Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin was a lieutenant colonel in the
Russian KGB. He went on to become the president of
Russia. Now his nominee is president while he is the
prime minister. This gives him direct power or at all events power. Vlad is
rated as the best ruler Russia has had since Peter the Great. This is from real
people. The main stream media are moderately abusive but then the main stream
media is largely owned and controlled by Jews. The Wiki is, sometimes a curious exception
to the generality.
The
Frame-Up of Vladimir Putin
Did he have Anna Politkovskaya murdered
because she talked too much? The main stream media are keen on the idea.
Evidence? Forget it. Berezovsky and Nevzlin
[ both Jews ] are plausible candidates. Paul Klebnikov wrote about
Berezovsky then he was
murdered. Cause and effect? Berezovsky would say no.
Putin
Plans War on Oligarchs
Is this why he is getting a bad press every time he has some one
murdered? It could be. They are a nasty bunch of crooks. Details at
Oligarchs
The
Making Of A Neo-KGB State
The Economist is in propaganda mode, telling us the Vlad is a
wrong one. You are fully at liberty to believe them if you want. I do not.
QUOTE
Yet Mr Yeltsin, though he let the agency survive, did not use it as his power
base. In fact, the KGB was cut off from the
post-Soviet redistribution of assets. Worse still, it was upstaged and
outwitted by a tiny group of opportunists, many of them Jews (not a people
beloved by the KGB), who became known as the
oligarchs. Between them, they grabbed most of the country's natural resources
and other privatised assets. KGB officers watched
the oligarchs get super-rich while they stayed cash-strapped and sometimes
even unpaid.
Some officers did well enough, but only by
offering their services to the oligarchs. To protect themselves from rampant
crime and racketeering, the oligarchs tried to privatise parts of the
KGB. Their large and costly security departments
were staffed and run by ex-KGB officers. They also
hired senior agency men as “consultants”. Fillip Bobkov, the head of the Fifth
Directorate (which dealt with dissidents), worked for a media magnate,
Vladimir Gusinsky. Mr Kondaurov, a former spokesman for the
KGB, worked for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who ran and
largely owned Yukos. “People who stayed in the FSB
were B-list,” says Mark Galeotti, a British analyst
of the Russian special services.
UNQUOTE
The bit about being stitched up
Jews rings true. The rest is tosh.
Vladimir Putin -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
QUOTE
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (Russian:
Влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин,
IPA: [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr
vlɐˈdʲimʲɪrəvʲɪtɕ ˈputʲɪn]
(
listen); born 7 October 1952) served
as the
second
President of the
Russian
Federation and is the current
Prime Minister of Russia, as well as chairman of
United Russia and
Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the
Union of Russia and Belarus. He became
acting President on 31 December 1999, when president
Boris Yeltsin resigned in a surprising move. Putin won the
2000 presidential election and in 2004 he was
re-elected for a second term lasting until 7 May 2008.
Due to constitutionally mandated term
limits, Putin was ineligible to run for a third consecutive presidential term.
After the victory of his successor,
Dmitry Medvedev, in the
2008 presidential elections, he was nominated by the latter to be Russia's
Prime Minister; Putin took the post on 8 May 2008.
Putin is credited with bringing political
stability and re-establishing the rule of law.[2]
During his eight years in office, due to strong macroeconomic management,
important fiscal policy reforms, and a confluence of high oil prices, surging
capital inflows, and access to low-cost external financing,[3]
Russia's economy bounced back from crisis, seeing
GDP
increase by 72% in
PPP (sixfold in nominal),[4][5]
poverty cut more than half,[6][7][8]
and average monthly salaries increase from $80 to $640, or by 150% in
real rates.[4][9]
Analysts have described Putin's economic reforms as impressive.[10][11]
During his presidency, Putin passed into law
a series of fundamental reforms, including a flat income tax of 13%, a reduced
profits tax, and new land and legal codes.[10][12]
At the same time, his conduct in office has been questioned by domestic
political opposition, foreign governments, and human rights organizations for
leading the
Second Chechen War, for his record on internal human rights and freedoms,
and for his alleged bullying of the former
Soviet Republics.
