Inscrutability is a prerequisite for spies, but its not traditionally a presidential attribute. Yet Russians woke up to their New Years day hangovers to find themselves ruled by a man who has never given a press conference and whose official biography is only eight lines long. Even those who have probed the background of acting President Vladimir Putin have turned up little about his days in the KGB, his attitude to political and economic reform in Russia and his relationship with the countrys shadowy financial oligarchy.
"Even close friends whove worked with him for years say they dont know him very well at all," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. "He rose quickly in the KGB in the '80s, but by doing what he was told rather than by distinguishing himself. Hes awkward in public and extremely reluctant to talk to the media. And he studiously maintained a low profile until last August, when he seemed to appear from nowhere to be named Yeltsins heir."
These things we do know about Putin: He's 47, married, joined the KGBs foreign intelligence directorate after graduating college in 1975, and — officially, at least — spent most of his KGB career stationed in East Germany monitoring political attitudes there. He returned to Leningrad in 1989, where he took up a position at the State University and developed a close relationship with key reformist figure Anatoly Shobchak, who in 1991 became the citys mayor and appointed Putin to various key administrative posts. Having proved himself a capable manager in St. Petersburg (Leningrads original name, restored after the collapse of communism), he was brought to Moscow in 1996 to serve on Boris Yeltsins presidential staff. Two years later, Yeltsin appointed Putin head of the FSB, the KGBs successor organization, and last year he assumed control of the coordinating body of all of Russias security and intelligence ministries before being named Prime Minister.
Putins years in the KGB, followed by his association with some of the key reformers in the post-communist period raise more questions than they answer. "Although some now say Putin was involved in economic espionage in Western Europe, others say he was a low level political commissar type keeping an eye on the loyalty of Soviet staff," says Meier. "Then theres a big question mark over his mission in St. Petersburg — whether he, as he claims, had turned into a liberal democrat determined to push the reform program, or had been sent there to keep an eye on the reformers." In the murky world of post-communist Russia, of course, those two options arent exactly mutually exclusive, either.
While his background includes both solid security credentials and an association with Russias reformist politicians, its clear that the former played the major role in bringing Putin to power — and therein lies a harsh message for the West. Yeltsin had established a working relationship with Washington based on copious infusions of Western cash to shore up his deeply unpopular regime in exchange for Russian compliance with the U.S. agenda on the international stage and lip-service to Western ideas on how the Russian economy should be reformed. But the systematic international humiliation that Yeltsins approach brought for the erstwhile superpower reached a breaking point in the Kosovo crisis. After the U.S. bombed a Russian ally over Moscows objections, Washington enlisted Yeltsins support to broker a peace deal that saved NATO from having to go to ground war and then immediately violated the terms of that deal by taking unilateral control of the province and sidelining the Russians.