The Penguin History of the World

His successor was already at that moment serving as his prime minister. Boris Yeltsin had duly announced that the next president should be Vladimir Putin, and accordingly Putin took up office after the election of March 2000. A former member of the KGB, Putin by then had to his credit in the eyes of many Russians a – temporary it turned out – success in pacifying Chechnya and the decline of the danger that its turbulence might spread beyond its original borders. It seems likely that outcry abroad over threats to human rights in Chechnya further helped to rally patriotic support behind him, but he had also made a favourable impression in western capitals. In spite of the misfortunes of a series of accidental disasters in his first months as president, which indicated the rundown state of Russia’s infrastructure, there was a new sense that grave problems were at last going to be surmounted. In a more narrowly personal sense, that was no doubt true also for Yeltsin, who, with his family, was assured by his successor of immunity from prosecution for offences committed during his presidency.

Putin’s presidency put a new vigour into Russian government after the lethargy of the last Yeltsin years. The new president, only forty-eight when he took office, projected an austere and reserved image that most Russians liked after his extrovert but often inefficient predecessor. Putin wanted to be known as a man of action. He immediately began recentralizing power in Russia and cracked down on the super-rich – the so-called ‘oligarchs’ – when they would not do the bidding of the Kremlin. After his re-election in 2004, however, concerns began to be voiced about the pressure his government exercised on Russian media critical of the president’s policies.

While the events of 11 September 2001 had given Putin a welcome chance to portray his aggressive conduct of the war in Chechnya as a war against terrorists – and thereby avoid too vocal a reaction from the West – he had little success in bringing the conflict to a close. His attempts at influencing Russia’s former Soviet neighbour-states to take a more friendly attitude to the new Russia have also mostly backfired. Putin’s most important contribution is to have created some form of economic stability; by 2005, inflation had been stemmed and Russian GDP was gradually increasing. Still, Vladimir Putin, even after his re-re-election in 2011, is likely to be seen as a transitional figure on the way to a new Russian society that re-takes its place among the world’s great centres of power.

Taking a long backward look from the early twenty-first century, the United States, much more clearly than in 1945, was the world’s greatest power. For all the heavy weather of the 1970s and 1980s, and a cavalier piling up of public debt through budgetary deficit, its gigantic economy continued to show over the long run a huge dynamism and seemingly endless power to recover from setbacks. Its slowing as the 1990s drew to a close did not check this. For all the political conservatism which so often struck foreigners, the United States remained one of the most adaptive and rapidly changing societies in the world.

Yet as the last decade of the twentieth century began, many old problems still remained. Prosperity had made it easier for those Americans who did not have to face those problems in person to tolerate them, but it had also provided fuel for the aspirations, fears and resentments of black Americans. This reflected the social and economic progress they had made since the Johnson presidency, the last that had seen a determined effort to legislate black America out of its troubles. Although the first black state governor in the nation’s history took up office in 1990, only a couple of years later the inhabitants of the Watts district of Los Angeles, notorious for their riots a quarter of a century before, again showed that they saw the Los Angeles police force as little more than members of an occupying army. Over the country as a whole, a young black male was seven times more likely than his white contemporary to be murdered, probably by a fellow black, and was more likely to go to prison than to a university. If nearly a quarter of American babies were then being born to unmarried mothers, then two-thirds of black babies were, an index of the breakdown of family life in the black American communities. Crime, major deteriorations in health in some areas, and virtually unpoliceable inner-city areas still left many responsible Americans believing that the nation’s problems were racing away from solution.