Power suits him

Those who have recently encountered Vladimir Putin note that he is tired - he looks tired and aged. When he spoke at the opening of the monument to Boris Yeltsin at the end of April, it even seemed that he was unwell. Journalist Vladimir Solovyov, in his book on Putin, suggests that he has back problems because his favorite move is the throw over the back from the knees - in judo they are usually parried with a knee thrust, which injures the spine. According to another version, Putin injured his back while already president, landing badly after jumping from a helicopter while skiing.

During these eight very difficult years, Putin had a lot to get tired of. Anyone would be tired. He certainly is not joking and is not cunning with himself, comparing himself with a slave in the galleys. The further, the more difficult it was for the second president of Russia, and he had fewer and fewer interlocutors to discuss the problems of the state and his own. The last year or two had obviously been very difficult for him. Putin had no one with whom to share how and to whom he would transfer - if he transfers at all - power in Russia. Putin could not trust anyone. And now, having liberated the Kremlin immediately after the solemn inauguration of his successor, he moves to the White House and still cannot afford to relax and have a good rest.

FACE MASK

Before the inauguration, no one still knew anything, and Putin was asked why he and Dmitry Medvedev did not tell their subordinates in advance who would be removed and who would be appointed to what position. To keep them on their toes, Putin replied, hinting that he simply did not believe them: extra information in the wrong hands is always a risk. Putin developed his signature style of complete secrecy not by chance: having worked as an official in St. Petersburg and the Kremlin, he came to power with distrust of politicians and political institutions. “He sincerely believes that Russia cannot be a self-organizing system and must be controlled from above,” says Boris Berezovsky about him today.

Putin himself said at the last meeting with Western political scientists that the St. Petersburg parliamentarism of the 1990s left a heavy impression on him. And as his self-confidence grew in him, he understood more and more clearly that, except for himself, he had no one to rely on, and therefore he took all power into his hands. “We have to do a lot of things manually,” he admitted to journalists not so long ago, drawing analogies with Franklin Roosevelt. And Putin himself, the further, the more willingly deceived and cunning - since you can’t fully trust anyone, then don’t expect sincerity from him either. Too much responsibility for him.

He is always wearing a mask, observers quickly concluded, and he often puts on performances. Newsweek has already described how the head of Transneft, Semyon Vainshtok, feigned surprise in Irkutsk in April 2006, when Putin suddenly proposed moving a projected oil pipeline away from Lake Baikal - Vainshtok knew what would happen. A year ago, Putin was asked about the situation with Manana Aslamazyan, the head of the Educated Media Foundation, who was put on the wanted list. And who is this, Putin asked, although he was definitely in the know. And who is this, Putin asked in exactly the same way when they recently started talking to him about Svetlana Bakhmina, a lawyer for Yukos, who is serving a seven-year sentence. He could not help but know who it was, but those, in his opinion, were the rules of the game.

Putin is like a mirror, officials have been talking about him for a long time: he tells everyone what they want to hear from him. In January 2004, the head of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, came to a meeting with Putin with a tough talk about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had been arrested in October. Instead of 30 minutes, the meeting lasted an hour, and Wolfensohn, according to a source in banking circles, came out satisfied and said with emotion that Putin was very worried about the state of affairs in Israel.

ACCESS TO THE BODY

Putin is not just used to being cunning, he often hesitated and did not make a decision for a long time. And having decided something, he could change his mind later, after listening to someone else, sources say; for example, this was the case with a single investigative body, the creation of which Putin announced to his team in 2000 and which was never created. “And it became clear that if Putin has decided something, this is not a dogma,” explains a source close to the Kremlin. This, in the opinion of many officials, is the huge apparatus power of Putin's aide Igor Sechin, who always had access to Putin's documents.

In February 2007, after removing Sergei Ivanov from the post of defense minister, Putin ordered the preparation of a decree appointing Yury Baluyevsky as minister, the Kremlin official claims, but the decree got stuck in Sechin's office; he obtained an audience, and on the same evening a decree was signed appointing Anatoly Serdyukov as Minister of Defense. Apparently, according to the same or very similar scheme, Vladimir Ustinov became Prosecutor General in May 2000 instead of Dmitry Kozak. Well, the investigative committee was removed from the Prosecutor General's Office when Putin replaced Ustinov, and Sechin's group was already interested in weakening the institution of the prosecutor's office.

