Putin the immortal?

Russians sometimes call themselves 'Italians of the North,' and they don’t mean it in a good way. So he wants a strong state, run with a firm hand, even after he has retired, which means that a clear and orderly succession is very important.

Corruption in Putin’s Russia is far less than it was in the 1990s under the first post-Communist president, the Western-backed Boris Yeltsin, a drunken puppet who made ordinary Russians cringe.Photograph courtesy of the World Economic Forum

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

January 20, 2020

Five years ago, somebody posted photographs on the internet showing a man who looked a lot like Vladimir Putin in photographs from 1920 and 1941. In both shots, he was in military uniform, defending the interests of the Russian people then as he still does today.

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