Word: perestroika
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Even after he was elected Russia's President last March, Vladimir Putin remained a riddle. Was he really, as his own staff members whispered, a cautious reformer who had learned his stuff in St. Petersburg during the early years of perestroika? Or was he the product of his training and times--a middle-level KGB officer whose views had been formed during a period when the Soviet Union seemed, on the surface at least, a mighty power? Thanks to the Kursk submarine debacle, which cost 118 lives, the guessing game is over. Putin is a gosudarstvennik--a believer...
...raging characters. A native of Washington, he studied political science at Amherst College before turning to acting. "It seemed to make sense that you could marry the two," he says, and that approach has served him well as a militant gay nurse in Broadway's Angels in America: Perestroika (a role for which he won a 1994 Tony); as the drug-addled subject of the 1996 biopic Basquiat; and as the ex-slave who fights for the Confederacy in last year's Ride with the Devil...
...collapse of the Soviet Union. The timing of those events, at the end of the Reagan years, disconcerts Reagan's critics. They claim that the Soviet collapse was the result of long years of economic inefficiency and deterioration, and of Gorbachev's loosening of the bolts through glasnost and perestroika...
Lieut. Colonel Putin came home to a Russia that was radically altered. While he had been tasting the ways of the West, his country had roiled through the reversals of perestroika. Moscow Center's talent spotters took no interest in him, and he was given a low-rent KGB "cover" job assisting the rector at his old Leningrad university, a position normally reserved for a retiring agent. He was unsure how he fit into the new order, says a close aide. Worse, says Polokhov, who met him again in 1990, Putin was "hurt that the state did not want...
...Putin was sent back to Leningrad, still in the employ of the KGB, to monitor that city's blossoming perestroika movement. Among his contacts was one of the city's most progressive politicians, and a former law professor of his, Anatoly Sobchak. When Sobchak became mayor, Putin joined him and eventually handled foreign investment, among other responsibilities. Though he hunkered out of public sight--he was known as "a gray cardinal"--Putin began to accumulate power and a quiet reputation among reformers. In 1996, Sobchak lost a re-election campaign, and Putin headed to Moscow, where he quickly rose...