Putin easily allowed himself to be convinced that the NTV channel showed live the storming of the Theater Center on Dubrovka. And although it has been proven that this is not true, judging by the conviction with which Putin spoke about it, he apparently sincerely believed in it, one of the TV journalists believes. In the same way, and many journalists remember this, two years earlier Putin had accused Berezovsky of having been told that ORT had hired prostitutes to pose as relatives of sailors from the sunken Kursk submarine, although no prostitutes did not have.

Observers are sure that Putin used the tragedy with Kursk to establish control over Channel One and get rid of Berezovsky, Nord-Ost came in handy to fire NTV CEO Boris Jordan and change the line to NTV. In the same way, after the Beslan terrorist attack, Putin carried out by that time his long-planned, according to Newsweek, cancellation of gubernatorial elections.

THIS IS A CONSPIRACY

Putin is always afraid of being manipulated, the journalist Solovyov noted in his book. Putin was a suspicious president. "It's a conspiracy," he told Dmitry Medvedev, according to Newsweek, when, even before Khodorkovsky's arrest, he approached him on behalf of five or six Kremlin officials to stop the Yukos affair. It is still unknown why, in the summer of 2006, Putin suddenly replaced Prosecutor General Ustinov. According to one version, he became aware that Ustinov was aiming for the presidency with the support of Igor Sechin and Yuri Luzhkov. Another hypothesis is that in one of the cases that Ustinov took on, Putin saw some kind of threat to himself personally.

In February 2004, before the presidential elections, at a meeting with members of the government, Putin proposed to turn off gas to Belarus for a day. Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov objected, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov supported Kasyanov. A disgruntled Putin, the source says, announced that he had made a decision, quickly called off the meeting, and has not met with Kasyanov since. On February 19, Gazprom for the first time turned off gas in the Belarusian direction, and on February 24, Kasyanov was suddenly dismissed. By that meeting, Putin most likely already suspected Kasyanov of a conspiracy: Putin was convinced that the presidential elections could somehow be disrupted and then the prime minister would become and. O. president.

A year later, Kasyanov completely became an outcast, after, from Putin's point of view, he opposed him without declaring war, although there was supposedly an agreement that he would warn the president if he went into politics. At that time, ex-Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko had just come to power in Ukraine, and the Kremlin seriously feared an orange revolution on the Ukrainian model. The mania was so strong that at a meeting in the Kremlin at that time they almost rejected a layout of a greeting card with the image of two battlements of the Kremlin wall, in which someone saw Kasyanov's initials.

PAIN POINT

“Let's sit down, not sugar,” Khodorkovsky told reporters off the record before his arrest. Of course, he made a mistake in his calculations, not thinking that he would be given eight years in prison with the impending prospect of a new term, and in early 2005, before the verdict, in an interview with Newsweek from Matrosskaya Tishina, he willingly made plans for the future. And right up to the verdict, he was sure, says his former employee, that he was the victim of a conspiracy of Putin's aides Igor Sechin and Viktor Ivanov, and Putin had nothing to do with it. Allegedly, Prosecutor General Ustinov suggested arresting the oligarch to the president, and he replied: "Act according to the law." Sources close to the Kremlin also say that Putin did not have a clear plan in the Yukos affair, he followed circumstances and instinct.

According to some reports, when in April 2006 one of the prisoners cut Khodorkovsky's face with a cobbler's knife; Putin was shocked, allegedly summoned the Minister of Justice Yury Chaika and even demanded to organize something like house arrest, but then Sechin intervened again - and Putin backed off. This is a legend, Khodorkovsky's lawyer Yuri Schmidt doubts, although, of course, it is important for Putin that nothing happens to his main personal opponent and that he does not pass for the killer of his enemies.