A new
group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's
economy—such as
Roman Abramovich,
Oleg Deripaska,
Mikhail Prokhorov, or
Yuriy Kovalchuk, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin—emerged
according to media reports.[13][14][15][16][17][18][19]
Along with Putin's connections to the business world, he has been criticized
since the beginning of his first term as developing a
cult of personality.[20][21][22][23]
Early life
Putin was born on 7 October 1952 in
Leningrad,
RSFSR,
USSR
(now
Saint Petersburg,
Russian
Federation),[24]
to parents Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin (1911–1999) and Maria Ivanovna
Shelomova (1911–1998). His mother was a factory worker, and his father was a
conscript in the
Soviet
Navy, where he served in the
submarine
fleet in the early 1930s,[25]
subsequently serving with the
NKVD in a
sabotage group during
World
War II.[26]
Two elder brothers were born in the mid–1930s; one died within a few months of
birth, while the second succumbed to
diphtheria during the
siege of Leningrad. His paternal grandfather, Spiridon Ivanovich Putin
(1879–1965), was employed at
Vladimir Lenin's
dacha at
Gorki as a cook, and after Lenin's death in 1924, he continued to work for
Lenin's wife,
Nadezhda Krupskaya. He would later cook for
Joseph Stalin when the Soviet leader visited one of his dachas in the
Moscow
region. Spiridon later was employed at a dacha belonging to the Moscow City
Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at which the young Putin would visit
him.[27]
His autobiography, Ot Pervogo Litsa (English: In
the First Person),[25]
which is based on Putin's interviews, speaks of humble beginnings, including
early years in a communal apartment in Leningrad. On 1 September 1960, he
started at School No. 193 at Baskov Lane, just across from his house. By fifth
grade he was one of a few in a class of more than 45 pupils who was not yet a
member of the
Pioneers, largely because of his rowdy behavior. In sixth grade he started
taking sport seriously in the form of
sambo and then
judo. In his youth, Putin was eager to emulate the intelligence officer
characters played on the
Soviet screen by actors such as
Vyacheslav Tikhonov and
Georgiy Zhzhonov.[citation
needed]
Putin graduated from the International Law branch of the Law
Department of the
Leningrad State University in 1975, writing his final thesis on
international law.[28]
While at university he became a member of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and remained a member until the party
was dissolved in December 1991.[29]
Also at the University he met
Anatoly Sobchak who later played an important role in Putin's career.
Anatoly Sobchak was at the time an
Assistant Professor and lectured Putin's class on
Business Law (khozyaystvennoye pravo)
[30]
KGB career
Putin joined the
KGB in 1975 upon
graduation from university, and underwent a year's training at the 401st KGB
school in Okhta,
Leningrad. He then went on to work briefly in the Second Department
(counter-intelligence) before he was transferred to the First Department,
where among his duties was the monitoring of foreigners and consular officials
in Leningrad, while using the cover of being a police officer with the CID.[31][32]
According to
Yuri Felshtinsky and
Vladimir Pribylovsky, he served at the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, which
combated
political dissent in the Soviet Union.[33]
He then received an offer to transfer to foreign intelligence
First Chief Directorate of the KGB and was sent for additional year long
training to the Dzerzhinsky KGB Higher School in Moscow and then in the early
eighties—the Red Banner Yuri Andropov KGB Institute in Moscow (now the Academy
of Foreign Intelligence).[citation
needed]
From 1985 to 1990 the KGB stationed Putin in
Dresden,
East
Germany.[34]
Following the collapse of the East German regime, Putin was recalled to the
Soviet Union and returned to Leningrad, where in June 1991 he assumed a
position with the International Affairs section of Leningrad State University,
reporting to Vice-Rector
Yuriy Molchanov.[35][36]
In his new position, Putin maintained surveillance on the student body and
kept an eye out for recruits. It was during his stint at the university that
Putin grew reacquainted with
Anatoly Sobchak, then mayor of Leningrad. Sobchak served as an Assistant
Professor during Putin's university years and was one of Putin's lecturers.
