ABSTRACT
Putin’s rise to power reflected one of the most unusual political biographies
in recent years. Brought up in a communal apartment in Leningrad (from
1991 once again St Petersburg) and an enthusiastic participant in the rough
and tumble of childhood play in the city’s streets, only slowly did his lea-
dership qualities emerge. Attracted to work in the Soviet Union’s secret
service, then known as the Committee for State Security (KGB), he went on
to win a place to study law at Leningrad State University (1970-5), followed
by a career in the KGB (1975-90), the last five years of which he served in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the communist half of Germany
until the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Entering public service the following
year, he became a staffer of the former law professor, Anatoly Sobchak.
Putin rose swiftly to become Sobchak’s right arm when he became mayor of
the city (1991-6). Sobchak’s failure to win a second term in 1996 left Putin
unemployed until he was offered a job in the Kremlin. Once in Moscow
Putin’s rise was meteoric: from an official in the presidential administration,
up through minister of the service in which he had once worked, now renamed the Federal Security Service (FSB), and then as prime minister
from 9 August 1999. On 31 December 1999, by some reckonings the last
day of the century and of the millennium, president Boris Yeltsin unex-
pectedly resigned and Putin took over as acting president until elections on
26 March 2000 confirmed him as president for a four-year term. In March
2004 Putin was elected to a second term. How did Putin manage to achieve
such an astonishing rise to become president of the world’s largest country?
In this chapter we shall examine his background and the decisive moments that led to the presidency, and in the next we shall discuss the situation that
he faced and the ideas that shaped his politics. By the end of these two
chapters we shall be able to answer the question that greeted his emergence
as the leader of Russia: ‘who is Mister Putin’?
