Profile: Vladimir Putin: Vladimir Putin's response to external pressure and internal unrest is nvariably ruthless - unlike his G8 counterparts, writes Chris Stephen in Moscow
When he was parachuted into the presidency on New Year's Eve, 1999, Vladimir Vladimirich Putin took the world by surprise. Most had assumed the KGB was a busted flush, along with the Soviet Union it once policed, yet here was a 47-year-old former KGB colonel suddenly taking the helm.
Then, as now, he crafted an enigmatic personality, using his skills as a recruiter of agents to appear to be all things to all people. Seven years on, as he hosts his first international summit, Putin has maintained his Man of Mystery façade. He is being judged on his actions, and as he hosts the G8 in St Petersburg, those actions have got the other summit leaders worried.
Under Putin's watch, parliament, government and regional assemblies have become rubber stamps. Industry is being renationalised: the national gas giant, Gazprom, is run by his former chief of staff, the state oil company by his deputy chief of staff. The opposition has been marginalised, the judiciary sidelined, and all national TV networks brought under the Kremlin's control.
Putin's life story mirrors that of his country. Born in St Petersburg, then named Leningrad, six months before the death of Stalin, he was raised in austerity: his mother was a janitor, his father, wounded by a German grenade in the second World War, a machinist. Putin was by his own admission a delinquent, placed on a register of hooligans by police after they discovered him with a hunting knife. "I was a hooligan. Seriously, I was a real ruffian." But he was also intelligent, and fiercely ambitious. A devotee of judo, and of spy novels, he went to the local KGB headquarters to join up aged 17 - and was told he was not old enough. He finally got to be a spy, after graduating in law, and cut his teeth spying on foreign visitors to Moscow.
In 1983 he married Lyudmila, an airline stewardess, and was sent to East Germany to spy on dissidents. These included friends of the current German chancellor Angela Merkel - one reason for her coldness when the two leaders met recently.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Putin returned to his native city, now renamed St Petersburg, to find revolution in the air and the KGB in the doghouse. Wisely, he jumped ship, working as a deputy for the city's flamboyant new mayor, Anatoly Sobchak.
LOCALS REMEMBER HIM as colourless, but also an efficient administrator - and he was smart enough to be recruited by the Kremlin administration in 1996.
Two years later then-president Boris Yeltsin appointed him head of the KGB, now renamed the FSB. Russia was by now in chaos - democracy had not worked, corruption was everywhere.
The KGB saw its chance, reinventing itself as the saviour of the nation. In 1999 Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister - his fifth in less than two years. Few gave the new boy a chance, but Putin had other ideas. In August and September that year, apartment bombs tore through Russia, killing 300 people. Putin blamed Chechen rebels and unleashed the army on Russia's rebellious southern republic. His opinion ratings soared and he quickly formed his own party, United Russia, which won a landslide election victory.
In 2000 Yeltsin made Putin president, in return for Yeltsin getting immunity from prosecution, and Putin was away.
Since then, Putin has faced both ways, talking the language of democracy while dragging the levers of power inside the Kremlin. His own political orientation comes down to just one word - control. Not since Soviet times has so much power been concentrated in the hands of just one man.
In Moscow, nightly newscasts are eerie. They feature scripted cabinet meetings in which Putin sits at the end of a long table in the Kremlin, with his ministers arranged on both sides. Often he will pick a minister and berate him for some failure. The minister, head bowed, mumbles his apologies and you half-expect a trap door to open beneath him and drop him into the flames.
What makes all this possible is the soaring oil price which has showered Russia - or Moscow, in any case, with cash.
This bonanza has enabled Putin to spread his wings abroad - to the consternation of the West. To Americans in particular, it sometimes seems Putin is bent on supporting the world's troublemakers. Putin is building nuclear power plants for both Iran and North Korea. He is selling weapons to Syria and rolling out the red carpet for Hamas. When Belarus and Ukraine held patently rigged elections, Putin declared the results valid. Competition, rather than partnership, characterises the relationship this new, bold, Russia wants to have with the West.
At home, Putin loves the trappings of glory, restoring the Red Flag to the army, but also supporting the Orthodox Church, a contradiction he seems unaware of.
HIS COUNTRY IS changing in other ways too. First, Putin has reinstalled the top-down Byzantine leadership system favoured by tsars and Soviets alike, nicknamed here the "power vertical". It is a system that is peculiarly unsuited to the complexities of a modern state, and has ensured the return of Soviet-era bottlenecks. Most recently, and most ridiculously, Russia is running short of wine because the new law on customs has kicked in before the factory that produces the new customs labels has begun production. It is the sort of clunky mess that most Russians had assumed they had left behind with communism.
And corruption is back. Administrators and police have realised that, as long as they are loyal to the power vertical, they can bleed the system at will. Russia has actually slipped down the international corruption index.
All of this has produced a lop-sided state. Manufacturing is in the doldrums - try to find a Made In Russia label next time you are shopping - with oil keeping the country afloat. Moscow is a boom town and most of the rest of the country is mired in poverty.
Meanwhile Putin, closeted inside the red-walled Kremlin, has become almost messianic in his sense of mission. He constantly admonishes people to remember that the job of Russians is to serve the state - in the other G8 countries it is supposed to be the other way round.
Recently, perhaps conscious of how serious his persona has become, he has tried to show a lighter side: earlier this month, on a walkabout, he suddenly pulled up a six-year-old's jumper and kissed his stomach, a gesture nobody has yet been able to explain.
FOR THE WEST, Putin's defining moment came last January when, after Ukraine refused to pay a quadrupled gas bill, Putin simply turned off the taps. The fact that a modern state would solve a dispute this way was a shock. That fact that it would do it just as it took over the chairmanship of the most powerful industrial club in the world doubled the shock. At a stroke, Russian politics was suddenly an important subject for all Europeans who heated their homes with gas.
The gas cut-off has poisoned Putin's chairmanship of the G8. Last May US vice-president Dick Cheyney accused the Russian president of using energy as a political weapon.
The European Commission refused a Russian demand that it sell control of its gas pipelines to Kremlin-controlled Gazprom. Putin's reaction was to up the ante - threatening Europe that he might switch its gas supplies to China.
For this weekend, the mutual antagonism has been put on hold, but this summit is probably the swansong for the G8. Putin has no interest in cosying up to the democracies - his focus now is on relations with China, which does not bother him with testy questions about human rights and democracy. As such, it is also a reminder of how the world is changing.
Putin, meanwhile, can afford to smile. He controls just about everything and is flush with cash. The question worrying G8 leaders is what the Russian leader plans to do with all this power.
The Putin File
Who is he? President of Russia
Why is he in the news? He is hosting this weekend's summit for Group of Eight (G8) industrial nations.
Most appealing characteristic No-nonsense toughness
Least appealing characteristic No-nonsense toughness
Most likely to say "Pay your gas bill or granny freezes."
Least likely to say "Let's all just be friends."