Russian president Vladimir Putin fired the first
salvo of his re-election campaign in his state of the nation
speech on May 16 and used it to report on his first three
years in office.
Only three years ago as he stepped up to the lectern to deliver
the most-watched speech of his young presidency, Putin was being
lambasted as a dictator in the making. He was also accused of
recreating Stalin's police state, after he ordered the second
invasion of Chechnya, stripped regional governors of powers and
drove leading oligarchs abroad into self-imposed exile. That day he
launched an ambitious and radical reform programme.
It was a big gamble. Following the 1998 crisis he needed to
noticeably improve Russians' lives if he was to be re-elected in
March 2004. "We have reached a line beyond which we cannot go.
Poverty has reached a mind-boggling scale in Russia," Putin said in
the May 2000 speech....
