ikea has arrived in Moscow. So has a tight-lipped 47-year-old KGB staffer, with clear blue eyes and authoritarian tendencies strong enough to bomb one of Russia’s republics back into the middle ages…Now a man like Vladimir Putin has arrived to remind the IMF just how far the dark continent has slipped back into the Tsarist 19th century.
David Hearst, How Russia was lost, The Guardian, 27 March 2000, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/27/russia.comment1
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