Putin resigned from the active state security services in the beginning of
1992, after the defeat of the KGB-supported abortive
putsch against Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev.[30]
Early political
career
In May 1990, Putin was appointed Mayor
Sobchak's advisor on international affairs. On 28 June 1991, he was appointed
head of the
Committee for External Relations of the
Saint Petersburg Mayor's Office, with responsibility for promoting
international relations and foreign investments. The Committee was also used
to register business ventures in Saint Petersburg. Less than one year after
taking control of the committee, Putin was investigated by a commission of the
city legislative council. Commission deputies
Marina Salye and
Yury
Gladkov concluded that Putin understated prices and issued licenses
permitting the export of non-ferrous metals valued at a total of $93 million
in exchange for food aid from abroad that never came to the city.[37][38][39][40][41]
The commission recommended Putin be fired, but there were no immediate
consequences. Putin remained head of the Committee for External Relations
until 1996. While heading the Committee for External Relations, from 1992 to
March 2000 Putin was also on the advisory board of the German
real
estate holding Saint Petersburg Immobilien und Beteiligungs AG (SPAG)
which has been investigated by German prosecutors for money laundering and
connections to
Colombian
cocaine
dealers.[30][42][43][44][45][46]
From 1994 to 1997, Putin was appointed to
additional positions in the Saint Petersburg political arena. In March 1994 he
became first deputy head of the administration of the city of Saint
Petersburg. In 1995 (through June 1997) Putin led the Saint Petersburg branch
of the pro-government
Our Home Is Russia political party.[47]
During this same period from 1995 through June 1997 he was also the head of
the Advisory Board of the JSC Newspaper
Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti.[47]
In 1996,
Anatoly Sobchak lost the Saint Petersburg mayoral election to
Vladimir Yakovlev. Putin was called to Moscow and in June 1996 assumed
position of a Deputy Chief of the Presidential Property Management Department
headed by
Pavel Borodin. He occupied this position until March 1997. During his
tenure Putin was responsible for the foreign property of the state and
organized transfer of the former assets of the Soviet Union and
Communist Party to the Russian Federation.[30]
On 26 March 1997 President
Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin deputy chief of
Presidential Staff, which he remained until May 1998, and chief of the
Main Control Directorate of the Presidential Property Management Department
(until June 1998). His predecessor on this position was
Alexei Kudrin and the successor was
Nikolai Patrushev both future prominent politicians and Putin's
associates.[30]
On 27 June 1997, at the
Saint Petersburg Mining Institute Putin defended his
Candidate of Science dissertation in economics titled "The Strategic
Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations".[48]
According to Clifford G Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, a
Washington DC think tank, sixteen of the twenty pages that open a key section
of Putin's 218-page thesis were copied either word for word or with minute
alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, written by
US professors William King and David Cleland and translated into Russian by a
KGB-related institute in the early 1990s.[49][50]
Six diagrams and tables were also copied.[51]
Gaddy said "there's no question in my mind that this would be plagiarism", but
nevertheless does not believe that the plagiarism was really intentional "in
the sense that if you had wanted to hide where the text came from you wouldn't
even list this work in the bibliography."[52]
The dissertation committee disagreed with Gaddy's claims. Chairman of the
committee Natalia Pashkevich, accused Gaddy of not reading the dissertation
very well. "There are references to the article mentioned. Everything is done
correctly... It is only a plus for Vladimir Putin that he used not only
Russian authors, but foreign ones as well." Anatoly Suslov, provost of
economics at the Mining Institute, who was present at Putin dissertation
defense, recalled: "The opponent was someone from Moscow. The defense went
calmly. There were many questions, of course, since it was a candidate's
dissertation, but there was no question of plagiarism. No one uncovered
anything of the kind. Vladimir Putin defended himself, and he prepared his own
work. All those conversations about dissertations being bought are untrue.
