signifies nothing as much as the end of the road for Western illusions about post-communist Russia. The stage has been set by the "reform" presided over by Boris Yeltsin, which has included an orgy of corruption, asset stripping, capital flight and authoritarianism that has made overnight (offshore) billionaires of a handful of powerful oligarchs while plunging the majority of their countrymen into a catastrophic poverty unthinkable even in the last decades of communism. In Yeltsin's place there is a new type of leader, quite unlike the anticommunist hero the Western media painted Yeltsin to be.
Putin has been served up to Russian voters by the same shadowy inner circle that kept Yeltsin going long after his sell-by date, but that doesn't mean the former KGB career officer is anybody's puppet. The real question is whether Boris Yeltsin's chosen successor represents more of the same, or whether his tough-guy promises to restore the authority of the state, eliminate corruption and reclaim Russia's great-power status are to be believed. Either way, Putin's ascendancy offers little cause for Western comfort.
While Putin's victory in Sunday's presidential election is a near certainty (he needs a simple majority of votes and a 50 percent turnout, both of which are believed to be easily within his grasp) there are few other certainties about the intentions of the former spook whose rise over a mere five months from faceless security bureaucrat to popular choice for Russia's presidency is as improbable as it is seemingly inevitable.
Putin has sold himself to Russians as the tough-guy who'll sort out the mess bequeathed by Boris Yeltsin, affirming his credentials as sheriff in the brutal war to recapture Chechnya — and, along with it, Russia's national pride. After all, many Russians haven't forgotten that while the West was championing Yeltsin, his government was condemning them to poverty. His brutal and failed war in Chechnya only compounded their misery, and NATO's humiliation of Russia over Kosovo only confirmed that Moscow had lost its superpower status. All of which turned the considerable goodwill toward the West that had existed at the fall of communism into suspicion and hostility. Riding roughshod over Western human rights concerns in Chechnya actually boosted the acting president's standing, if anything.
But while Russian popular sentiment is increasingly anti-Western, Putin is well aware that his goal of rescuing Russia's flailing economy requires a working relationship with the West. Which is why, as TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier notes, "Putin has quickly mastered the fine art of telling the West exactly what it wants to hear and then doing whatever he wants at home, even if the two are quite different." Thus the rash of recent interviews in which Putin suggests he'd like Russia to join NATO or that the reason he's surrounding himself with former KGB colleagues is to fight corruption, while his rhetoric and actions at home don't always conform.
"He waxes nostalgic about the KGB, and that's very worrisome," says TIME Washington correspondent Massimo Calabresi. "The KGB perpetrated some of the greatest horrors of this century, and his failure to criticize it speaks to the moral foundations of his character. And there's further cause for concern in Chechnya, where it appears that war crimes may have been committed and there's no question that an enormous number of civilian casualties were inflicted in a campaign directed by Putin."
While there's little doubt that, even in his best version of himself, Putin is out to strengthen the authority of the state and has a stronger nationalist leanings than Yeltsin, the immediate question remains what he plans to do about corruption. Putin's ruthless campaign in Chechnya has raised expectations that he will deliver swiftly on promises to root out corruption. "He's surrounding himself with clean-cut detective types who, for the most part, have been kept away from the feeding trough," says Meier. "The question is whether they're a squad of 'untouchables' hungry to clean up, or are simply hungry for their turn to feed. Remember, the 'best and brightest' around Yeltsin very quickly proved to be something else."
There's not much reason for optimism in the story of Putin's rise to power, for it was Yeltsin's inner circle of business and political cronies that facilitated the security chief's emergence. "Yeltsin's early retirement and Putin's elevation was orchestrated by arch-oligarch Boris Berezovsky, together with Yeltsin's chief of staff Aleksandr Voloshin and key Kremlin aide Valentin Yumashev," says Meier. "Putin speaks warmly of Berezovsky and thus far there's no sign of any nervousness on the oligarchy's part about the acting president." Indeed, his very first action as acting president was to grant Yeltsin and his family immunity against corruption charges. "Although he's said he was going to clean up, he's also already done a fair amount of looking the other way," says Meier. "An important indicator of his intentions will be whether he jettisons the core of the Yeltsin clique. Remember, Yeltsin's chief of staff and key adviser, Voloshin, is also Putin's chief of staff and key adviser. And Yumashev continues to play a central role in Putin's administration, just as he did in Yeltsin's."
Then again, even if some of Moscow's most powerful vested interests have helped Putin into power, there's no guarantee that he'll do their bidding. "Those who know him well insist the man has an iron will, and that as someone who tended to do as he was told, he's now eager to distance himself from the people who put him in power," says Meier. "So it's quite possible that the will to clean up is part of his vision for Russia, and that he'll act on it." And unlike Yeltsin, who, as he became increasingly reviled by his own electorate, found himself increasingly dependent on the good offices of the media baron Berezovsky, Putin maintains a strong power base of his own in Russia's formidable security services. And a decisive victory on Sunday will also give Putin a strong popular mandate, which could further embolden him to rewrite whatever script his powerful Kremlin backers originally had in mind.
Whether or not Putin bites the hand that has fed him may determine the shape of Moscow's power elite in years to come, but it doesn't much change the reality with which the West now has to deal. Even in the best-case scenario on corruption, Putin remains a tough-minded authoritarian committed to restoring Russia's greatness rather than rebuilding it according to Western desires. "Some sticky confrontations lie ahead," says Meier. "Because Putin is a lot closer to Russian popular opinion than Yeltsin ever was."
And that's a body of thought whose attitude to the West, these days, ranges from wariness to implacable hostility.
PHOTO CREDIT: IVAN SEKRETAREV/AP