Free Republic

When the compact figure of Vladimir Putin strode onto the world stage after his success in the 2000 presidential elections, a tremor of anxiety passed through the collective body of Western leaders. Gone was the boozy, bumbling, free-wheeling Boris Yeltsin, clown-prince of post-Soviet Russia who had unaccountably found himself in the box seat at the historic moment when his country was rolling up the Communist empire. The new leader of the new Russia was his polar opposite. A former KGB colonel, Putin was the identikit Soviet-style apparatchik: hard-eyed, unsmiling, tightly disciplined. And he had a black-belt in judo to prove...