How did Putin became the President of Russia.

How did Putin became the President of Russia is the question of most people in the world.

After the reign of the reign of the 1st president of Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin has been the Russian leader taking over pretty much without pause, and it appears that he is not planning to leave (read more below to know why).

The Russian Federation was born in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved. Out of the three different presidents, the first who was elected was Boris Yeltsin. However, the early years of the federation were chaotic and full of financial hardship.

Because of the dilemma, it was the time to laid the groundwork of the rise of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a former KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, English Committee for State Security). He was offered to become Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor when the latter stepped down. Terrorist attacks purported to be carried out by terrorists from a breakaway region Chechnya gave the soon-to-be-new president an excuse to quell the separatist movement there. It also gave Putin his first of two legitimate electoral wins.

The Rise of Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin worked as a KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany starting in the mid-1980s. He was there when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, returning to the Soviet Union in 1990 shortly before it dissolved.

He took up work in the mayoral administration in 1991 led by his former professor Anatoly Sobchak in his native residence, St. Petersburg, formally Leningrad. There he developed what would become the base of his power later on, making connections with various groups that would support his regime including Russian Mafia and Oligarchs.

During the economic turmoil following the disintegration on the Soviet Union, the Oligarchs had used their positions of influence to gain control of industries across the country. They created monopolies which gave them mass wealth, that they plundered from the nation, and power. They used it in turn to control the levers of a weak government struggling to transition from communism to a free-market economy.

Putin Becomes President

When Sobchak lost re-election in 1996, Putin moved to Moscow where he took up a position in the Yeltsin administration. Within a year he was part of the Presidential Staff despite being relatively unknown. And in 1999 he was named Prime Minister and Boris Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor to run in the presidential elections the following year. Just months later, on New Years’ Eve, Yeltsin unexpectedly stepped down making Putin the Acting President of the Russian Federation.

He handily won his first term as president in 2000. If Russian’s successful campaign to quell the separatist movement in Chechnya, he would go on to win re-election in 2004 with an even larger majority of the vote. However, as he was consolidating authoritarian power under the Russian constitutional democratic system he ran into a glitch, term limits.

Putin Gives Up Presidency But Holds Onto Power

Under the Post-Soviet constitution presidents could only hold two consecutive terms in office, but there is no limit on the terms in total. So Putin found a work around changing places with his First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who was elected president in 2008 becoming the Russia’s third president. Conveniently, Putin proposed that whoever was elected in 2012 should have more time in office and extended the four-year term to six years.

Medvedev kindly proposed that Putin be the candidate for president in the 2012 election in accordance with a deal the two had previously worked out. Putin was elected once again to be president, technically Russia’s fourth president, but there were widespread accusations of electoral fraud.

Not surprisingly, he won re-election in 2018, again under questionable circumstances.

Putin Could Be President Until 2036

The constitutional changes in 2008 did not remove the two-term barrier that Putin would have encountered in 2024. So, in 2020 a barrage of constitutional changes were proposed, and tucked in among them was one giving him the opportunity to serve two additional consecutive six-years terms.

So, Vladimir Putin might remain in the office until 2036. Whether he chooses to leave then, by which time he will be 84 years old, he is free from criminal prosecution in Russia. In 2020 Putin signed a bill giving former presidents and their families immunity for anything they’ve done during their lifetimes.

 

How did Putin became the President of Russia is really an interesting fact to curious people. Most especially in this time when the Ukrain-Russia arises.

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