Vladimir Putin | Reign of the patriarch Premium

Vladimir Putin won the 2024 Russian Presidential elections facing no meaningful challenge. Subscribe to The Hindu to read a profile of the Russian leader’s rise to power.

There was no surprise. When Russia’s election authorities announced results of the presidential election, Vladimir Putin, who has been in power for nearly a quarter century, was elected for another term. He won 87% of votes, extending his reign for six more years, while his closest rival, Nikolay Kharitonov of the Communist Party of Russian Federation, won 4.31% vote. There was no meaningful challenge to Mr. Putin in the election. Candidates who were critical of his policies, including the Ukraine war, were barred from contesting. State-controlled media hardly allowed any voices of dissent. And Mr. Putin’s approval rating has stayed high, according to Levada Centre, an independent Russian NGO, and he faces no visible or credible challenge to his authority among Russia’s elites.

If he completes his term, Mr. Putin, now 71, would surpass Joseph Stalin as the longest serving leader of modern Russia and the longest serving Russian leader since Catherine the Great, the 18th century Empress, who captured Crimea from the Ottomans and annexed it in 1783.

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In many ways, Mr. Putin’s rise to power is intertwined with Russia’s own comeback from the forced retreat of the 1990s, which many Russians call the “decade of humiliation”. He has witnessed the peak years of the Cold War, the collapse of the state, which he called a “catastrophe” and the years of chaos. If in the late 1990s, he was seen as the man who could fix Russia’s problems, now he is the face of the state that’s at war in Ukraine “with the collective West” and has built a water-tight authoritarian system at home that allows no dissent.

Born in 1952 in Stalin’s Russia, Mr. Putin graduated in 1975 from Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University). He served 15 years as a foreign intelligence officer for the KGB (Committee for State Security), of which six years were in Dresden, East Germany. In 1990, a year before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Mr. Putin retired with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. In the new Russia, he started his political career in St. Petersburg, the former capital of the Tsars. In 1994, he became the first Deputy Mayor of the city. Two years later, Mr. Putin moved to Moscow where he joined the Kremlin as an administrator. He captured the world’s attention in 1998 when President Boris Yeltsin appointed him as director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor of the KGB. He never had to turn back.

Russia was in a bad shape. Its economy was in shambles. It was not in a position to challenge NATO, which had revived talks of expanding to Eastern Europe. In Chechnya, a separatist war was raging. Yeltsin, the vodka-drinking, aloof leader who was struggling to deal with the many challenges his big but weak country was facing, started looking at Mr. Putin, the young spymaster, as his successor. In 1999, he appointed Mr. Putin as Prime Minister. When Mr. Yeltsin stepped down, Mr. Putin became acting President. And in 2000, he began his first term after the presidential elections.

During the early years of Mr. Putin’s presidency, Russia’s ties with the West were relatively cordial. Russia was taken into the G7 industrialised economies in 1997. Mr. Putin supported the U.S.’s war on terror after the September 11 terrorist attack. In 2001, President George W. Bush said Mr. Putin was “very straightforward and trustworthy”. “We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country,” Mr. Bush said. But the larger factors of great power rivalry would soon take over the post-Soviet tendencies of bonhomie. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Russia took a strong position against it. This was also a period when Russia, under Mr. Putin’s leadership, was rebuilding its economy and military might. A year after the Iraq invasion, NATO expanded further to the east, this time taking the three Baltic countries — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all sharing borders with Russia — and four others in Eastern Europe into its fold.