How Putin became Russia's ruler and why it changed the world

A quarter of a century ago, Boris Yeltsin anointed Vladimir Putin as his heir and appointed him Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. When he took power, many people asked, "Who is Vladimir Putin?" Today, there is no doubt that a monster rules Russia.

Boris Yeltsin won the presidential elections in 1991, becoming the leader of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. He made an agreement with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine to dissolve the USSR, becoming the head of the independent Russian Federation. Although, at the beginning of his first term, Yeltsin enjoyed enormous public support, the growing crisis rapidly lowered his approval ratings. He did win the next election, although some voices claimed he owed it to falsified results.

During his second term, Yeltsin practically changed the heads of government every year, and the list of candidates who could take the office systematically shrank. Eventually, the name Vladimir Putin came up.

What decided his selection was not that he knew languages well, frequented the West, or had connections among wealthy and influential Russians. As "Fakt" points out, it was because he was nondescript and posed no threat to anyone.

After Yeltsin's address on August 9, 1999, it became clear that Yeltsin had not only chosen Putin as Prime Minister but also as his successor. Although for a long time observers wondered who Putin actually was, it was quite quickly possible to create an idol of almost the entire nation out of him. Nothing indicated then that this nondescript politician would become one of the greatest monsters not only in the history of Russia but also of the world.

Putin quickly abandoned Yeltsin's path. He moved away from the reforms initiated by his predecessor. He also dealt quite brutally with the "old" oligarchs, replacing them with new elites and fully subordinating them. Putin had no mercy, even for those who had once helped him reach the top.

As "Gazeta Wyborcza" recalls, Aleksei Navalny, imprisoned by Putin in a penal colony near the Arctic Circle shortly before his death, admitted that he hated Yeltsin and his associates because they gave the country to Putin, who brought terror, violence, and war upon the Russians.

Valentin Yumashev, one of Vladimir Putin's first supervisors at the Kremlin, emphasized in a conversation with the BBC that the current President of Russia and Boris Yeltsin share one thing — a sense of mission.

The similarities end there because while Yeltsin's goal was to lead the country out of the "slavery of communism," Putin's goal is to return to the past. His goal is to reverse what he considers the greatest failure in Russian history, the dissolution of the USSR. "He wants to leave as a tsar," writes Fakt.