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All summer the Family has kept a fearful eye on the forces advancing on the Kremlin. Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow's mayor and the chief (if undeclared) aspirant to Yeltsin's throne, has long been the Kremlin's top rival. In early August, when Luzhkov's party allied with a bloc of Russia's muscular regional leaders (once loyal Yeltsin vassals), Yeltsin was infuriated. The alliance laid bare how fast and far power was draining from the Kremlin. Luzhkov's courtship of Yevgeni Primakov, the former Prime Minister sacked in May, to lead his party in the Duma campaign further caused Yeltsin to fulminate. The Family fears a Primakov-Luzhkov pairing could take not only the Duma this December but also the Kremlin next July.
Stepashin, meanwhile, had turned coy about his own presidential ambitions. Like Primakov before him, he had become too popular for the Kremlin's liking. Over the weekend, as polls showing Stepashin pulling even with Luzhkov landed on Voloshin's desk, and militant separatists in the Caucasus reappeared on Russian TV screens, the Family gathered and Yeltsin pulled the trigger. "Stepashin made no major mistakes," says a Kremlin aide. "He simply failed to become the good dictator."
Enter Putin, best known for his anonymity. A slight man of few words, the 46-year-old is a veteran of Soviet intelligence . Though he is known to have spent 15 years in East Germany as a KGB operative, little else has emerged about him. Colleagues who have worked by his side know almost nothing of his resume or private life. When a Russian TV interviewer, struggling to introduce Yeltsin's chosen heir to her audience, asked Putin for "a few words" about his family, he gave her a few: "Wife, two children. Two girls, 13 and 14 years old." Curtness, colleagues say, masks his real nature. He's a tough guy, they say, but an enlightened, modern one. Still, in addition to a fondness for wrestling and judo, he professes admiration for the iron discipline of Yuri Andropov, the former KGB boss who ruled the U.S.S.R. in the early 1980s. On the 85th anniversary of Andropov's birth in June, Putin laid flowers on his grave at the Kremlin wall and cited Andropov's enduring popularity as proof "there's a demand for people like Andropov--honest, decent and tough."
For all his years in the KGB, Putin merited little notice among his colleagues. "He did what he was told," says a former high-ranking intelligence officer. Remarkably, in 1975, after getting his law degree in Leningrad, Putin entered the KGB and was sent abroad on his first posting. "It couldn't have been pure luck," says retired KGB Lieut. Colonel Konstantin Preobrazhensky. "He must have had family connections." As the U.S.S.R. unwound, Putin returned to Leningrad and rose through the city system to national power.