There is a whole cemetery on them, with muscles on his face, Putin recently explained why he does not sympathize with the former head of Yukos. Having long won, internally Putin is still at war with Khodorkovsky. “There is tension in him,” agrees politician Boris Nemtsov. “Khodorkovsky is his pain point.” Putin could be indecisive in small matters, but in the main, on the contrary, he was bold and decisive, as in the case of Yukos, because in 2003 it was not clear whether he would win in the end or not, even if the oligarch would sit for a long time. No one expected in 2001 that Putin would turn around 180 degrees in foreign policy and call George W. Bush on September 11 with words of support. Finally, getting involved headlong into the second war in Chechnya, Putin could hardly be sure that one way or another he would win here too.

BOSS

After becoming president, Putin was always and everywhere late - this is how he understood his prerogative as a boss. In the Kremlin, they called him that - “chief”, “chief”. So far, he has never been late. He is the boss, he can, FSB director Putin once told the then head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Sergei Stepashin, in the reception room of Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, when Primakov had already been late for half an hour and a disgruntled Stepashin wanted to leave, recalls an informed source. With subordinates, Putin can be ironic and attentive, or he can be quick-tempered and harsh, people who know him say.

Putin finally chose Dmitry Medvedev as his successor and told him about it, as is now clear, somewhere at the end of August 2007: it was then that Medvedev became inspired and began to work more actively. Apart from them, no one knew anything, and Putin did not inform Sergei Ivanov, another likely successor, in advance, who learned the news along with everyone else and was offended, the sources say. Grigory Rapota, who was appointed last October as plenipotentiary in the Southern District, according to various sources, also learned about his appointment from television news.

Journalist Sergei Dorenko talks about his meetings with Putin, which showed how he is always ready to break into a cry. “He eats his own lips and cheeks,” Dorenko figuratively draws his emotionality. Another source recalls how Putin lost his temper immediately after learning that one of his subordinates was in closer contact than he should have been with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko. Ukrainian political scientist Dmitry Vydrin says that when the chairman of the Ukrainian Football Federation under Putin offered to unite with Russia to host the European Championship, if it doesn’t work out with Poland, he looked at him with surprise: “Do you yourself understand what you are talking about?” “He knew how to find harsh, offensive and unusual words for a diplomat,” says Vydrin.

It happened that the ministers waited for one and a half to two hours for Putin while he went about his business - and it was not always possible to understand whether the master of intrigue Putin was doing this out of inattention or guided by other considerations. Warring subordinates he could push against each other at his door. Newsweek already wrote that when the head of the State Drug Control Service, Viktor Cherkesov, put operational materials on top FSB officers on Putin’s table, Putin immediately called Viktor Ivanov, and then Cherkesov also ran into Sechin, and they understood - if, of course, they did not know this before, - Where did Putin get compromising evidence.

Quarrels within his team, Putin tries not to lead to the victory of either side, preferring to divide and rule, forming from his closest associates - almost all of them have known Putin and come from St. Petersburg for a very long time - something like a special caste. They can do anything, they are not punished, the sources explain, under Putin they will always be all right. Of these officials and businessmen, Putin is most likely to “you” only with Igor Sechin - with all the influence of Sechin, they never had a very close relationship. And over the years of his presidency, Putin was completely disappointed in new friends, with the exception of Silvio Berlusconi, Sergey Dorenko is sure.

THE STATE IS ME

“He arrived at the hospital, quickly said hello and immediately went to the wards to the wounded,” recalls a Beslan doctor who was on duty the night after the assault. - He looked so, probably confused and asked the victims to “hold on”. I approached the headmistress and was even delighted, as it seemed to me, when he saw that she was ready to speak. These shots made it to the news releases. Formally, for some reason, the anti-terrorist headquarters was headed by the head of the republic, Alexander Dzasokhov, and the head of the local FSB, Valery Andreev, but in reality, before and during the assault, there was a complete mess. A year later, Putin told the Beslan mothers that he had arrived at night after the assault, because if he had appeared earlier, it would have been even worse - everyone would have been busy with his person.

He was very worried, they assured him later in the Kremlin. “The state is me,” Putin could probably admit. For him, both of these entities gradually formed into a single whole, and he perceived everything on a personal level, being sure that one, through difficulties, was dragging the country forward. Such an approach required unification and subjugation, and Putin later said about Beslan that he would conduct an internal investigation: he would figure out who was to blame. The report on the official parliamentary investigation was quietly adopted by the Federation Council on New Year's Eve - on purpose on an emergency basis and so that the Beslan mothers did not have time to organize a protest. And Putin ordered the creation of a special anti-terrorist commission in each region.

