Vladimir Putin

Biography

Vladimir Putin was born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), the son of a factory worker and a wartime survivor. He joined the KGB in 1975 and served as a foreign intelligence officer in Dresden, East Germany, until the Berlin Wall fell — an event he later described as 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.' After returning to Russia he rose quickly through the post-Soviet security apparatus, becoming director of the FSB (successor to the KGB) in 1998 and Prime Minister in August 1999, just weeks before the apartment bombings that gave him the pretext for a second Chechen war. Putin transformed the Second Chechen War into the foundation of his political identity and his path to power. Where Yeltsin had prosecuted the First War incompetently and lost, Putin was methodical, brutal, and determined. He appointed Ramzan Kadyrov's father Akhmad as Chechen president in 2000, then Ramzan himself after Akhmad's assassination, creating a loyalist client state that would suppress Chechen independence for a generation. By the time Putin declared 'counterterrorist operations' in Chechnya officially over in April 2009, he had won the war, secured Russia's territorial integrity, and built a political brand on ruthlessness that would carry him through the next two decades.

Key Battles