Vladimir Putin: Power – but for what ends?

September 01, 2000

In his first months as president Vladimir Putin has been gathering together the threads of power. Oligarchs have been curbed, regional governors put in their place and former KGB colleagues given influential positions. How Putin will use his authority remains uncertain. He seems intent on reforming the tax code and the customs administration and is committed to helping small and medium-size enterprises. But a start has barely been made on economic liberalization and the reduction of state intervention. Ben Aris reports







Putin: inherited a Russia with a very different political landscape from Yeltsin's era

"This is the end of the oligarchs in Russia," Boris Nemtsov, leader of the Union of Right Forces faction in the Duma, triumphantly declared to a room packed with journalists at the end of July. "The oligarchs are sick of being oligarchs. They want to be law-abiding taxpayers."

The meeting with 21 so-called oligarchs on Friday July 28 marked the end of the Wrst phase of new Russian president Vladimir Putin's campaign to make Russia great. His enemies have been subdued and his personal grip on power increased. He has largely accomplished what he set out to do - to destroy the Yeltsin system of government. But what will he do with all this power?

Yelena Bonner, widow of Soviet dissident and Nobel Peace prize winner Andrei Sakharov, believes Putin is setting up a modernized version of Stalinism. Presidential economics adviser Andrei Illarionov has talked about the need for a Pinochet-style model of reform.

Vladimir Putin: Power – but for what ends?

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