Prime Minister Vladimir Putin,...Second President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Because of constitutionally mandated term limits he is the current Prime Minister of Russia. His sock puppet, Dmitry Medvedev, was installed in the 2008 presidential elections. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law. During his eight years in office Russia's economy bounced back from crisis, seeing GDP increase, poverty decrease and average monthly salaries increase. During his presidency Putin passed into law a series of fundamental reforms, including a flat income tax of 13%, a reduced profits tax, and new land and legal codes. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile...
facing an outburst of protest against his rule, called Monday for an update of Russia's political system in response to what he said was a maturing civil society.
"We need to create a political system where people can and must speak the truth," Putin said in a wordy article which also quoted Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
"Our civil society has become incomparably more mature, active and responsible. We need to update the mechanism of our democracy. They must fit in growing public activity," Putin said in the article published on his campaign website and in the business broadsheet Kommersant.
Putin said the middle classes had become more "demanding" of politicians.
"The new demands towards the authorities, the middle classes' emergence from their narrow world of building their own prosperity is the result of our efforts. We worked on this," he wrote.
In a rare acknowledgement of the role of the Internet, which has galvanized the opposition movement, Putin called for the parliament to be obliged to discuss any public petition that manages to gather 100,000 signatures on the Internet.
Putin is battling the worst legitimacy crisis of his 12-year rule.
Tens of thousands erupted into the streets since disputed December parliamentary elections in a wave of protests unseen since the early 1990s.
Opposition activists said more than 120,000 people braved frosty weather to attend an opposition rally on Saturday, the budding protest movement's third since December.
In the piece -- his fourth campaign article -- Putin stressed that direct elections of regional governors would be reintroduced, a system he eliminated under his presidency in 2004.
But at the same time he said Russia must avoid "the temptation to simplify politics, to create a fictitious democracy" and insisted the country needed a "strong, effective and respected federal center."