Word: stepashin
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Chechnya had come to symbolize all that troubled the nation--all the failures and humiliations, real and imagined, of the past decade. "A leader must feel the pain of the country," says Sergei Stepashin, the Prime Minister dismissed in Putin's favor when he looked too soft to satisfy Yeltsin's demands. "Putin knew we had no alternative. Otherwise we'd have lost all authority in the country." Suddenly the gray-suited bureaucrat wore tough-guy garb, displaying the iron hand that Russians craved. When Putin coarsely proclaimed that his army would "wipe the terrorists out wherever we find them...
What does a man embrace from so varied a set of masters? In the KGB, says Stepashin, who also served a stint running its successor agency, you learn some useful presidential habits. Speak less, listen more. Don't form hasty conclusions. If you decide, decide. Calculate your responses. Don't betray your own. Putin, he says, "applies these principles to life in general." But a dedicated ex-agent admits that the system drills in some less positive unwritten rules. Don't say anything you don't need to say. Be underestimated. Putin, says this former spy, "will apply the same...
...conditions had to be fulfilled for the gambit to work, Pavlovsky said. The President needed a successor he could trust completely, and all serious contenders for the presidency would have to be weakened beyond the point of presenting any danger. The first condition was fulfilled when Sergei Stepashin, who had followed Primakov into the prime ministership, was fired on Aug. 9 and replaced by Putin. The second came on Dec. 19, when the political bloc the Kremlin feared most, Primakov's Fatherland-All Russia Party, was beaten into a disappointing third place in parliamentary elections. The final decision, however...
...then in East Germany. The acting President's spy life remains as much a mystery as the rest of his biography. Friends insist he was involved in "economic intelligence," designed to help the Soviet Union's badly antiquated industrial sector. After Yeltsin's resignation, however, former Prime Minister Stepashin told a television interviewer that inside the KGB Putin was known as "Stasi," possibly implying a link to the East German secret service...
...hanging mists. "Military strategy says you should never, never initiate a ground operation with winter approaching," commented Alexander Zhilin, a former Russian fighter pilot and now a military analyst for the weekly Moscow News. "I am afraid there are going to be massive casualties." Former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, a hawk during the last war, is much more cautious. A ground offensive, he warned, could lead to "political catastrophe...