At such crucial moments, Putin considered criticism and disloyalty a betrayal of national interests and recently called the leaders of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov and the LDPR Vladimir Zhirinovsky patriots, because in difficult times these oppositionists stood with him on the same side of the barricades. Politician Irina Khakamada recalls how, during Nord-Ost, officials advised her not to go there because Putin did not like it, and then he said that it was bloody PR. He took the murder of Akhmat Kadyrov on May 9, 2004 as his personal tragedy, writes the journalist Solovyov in his book. However, this was already true, without witnesses, according to Putin.

WITH BELIEF IN YOURSELF

“Every year on the birthday and death of Sobchak, we meet [Putin] at the cemetery,” says Anatoly Sobchak’s widow, Lyudmila Narusova. You do not work well, so Sobchak knew how to agitate, so a year ago, even before the elections to the Duma, at a closed meeting, Putin addressed the activists of United Russia. The further, the more willingly and with growing reverence Putin spoke of both Sobchak and Boris Yeltsin - his two godfathers, who each at one time saw in him a true leader and brought him to power. “Putin's respect for Yeltsin grew as he immersed himself in the presidency and understood what he had to face in 1991,” explains Senator Mikhail Margelov.

Approximately the same thing can be said differently: Putin's respect for Yeltsin and Sobchak grew in parallel with respect for himself. He has changed in eight years. At the beginning of the journey, he presented himself as a hired manager. But faith in the power of the state nurtured from him a leader, a man of mission. Vladimir Putin is sincerely convinced that by an effort of will and exertion of all his strength he has raised the country from its knees, but is not yet ready to release the ship he has built into the open sea.

Daria Guseva, Igor Ivanov, Zaur Farniev (Kommersant) took part in the preparation of the material

Accused, sit down

0.62% of the population of Russia is serving a sentence in places of deprivation of liberty. This is the second figure in the world after the United States (0.76% of the population). Following a slight decrease in the number of prisoners since 2005, growth has begun again - about 80% of convictions in Russian courts mean imprisonment, and 76.8% of those deprived of liberty are sentenced to more than 3 years.

off road map

There are 5.3 km of paved federal and regional highways per 1,000 inhabitants of Russia, which is 2.5 times less than in the United States, and almost 3 times less than in France. Even taking into account the increase in funding for the construction and reconstruction of motorways, their density by 2010 will be the same as now. This means that in 2010 there will be an average of 44 cars per 1 km in the settlement along which the public transport route passes, and by 2025 - 92.

presidential army

Under Mikhail Gorbachev, one representative of the corps of state power accounted for 220 inhabitants of the country. In 2006 - already for 90 people. The main increase in the administrative apparatus comes at the expense of the regions - first of all, these are employees of regional representative offices of federal departments (from 483,700 in 2000 to 786,000 in 2006), as well as employees of the judiciary and prosecutors at all levels (in 1.7 times in the same period).

come in large numbers

The shortage of labor force in Russia is compensated by migrant workers - only according to official data, in 2007 the number of labor migrants in Russia increased by 88%. The number of illegal immigrants, according to various estimates, ranges from 5 to 12 million people. This, in turn, provokes the growth of aggressive xenophobia.

An endangered species

According to the UN, in 2050 there will be the same number of dependents (old people and children) per 1,000 able-bodied Russians. According to the World Bank, a pension crisis awaits Russia as early as 2025 - the country simply cannot cope with providing for the older generation. This is unlikely to be helped by the baby boom that began last year. Although Russia has the highest birth rate growth in 25 years, the children of 2007 will barely turn 18 in 2025, and the turning point in Russian demography, when population decline will replace growth, according to the most optimistic government forecasts, will take place only in 2011.

A child without a garden

The first thing young parents should do after receiving a birth certificate for a child is to go and enroll him in a kindergarten. The number of preschool institutions in Russia has halved since 1990, now there are about a million potential kindergarteners in the queue, and this despite the fact that the institutions themselves are overcrowded - with the norm for the size of a group of 10-15 children, on average there are now about 30 of them.

