...
I believe I read that gut wrenching article about the state of Russia in 1998... I think this because I was busy reading everything in Peggy and Jim's library, including periodicals current and otherwise, at an astounding rate, stopping only for sleep and food, until 86 drove himself back into my life and I ended up putting down all the books and magazines to engage with the impending debacle of some 80,000 acres of timberland threatening to be eaten by Wall Street. I think I was completely consumed with that from about this time 1999 through until that fall. So I would have been disconnected from most of the news about the rise of Vladimir Putin, only catching snatches of what would have filtered down through the people around me from mainstream media.
I seem to remember he was favored heavily because Yeltsin had been such a disaster, despite being pretty much of an unknown quantity. He had risen in the completely disintegrated ranks of Russian government because, while still in the KGB, he had taken it upon himself to get food for the people of Saint Petersburg, and this had pretty much automatically moved him out of the KGB and into public office. That might sound goofy, but consider the chaos and corruption that held the day. If some guy manages to cut through that and make sure people actually eat, he's going to be extremely popular, permanently etched in your heart, before you're done chewing your first bite, no? Yes.
This popularity also shot him right up into national office, and this popularity is what then attracted the people around the dead drunk Yeltsin... but I don't think Putin was anxious to oblige them. I seem to remember there was some back and forth about it, that he wasn't avid to be appointed interim president, had to be talked into it, and... I can't remember... it might even have been our diplomats who talked him into it... or the feckless bunch who had been trying to cover for Yeltsin had to agree to get the fuck out of his way... something. I only vaguely recall that he was viewed by the cognoscenti as pretty much his own man and this was a good thing because the remnants of the old guard were completely useless.
I think people like to believe he was some kind of gangster who muscled his way in, but that was not the way it played. It was more the desperation of the people and the disintegrated blob of Russian government that flung the one man who was not a self-interested looter of the Soviet corpse into the limelight.
If I have something wrong here, I wish somebody would put me straight, but everything I've seen from him since I started paying attention again has been righteous, including taking back the Crimea. I'm sure people think this G8 bullshit is harsh, but when/if it starts really getting harsh, I think the membership of that organization will dwindle by quite more than just one.
