Putin's democracy a more sober affair

MOSCOW: Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin had sharply divergent characters and policies, but there was also an underlying continuity between Russia's first two post-Soviet leaders, analysts said.
Yeltsin was a maverick remembered by many more for his drunken pranks than his towering policy achievements.

Mr Putin, whose second and constitutionally mandated last term in office ends next year, has instead built up an image as a sober bureaucrat with a skill for bolstering Soviet-style controls.

While Yeltsin oversaw a chaotic period of liberal reforms characterised by all-powerful business oligarchs, Mr Putin pursued the goal of strengthening state control over the economy and tamed the business elites.

"Yeltsin was more a destroyer than a creator. He destroyed totalitarianism and socialism. But he wasn't sufficiently creative to launch a market economy in Russia," said Yevgeny Volk from the Heritage Foundation.

"With Putin, there has been a return to repressive Soviet political methods that disappeared under Yeltsin. Now there is a centralisation of political and media power."

Their images in the West are also markedly different, with Yeltsin seen as the democratic hero who brought an end to the Soviet Union and Mr Putin regarded as a reactionary who has clamped down on democratic freedoms.

Mr Putin, although never directly attacking his predecessor, has been sharply critical of the way in which Russia was run during the 1990s, particularly concerning the mass privatisation programs.

But Mr Putin was also hand-picked as successor by Yeltsin's entourage and their styles of leadership bear similarities that betray an underlying continuity.

Some observers have pointed to a toughening of Yeltsin's rule after he crushed opposition of the Russian parliament to his reforms in 1993 by sending in tanks to attack the building.

Others see the clique that surrounded Yeltsin in his later years and increasingly took over the business of government as similar to the current Kremlin elite of state-run firms and politicians.

Both men oversaw brutal military campaigns to crush separatism in Chechnya that led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths and thousands of military losses.

Some analysts have also seen Mr Putin as having the same broadly liberal policies as Yeltsin but only pursuing them in different ways and in a markedly changed Russia.

"Vladimir Putin is pursuing the democratisation policies of Boris Yeltsin. The only difference is that Putin rules in a period of economic growth," said Boris Kagarlitsky of the Moscow-based Institute on Globalisation.

The two men now favoured to become Russia's next president, deputy prime ministers Dmitry Ivanov and Sergei Ivanov, mirror the contrasts between Yeltsin and Mr Putin, as well as the continuity - both come from the same Kremlin elite.