Life has become more fun

Alcohol consumption statistics in Russia are maintained by Rosstat in terms of retail sales. Even it shows an increase in the consumption of strong drinks in terms of pure alcohol - 10 liters per year for each inhabitant of the country, including children. According to the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry, taking into account illegal alcohol, Russia has reached an indicator of 15 liters of annual per capita consumption. There are only 2.3 million registered alcoholics in Russia, every third death in the country has a direct or indirect cause of alcohol.

Unhealthy Lifestyle

In 2006, 76 out of every 100 people in the country received a first diagnosis, that is, they had an acute or chronic disease. According to the Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Health (RLMZ), only half of adult Russians (52%) can be called healthy, another 26% are “unhealthy”, and 18% are “sick”.

Double GDP

On May 16, 2003, speaking before the Federal Assembly, Vladimir Putin proclaimed the goal of doubling the GDP in 10 years. Nominally, the task was overfulfilled – in 2007 GDP in billions of rubles exceeded the 2002 figure by 3 times. But taking into account inflation over the past period, GDP growth in monetary terms amounted to only 29.6%.

How rich

The key to Russia's economic success in the 2000s was high prices for raw materials, the country's main export commodity. In general, Russian exports in 2007 amounted to $352.5 billion, including $165.6 billion worth of oil and oil products sold, compared with $14 billion in the crisis year of 1998.

money to money

Foreign business believed in Russian stability. Back in 2000, Russia shared third place with Pakistan in The Economist's ranking of countries with the greatest economic risk, second only to Myanmar and Zimbabwe. In 2007, the world agencies Moody's and S&P confirmed the very high credit ratings of Russia, predicting its development as "stable". According to the World Investment Report 2007 (UN), in terms of attracted direct investment, Russia ranks 10th in the world and 2nd (after China) among emerging economies.

Are debts short?

By the end of the 1990s, according to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the external public debt exceeded $180 billion, almost 100% of GDP. For 8 years, the public debt has decreased by 3.7 times to 8% of GDP. However, Russia's total external debt in absolute terms over the same period increased 2.5 times to $459.6 billion. This was due to the growth of external commercial debt (including state corporations), which has now approached 40% of GDP.

Pocket wider

During the reign of Vladimir Putin, the number of people with incomes below the subsistence level in Russia has halved. However, social inequality is also growing - the 10% of the wealthiest residents of Russia receive 16.8 times more than the 10% of the poorest. Most of the income of Russians is wages (70.3%), another 11% are social payments, and only 10% of the income of residents of a country of developing capitalism is income from entrepreneurial activities.

8 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AND 29 DAYS

On August 9, 1999, FSB director Vladimir Putin was appointed acting prime minister. On the same day, President Boris Yeltsin named him his successor. The FOM study showed that 74% of citizens did not know anything about Putin at that time. “Something heard” another 18%. Only 10% believed that Putin's chances of becoming president were great. On March 14, 2000, Putin won the first round of the presidential election with 52.64%.

On July 8, 2000, for the first time, Putin delivered his annual address to the Federal Assembly, in which he outlined the main priorities - a free market, an effective state, and the dictatorship of law. The result of eight years: the concentration of capital in the hands of state corporations, the growth of the corps of officials by 1.5 times. The first manifestation of the dictatorship of the law was the persecution of the oligarchs - they started with Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky.

On August 12, 2000, during exercises in the Barents Sea, 118 sailors of the Kursk submarine could not be saved. Independent media condemned the president for not interrupting his Sochi vacation during the rescue operation. Putin remembered this story for a long time. He not only came later to Vidyaevo, the home port of the Kursk. On May 7, 2008, the widow of the boat commander, Irina Lyachina, was invited to the Kremlin for the inauguration of Dmitry Medvedev.

On December 25, 2000, Putin signed a package of laws on state symbols. The emblem and flag remained the same as under Yeltsin, and the revival of the Soviet anthem with a slightly modified text, which was prepared by the permanent hymnographer Sergei Mikhalkov, made a splash. The intelligentsia was indignant, but the majority of citizens approved of Putin's decision. Later, the red flag became the official banner of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

On January 1, 2001, a flat income tax rate of 13% was introduced. This is the lowest tax in the world, except for the United Arab Emirates, where there is no such tax at all. In the US, for comparison, citizens pay up to 30%. There is a result: at the end of last year, only 12% of working citizens of Russia admitted to sociologists that they still receive their salaries in envelopes, that is, they live like in the Emirates.

