By Jonathan Power

President Vladimir Putin is often painted as an ogre in the world’s media. The seemingly eternal president of Russia has an iron grip on his nation and a foreign policy to match. Yet a large majority of Russians give him their support.

Is it his early economic success? Or is it because of a new stability? Or the nation’s growing self-respect after the ignominious years that followed the demise of the Soviet Union? Or is it a sense of besieged defensiveness because of the advantage the West undoubtedly took of Russia after that demise.

The answer is a bit of all these.

Few in the outside world seem to talk much about what happened after President Boris Yeltsin pushed aside Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union. Few recall the political and economic upheavals of that time and why the stability of Putin’s governance is welcomed by people at large. Perhaps it is because this was a quarter of a century ago and people now ruling the West, and the journalists who report on them, were only teenagers or in their twenties at the time – and suffer from that common Western political disease of lack of perspective and little knowledge of history.

Immediately after Gorbachev’s fall two things happened.Read More »