Ours isn't the kind of institute where you can do that."[53]
In his dissertation, and in a later article published in 1999, Putin advocated
the idea of so-called
National champions, a concept that would later become central to his
political thinking.[54]
On 25 May 1998, Putin was appointed First
Deputy Chief of
Presidential Staff for regions, replacing
Viktoriya Mitina; and, on 15 July, the Head of the Commission for the
preparation of agreements on the
delimitation of power of regions and the federal center attached to the
President, replacing
Sergey Shakhray. After Putin's appointment, the commission completed no
such agreements, although during Shakhray's term as the Head of the Commission
there were 46 agreements signed.[55]
Later, after becoming President Putin canceled all those agreements.[30]
On 25 July 1998 Yeltsin appointed Vladimir
Putin head of the
FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin
occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the
Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its
Secretary on 29 March 1999. In April 1999, FSB Chief Vladimir Putin and
Interior Minister
Sergei Stepashin held a televised press conference in which they discussed
a video that had aired nationwide 17 March on the state-controlled
Russia TV channel which showed a naked man very similar to the
Prosecutor General of Russia,
Yury Skuratov, in bed with two young women. Putin claimed that expert FSB
analysis proved the man on the tape to be Skuratov and that the orgy had been
paid for by persons investigated for criminal offences.[35][56]
Skuratov had been adversarial toward President Yeltsin and had been
aggressively investigating government corruption.[57]
On 15 June 2000,
The Times
reported that Spanish police discovered that Putin had secretly visited a
villa in Spain belonging to the oligarch
Boris Berezovsky on up to five different occasions in 1999.[58]
Premiership (1999–2000)
On 9 August 1999, Vladimir Putin was
appointed one of three First Deputy Prime Ministers, which enabled him later
on that day, as the previous government led by
Sergei Stepashin had been sacked, to be appointed acting Prime Minister of
the Government of the Russian Federation by President
Boris Yeltsin.[59]
Yeltsin also announced that he wanted to see Putin as his successor. Later,
that same day, Putin agreed to run for the presidency.[60]
On 16 August, the
State
Duma approved his appointment as Prime Minister with 233 votes in favour
(vs. 84 against, 17 abstained),[61]
while a simple majority of 226 was required, making him Russia's fifth PM in
fewer than eighteen months. On his appointment, few expected Putin, virtually
unknown to the general public, to last any longer than his predecessors. He
was initially regarded as a Yeltsin loyalist; like other prime ministers of
Boris Yeltsin, Putin did not choose ministers himself, his cabinet being
determined by the presidential administration.[62]
Yeltsin's main opponents and would-be successors, Moscow Mayor
Yuriy Luzhkov and former Chairman of the Russian Government
Yevgeniy Primakov, were already campaigning to replace the ailing
president, and they fought hard to prevent Putin's emergence as a potential
successor. Putin's
law-and-order image and his unrelenting approach to the
renewed crisis in Chechnya soon combined to raise his popularity and
allowed him to overtake all rivals.
Putin's rise to public office in August 1999
coincided with an aggressive resurgence of the near-dormant conflict in the
North Caucasus, when a number of Chechens invaded a neighboring region
starting the
War in Dagestan. Both in Russia and abroad, Putin's public image was
forged by his tough handling of the war. On assuming the role of acting
President on 31 December 1999, Putin went on a previously scheduled visit to
Russian troops in Chechnya. In 2003, a controversial referendum was held in
Chechnya adopting a new constitution which declares the Republic as a part of
Russia. Chechnya has been gradually stabilized with the parliamentary
elections and the establishment of a regional government.[63][64]
Throughout the war Russia has severely disabled the Chechen rebel movement,
although sporadic violence still occurs throughout the North Caucasus.[65]
While not formally associated with any
party, Putin pledged his support to the newly formed
Unity Party,[66]
which won the second largest percentage of the popular vote (23.3%) in the
December 1999 Duma
elections, and in turn he was supported by it.
Presidency
According to public opinion surveys
conducted by
Levada Center, Putin's approval rating was 81% in June 2007, and the
highest of any leader in the world.[223]
His popularity rose from 31% in August 1999 to 80% in November 1999 and since
then it has never fallen below 65%.[224]
Observers see Putin's high approval ratings as a consequence of the
significant improvements in living standards and Russia's reassertion of
itself on the world scene that occurred during his tenure as President.[225][226][227]
Most Russians are also deeply disillusioned with the West after all the
hardships of 90s,[228][229]
and they no longer trust pro-western politicians associated with Yeltsin that
were removed from the political scene under Putin's leadership.[229]
Key speeches
During his terms in office Putin has made
eight annual addresses to the
Federal Assembly of Russia, speaking on the situation in Russia and on
guidelines of the internal and foreign policy of the State (as prescribed in
[309]
Article 84 of the Constitution). The 2007 election campaign of the
United Russia party went under the slogan "Putin's Plan: Russia's
Victory". When asked on the "Putin's plan", Vladimir Putin said the last five
Addresses contained some key parts "devoted to the state’s medium-term
development", and "if all these key ideas were put together to build a
coherent system, it can become the country's development plan in the
medium-term".[310]
UNQUOTE
The Wiki is surprisingly kind about Vlad, not that he does not deserve it. But
the main stream media have been knocking him. The Wiki does not bother
to mention that
Berezovsky, one of his critics is a Jew on
the run wanted for murder and big time thieving.
Her Majesty's Government allowed
Berezovsky to get away with inciting war as well as refusing to extradite him.