April 2001 - crisis on NTV. After the transfer of the channel from Vladimir Gusinsky to the structures of Gazprom, a new leadership came to NTV. Some of the journalists headed by Yevgeny Kiselev resigned with a scandal. And although later, with the participation of Berezovsky, who moved to London, there were attempts to broadcast on the sixth button, for the Western public, the NTV reform became a symbol of Putin's victory over freedom of speech.

On July 11, 2001, an updated law "On political parties" was adopted, aimed at eliminating small parties. There is a limit of 10,000 members. However, already at the end of 2004, the Duma majority of United Russia brought this figure to 50,000, while simultaneously changing the electoral legislation: 7% as a barrier to entering the State Duma, a ban on electoral blocs, the abolition of the turnout threshold and the columns "Against all", etc. d.

On October 25, 2001 , Putin signed the Land Code, and agrarian reform began. For the first time, forms of private ownership of land were clearly prescribed. For example, the flourishing of cottage construction in recent years is the result of the introduction of agricultural land into commercial circulation. By separate decisions, industrialists were allowed to buy land for enterprises at reduced prices, and summer residents were allowed to register land plots under a simplified procedure.

On January 16, 2002, the first meeting of the Federation Council was held in a new composition. Without governors, but with their representatives and representatives of the legislative assemblies of the regions. Speaker Yegor Stroev, who ensured the peaceful surrender of the upper house of parliament, received the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, first degree. The new speaker was Putin's old acquaintance from St. Petersburg, Sergei Mironov, until then almost unknown to anyone.

On October 23, 2002, Chechen fighters took hostage about a thousand spectators and participants in the musical "Nord-Ost" in Moscow, in the Theater Center on Dubrovka. Politician Yavlinsky, journalist Politkovskaya, singer Kobzon and others went to the terrorists as negotiators. 129 people became victims of the terrorist attack and the assault.

On October 25, 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the Yukos oil company, was arrested. Even earlier, his partner Platon Lebedev went to jail. In May 2005, they were sentenced to 8 years for fraud, misappropriation of other people's property, tax evasion, etc. The main property of Yukos, after a series of dubious transactions, passed to the state-owned Rosneft. Now the convicts are in the pre-trial detention center of Chita, a new criminal case is being considered.

On March 25, 2004, a law was signed on the formation of a new subject of the Russian Federation, resulting from the merger of the Perm Region and the Komi-Permyatsky District. The process of unification of “matryoshka regions” launched by Putin is proceeding with difficulty. Poor provinces (Koryakia, Evenkia, Taimyr, etc.) disappear from the map without any problems. But the oil- and gas-rich Khanty-Mansiysk and Yamalo-Nenets okrugs fought off the agrarian Tyumen region.

On September 1, 2004, militants seized School No. 1 in Beslan. 330 people died. Beslan was the reason for the cancellation of the gubernatorial elections - Putin spoke about this in an address to the nation about the terrorist attack. Sociological data showed that citizens do not want to give up the right to choose governors, but there were no noisy protests. However, the expected hard cleansing did not happen - Putin reappointed governors more often than removed them.

On January 1, 2005, the law on the monetization of benefits came into force, provoking mass street protests. The rallies were attended not only by pensioners, but also by young people from radical organizations. The authorities were forced to make concessions in the form of subsidies for travel tickets, etc. Social reforms slowed down. Society has a new image of a hated official - the head of the Ministry of Health and Social Development Mikhail Zurabov.

On September 5, 2005, Putin spoke for the first time about national projects. Two weeks later, the Council for the Implementation of National Projects under the President was formed, and next year four programs were launched: on health, housing, education and agriculture. Future President Medvedev visited cowsheds, and peasants lined up for loans. New ambulances - they also write on them that these are not just cars, but a national project.

January 2006 - cut off gas to Ukraine. Gazprom actively participated in the public debate, arguing that it was prices that used to be wrong, but now they have become market ones. History repeated itself a year later with Belarus. Russia was rapidly losing friends in the CIS: a transport and postal blockade of Georgia was introduced, deportations of Georgian citizens to their homeland began; for political reasons, the import of wines from Moldova was stopped.

