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Peace at any cost is a prelude to war!
Yeltsin Says He'll Resign Early, Puts Putin in Power
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Boris Yeltsin said in a shock television
announcement on Friday that he intended to resign before the end of his term
next year. He also named Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as acting president
until an election is held in three months.
``I am going. I am going earlier than my established time,'' Yeltsin said in
a broadcast on state-owned ORT television. He said Russia needed to go into
the new century with new political leaders.
Yeltsin spoke slowly and calmly as he announced his resignation on the last
day of the 20th century.
Yeltsin, 68, has dominated Russian politics since he became president in
1991, leading Russia from the wreck of the former Soviet Union into a new era
of democracy.
``Today on the last day of the old century I am going to resign,'' he said.
Putin, a man he has already named as his preferred successor, would be acting
president for three months ahead of elections, he said.
Yeltsin's term was due to end in six months but he said he did not want to
hold on to power. He said he was sorry he had not fulfilled all the hopes of
Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
<A
HREF="http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?s=asia/head
lines/991231/world/afp/Putin_rocked_Russians_with_ruthlessness.html">Putin
rocked Russians with ruthlessness</A>
http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?s=asia/headlines/
991231/world/afp/Putin_rocked_Russians_with_ruthlessness.html
Friday, December 31 6:28 PM SGT
Putin rocked Russians with ruthlessness
MOSCOW, Dec 31 (AFP) -
Vladimir Putin, the poker-faced ex-KGB spy, once tried to westernize a
crumbling Soviet Union but has since galvanized a new Russia and is vowing to
annihilate the rebels of Chechnya.
"We'll get them anywhere -- if we find terrorists sitting in the outhouse,
then we will piss on them there. That's it. The matter is settled," barked
Putin shortly after Russia launched its Chechen war in September.
Such talk could have cost his predecessors their job. But it boosted Putin's
career.
He became acting president Friday when Boris Yeltsin suddenly announced he
was stepping down, and is likely to retain the Kremlin hot seat for years to
come.
Yeltsin, ailing and being edged out of power by his closest advisers, named
the then virtually unknown security chief as prime minister last August.
He had been running the secretive but omnipotent Security Council.
He has since turned into one of the most admired figures Russia has seen this
decade, even his opponents singing his praises.
"Putin has enchanted Russia," wrote Vyacheslav Kostikov, a former Kremlin
spokesman and current board member of a Media-MOST empire that has campaigned
heavily against the government.
"I honestly believe that Putin is capable of heroic deeds in the name of our
humiliated Russia," Kostikov said.
Yet the 47-year-old prime minister and acting president remains a political
enigma.
He helped found a new party, Unity, which rode into the State Duma (the lower
house of parliament) on the back of his popularity in December 19 elections.
The party is described as "centrist." But the respected Moscow Times said in
an editorial: "There is no particular reason to believe that Unity is
'centrist,' unless 'centrist' is another word for 'unknown.'"
The English-language newspaper added: "But what seems clear is that the
Kremlin has been dealt a winning hand -- or the Kremlin has dealt itself a
winning hand, depending on one's point of view."
What can be gleamed from Putin's bare biography suggests that he is
intelligent and cunning, trusted enough by peers to be handed some of the
most sensitive assignments.
Putin "was shaped by the single greatest mission in the history of the KGB,"
wrote the US-based private global intelligence firm Stratfor.
That mission was the "systematic restructuring of the Soviet economy, Soviet
society and Soviet relations with the West in the hope of preserving the
state and the regime."
Putin spent the 1980s in Berlin, where intelligence observers believe he
slipped into West Germany to learn trade secrets of such companies as US
computer giant IBM.
Observers believe KGB officers knew the Soviet Union was in ruins and could
be preserved only by revolutionising its lagging technology and attracting
investors from the West.
It remains unclear how successful Putin was. But he became the chief liaison
for foreign investors after joining the pro-reform team of Saint Petersburg
Mayor Anatoly Sabchak in 1994.
Local journalists report that it was impossible to make foreign investments
in Russia's second city without first contacting Putin.
He then also became a trusted ally of economics chief Anatoly Chubais, who
brought Putin to Moscow in 1996 and made him responsible for monitoring
regional leaders who were seeking greater independence from Moscow.
One political analyst reported that Putin was told to collect so-called
"compromising material" on governors which could then be used as an
"incentive" for them to toe the Kremlin line.
Analysts suggest the Kremlin is now repaying Putin by making him the star of
a well orchestrated media public relations campaign, one which has put his
presidential rating at an unheralded 46 percent.
The latest Public Opinion Foundation poll said Russians were three times as
likely to vote for Putin in presidential election due in June than his
nearest rival, Communist Party boss Gennady Zyuganov.
"Russia was and will remain a great country," Putin wrote in a 14-page essay
entitled "Russia on the Threshold of a New Millenium" published this week on
the government's Internet web site.
The message, at once an outline of policy objectives and a philosophical
expose, was striking both in its relaxed tone and a novel content that mixed
Western democratic and market ideals with traditional Russian mores.
"Russia is never going to be another USA or England, where liberal values
have deep historic roots," Putin asserted.
"It is a fact that in Russia the attraction to a collective way of life has
always been stronger than the desire for individualism."
At the same time, though, the country and its people understand better than
many the dangers that a government -- particularly an executive branch --
endowed with excessive power can pose to people's freedom, he said.
"The global experience prompts the conclusion that the main threat to human
rights and freedoms, to democracy as such, emanates from the executive
authority," Putin wrote.
"The state must be where and as needed; freedom must be where and as
required."
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