Putin Explains His Decision to Seek Presidency

In a giant article in daily newspaper Izvestia, the strongman Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin cast himself as the man who prevented Chechnya and the North Caucasus from breaking away from Russia, arguing he is now ready to lead the country into a new more sophisticated era of development.
"In 1999 when I became prime minister and then president our state was in a deep systemic crisis," he wrote.
"(But) it was precisely the group of like-minded people who the author of this article was destined to gather together and lead that pulled Russia away from the dead end of civil war, broke the spine of terrorism, restored the country's territorial integrity and constitutional order, and revived the economy."
Denigrating what he described as a recurring desire by part of the country's elite over the centuries to make a sudden dash for change or even revolution, he presented himself as the tried and tested guarantor of stability.


Mr. Putin’s document painted a gloomy picture of mounting global turmoil, in which economic shocks are converging with toxic social and ethnic tension. He said other nations — presumably the United States — are intentionally feeding this process by supporting uprisings like those in the Middle East. He cast Russia as a necessary interlocutor between the West and the East.


“In a number of regions, we hear the declarations of aggressively destructive forces, ultimately threatening the stability of all the peoples of the earth,” Mr. Putin’s document said. “Objectively, their allies turn out to be those states that are trying to ‘export democracy’ with the assistance of forceful, military means.”


“Under these conditions, Russia can and must worthily play the role dictated by its civic model, its great history, geography and cultural genome, which organically combines the fundamental basis of European civilization and many centuries’ experience of cooperation with the East, where new centers of economic and political influence are developing,” he said.


He returned repeatedly to the notion of majority rule, which he argued is the bedrock of the democratic process. He took a dim view of the mobilization that took place in December, suggesting that voters who were inspired by the unusual street protests will soon become disenchanted and turn away from direct political action.


His tone shifted from scholarly to irritated at that point, arguing that the dissenters should look beyond the elections and concern themselves with Russia’s long-term policy choices.


“Today people are talking about various forms of renewal of the political process,” he wrote. “But what are we supposed to be negotiating about? About how our power should be structured? Whether it should be given to ‘better people?’ And beyond that — what? What should we do?”