On July 10, 2006 in Ingushetia, near the village of Ekazhevo, an explosion killed Shamil Basayev, who was associated with all the major terrorist attacks of the last decade. Before him, other leaders of the Chechen resistance went to the next world - Aslan Maskhadov was killed during the capture, the Jordanian Khattab was poisoned with a letter treated with poisons, Brigadier General Gelaev was shot dead in a mountain gorge, and the ideologist Yandarbiev was blown up in Qatar.

In September 2006, Chechen pogroms began in the Karelian regional center of Kondopoga, provoked by the murder of two local residents in the Chaika restaurant. Kondopoga has become a symbol of the nationalist movement, now this word is chanted in the so-called. "Russian marches". In 2007, 563 people suffered from ethnically motivated crimes in Russia, including 61 people who were killed (according to the Sova Information and Analysis Center).

On November 23, 2006, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko died in an English clinic, poisoned by polonium. Scotland Yard suspects Russian Andrey Lugovoy, who is associated with the special services, in the murder. Moscow refuses to extradite Lugovoy, citing the Constitution. London believes that the rules can be changed. “Their brains need to be changed” is another Putin aphorism, born out of the new Cold War with Britain.

On February 10, 2007, at a conference in Munich, Putin uttered harsh words against the United States, protesting against plans for NATO expansion to the east and deployment of missile defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland. Subsequently, Russia announced its withdrawal from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and sent an envoy to Brussels nationalist Dmitry Rogozin. Strategic bombers of the Russian Air Force took up combat duty over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans.

March 3 2007 , Petersburg, the "March of Dissent" was held, which became the first in a series of similar ones throughout Russia. They became a continuation of the activities of the Other Russia coalition, conceived for the sake of uniting the right and left, dissatisfied with the regime. The authorities reacted painfully: cases of violence against demonstrators were recorded. In Moscow, they still catch everyone who goes on the march, but in St. Petersburg and Samara they were allowed - and the dissenters have diminished.

On May 17, 2007, the Act of Canonical Communion between the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad was signed in Moscow. The ROCOR became an "integral self-governing part" of the ROCOR. Spiritually, the two Churches became one, but the foreigners retained full administrative and economic independence. Thus, an end was put to the split, which lasted more than 80 years.

July 5, 2007 Sochi was elected the capital of the Olympic Games. Subsequently, the State Duma adopted amendments, including to the Land Code, regulating the transfer of land from individuals and organizations for the construction of sports facilities and infrastructure. Yuri Luzhkov immediately proposed to expand the "Olympic law" and allow any subject of the federation to voluntarily-compulsorily withdraw land from citizens for their needs.

May 7–8, 2008 Vladimir Putin is again prime minister. The new President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, in an address to the people, speaks of the further development of civil and economic freedoms, a just state, as well as true respect for the law.

ONLY NUMBERS

Inflation during the years of Vladimir Putin's rule amounted to 178% , that is, consumer prices increased by 2.8 times.

There were 4.8 million unemployed in Russia as of March 2008. This is 1.5 times less than in 2000 (7.1 million).

2498 charges lost the strategic nuclear forces of the Russian Federation in 2000-2007. (this is 43% of the former nuclear arsenal). The number of carriers (missiles, bombers) was reduced by 405 units (35% of the fleet).

1.34 million young professionals graduated from Russian universities in 2007, twice as many as 8 years ago (635,000 in 2000)

66 years is the average life expectancy in Russia, 12 years less than in the USA. Since 2000, this indicator has increased by 1 year.

Russia ranks 143rd in the fight against corruption in the Transparency International rating. With a score of 2.3 on a 10-point scale, where 0 is an indicator of absolute corruption, Russia neighbors the Gambia, Indonesia and Togo.

by 9 times The number of organizations participating in the parliamentary elections has decreased . If in 1999 139 public associations had the right to take part in the election race, then in 2007 only 15 parties had the right to take part in the election race.

Sources: Rosstat; Report “The Crisis of the Russian Army”, Institute for National Strategy; Transparency International; CEC RF; Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation.