Grozny, Baby! It's Vladimir Putin, International Man of Mystery

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"Kosovo opened a rift between Russia and the West that may last for decades," says Meier. "The Russians had endured NATO expansion into their former sphere of influence and the bombing of Iraq over their objections. Now Washington was talking about missile defense and rewriting the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and turning NATO into an instrument of projecting its power by going to war in Kosovo."

The first sign of an incipient rebellion within Russias security forces was their lightning raid on Kosovos airport, which they captured, to NATOs considerable embarrassment, at the close of the Kosovo campaign. Russia's politicians from Yeltsin on down were taken by surprise, but the fact that the President later awarded medals to the men responsible signaled that hed gotten the message. With the clouds of scandal swirling around his office and his immediate entourage, his future would depend on doing the bidding of the countrys security establishment. That was the context in which Yeltsin named Putin prime minister and anointed him as his presidential heir.

Putin proceeded to build a credible political claim through going to war in Chechnya, but that too has dire implications for the West. "Russian enthusiasm for the war in Chechnya is based on a lot more than the actions of which the Chechens have been accused," says Meier. "From the outset, its been very overtly spun as an act of defiance against the West, and that has had tremendous appeal to Russians need to restore the sense of national pride that has disappeared under Yeltsin."

The bloody crusade against Chechen separatists is all that Russians know of their president right now, and so far they like what they see. "To Russians, Putin comes across as the tough cop thats going to clean up the town," says Meier. But the rot in Russia is about far more than separatist violence. "The pivotal question will be whether Putin rules the oligarchs or they rule him. Thus far, he clearly has support from arch-tycoon Boris Berezovsky, but it remains to be seen whether hell turn on Berezovsky." The oligarchy may, of course, take some comfort in the amnesty Putin immediately granted Yeltsin and his family. Still, what will follow in the coming months is the next round of furious infighting and deal-making in the political-business-criminal-security elites that make up the "nomenklatura" of post-communist Russia.

Pollyannaish spin from Washington notwithstanding, the transition from Yeltsin to Putin is unlikely to bring good news for the U.S. After all, Yeltsin propelled himself to power by convincing Russians that he was a liberal reformist who would deliver them from the drudgery of communism. If Vladimir Putin wins the presidency in March — and right now he looks a shoo-in — it will be because Russians believe hell stand up to Washington.

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