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Putin could succeed Yeltsin

Tuesday, 30 November 1999 2:31 (GMT)

(UPI NewsAnalysis) - Putin could succeed Yeltsin

By MARTIN SIEFF - UPI National Security Editor

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 (UPI) - As concern grows yet again about the health of ailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin, his natural successor appears to be a man no one in Russia took seriously only three months ago: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

When Yeltsin, 68, appointed Putin, 47, as his fifth prime minister in 18 months last August, no one took the ex-KGB officer seriously as a political force. Yeltsin appeared to have appointed him to be a powerless puppet that could be discarded at will, as happened to two of his predecessors - Sergei Stepashin and Sergei Kiriyenko.

But last week, Putin celebrated his first 100 days in office riding high in public opinion polls ahead of any conceivable challenger. And even the two previous front-runners - political allies Yevgeny Primakov and Yuri Luzhkov - have come to support Putin's tough policy to crush the Chechens.

On Monday, Yeltsin was rushed to Moscow's central Clinical Hospital after doctors detected what may be pneumonia. He suffered a bout of pneumonia just over a year ago in November 1998.

According to Yeltsin's own 1993 Constitution, if the president becomes so incapacitated by ill health that he cannot run the country, the prime minister takes effective control until he recovers. If the president dies in office, the prime minister then enjoys the power of incumbency as acting president for the next three months until new presidential elections can be held.

But if an election were to be held today, even before Putin had the chance to establish himself as president or acting president in the eyes of the Russian people, opinion polls show that he would easily defeat any serious challenger. More than 60 percent of Russians now say they approve of the job he is doing of running their enormous nation.

From the time in August when Yeltsin first selected him to be prime minister, Putin's support as a presidential candidate has risen from "zero to 41 percent" according to analyst Gregory Feifer, writing in the current issue of The Russia Journal, a Moscow weekly.

"Russia's allegedly most popular politician in 30 years has the support of the army as well as political parties bitterly opposed to the Kremlin that appointed him," Feifer wrote.

"Putin's rise in popularity has certainly been impressive," said Keith Bush, top expert on Russian and former Soviet affairs at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies. Putin has impressed Russians in two key areas. Although he has not initiated any economic reform, the economy has slowly but significantly strengthened, largely because of rising world oil prices.

Last week, world crude oil prices reached $27 a barrel - the highest level in nine years, since before the January 1991 Gulf War. As crude oil is Russia's largest and most important hard currency earner, this has had crucial and positive effects on the country's short-term financial stability.

During the decade of corrupt and bungled transformation to a free market system, Russians have been impoverished to a degree that even dwarfed the sufferings of Americans during the Great Depression.

Therefore any good economic news in recent years has been rare and precious for them, and Putin has benefited from this. "After all the high expectations and disasters of the period of privatization, it is not enough for a head of government to just do no harm. This will make him appear impressive compared with most of his predecessors," said Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a leading Washington foreign policy think tank.

Second, the Russian war in Chechnya has so far been conducted with remarkable success and relatively low casualties. According to official figures, around 500 Russians have died so far. Russians have been starved of any major battlefield success since their victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 - the greatest and most costly triumph in any land war in recorded history. And no major military operation has been carried out successfully since the bloodless occupation of Czechoslovakia 31 years ago in 1968.

Coming after the humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, the collapse of communism, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Russian domestic economy, the success of military operations in Chechnya so far has reawakened Russian patriotism. It has appeared to defy the predictions of some Western analysts that the Russian state itself was doomed to continued powerlessness and eventual disintegration.

Putin has also proven politically canny in translating his popular support into significant coalition terms.

He has won the important support of the Russian general staff, who are convinced that Yeltsin and Alexander Lebed, the Russian Security Council chief at the time, robbed them of victory against the Chechens in the 1994-96 war.

This support is crucial.

Although many Western analysts have seen Lebed as a possible military strong man to rule Russia, he was always an outsider, disliked and distrusted, to the inner circle of senior officers that really runs the army. The core of this group are the senior three-star colonel-generals who command the nation's military districts and who run the general staff in Moscow. Lebed was never one of them. He was a two-star paratroop general who was regarded by most of the insiders as not bright enough or educated enough - and certainly not emotionally stable enough - to be one of them.

Putin, by contrast, was a senior KGB officer who has provided the political leadership and approval for the tough policies the top army commanders wanted to carry out in Chechnya. According to Moscow insiders, he enjoys their trust and support.

Putin's rapid rise has alarmed Boris Berezovsky, the most powerful billionaire in Russia and a strong influence in Yeltsin's inner circle. At first, Berezovsky appeared to welcome Putin's appointment as a way to keep the men he really feared - former Prime Minister Primakov and Moscow Mayor Luzhkov - from establishing an unstoppable political momentum in their drive to win power in next year's presidential elections.

But over the past month, Berezovsky's national television network and the newspapers he controls have treated Putin as a non-person and instead boosted a political nonentity, Emergency Affairs Minister Sergei Shoigu, as the next leader of Russia.

Yeltsin - backed by Berezovsky - had carried out such shameless coups before when he plucked Kiriyenko and Stepashin out of obscure posts to become interim puppet prime ministers. When Putin was first appointed, he appeared to belong to that line too. But Berezovsky's media drive appears to have been losing steam and before flying to the European security summit in Istanbul earlier in November, Yeltsin publicly and energetically repeated his endorsement of Putin.

Now, even Primakov and Luzhkov have come out in support of Putin's policy in Chechnya. Experts on Russian politics caution that Putin continues to serve at Yeltsin's pleasure and that the tough, resilient old president could still dispense with his services as he has every prime minister he ever appointed before.

"It is important to remember that Putin continues to serve at Yeltsin's pleasure and Yeltsin in the past has not hesitated to fire prime ministers when he felt they were becoming too popular for his comfort," said Simes of the Nixon Center.

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The Bear stirs from his slumber.

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-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), November 30, 1999

Answers

All it would take is a nationalist lunatic like Putin, Zhirnovsky or Lebed to come to power in the Soviet Union. Within a week, the Red Army would re-occupy most of Eastern Europe and the world would be on the brink of war.

Make no mistake! The Soviet Bear is not dead nor in a deep sleep. It won't take very much to make the bear stir in fury.

-- Irving (irvingf@myremarq.com), November 30, 1999.

The Soviet bear is dead but the Russian bear lives on. Does Putin have a brother named Ras?

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), November 30, 1999.