Icon makes comeback with 'Putin the Great'

It’s not the storyline of an action movie. The images come from a collage that hangs at the ‘central public reception’ of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s presidential campaign office.

Irina Gvozdkova, a pensioner from Moscow district, spent two years cutting out the 126 pictures of her president from newspapers and magazines to make the collage in support of his bid for a second four-year term.

And a week short of the country’s presidential elections on March 14, it is a reminder of one vital fact: Russia loves a strongman. From Ivan the Terrible to Stalin and beyond, the country has bowed down to a decisive, all-powerful ruler.

Touching popularity ratings of 80% in some polls, Putin is set for a thumping victory. His five challengers will be lucky to muster 10% between them. Ivan Rybkin, who had polled about 1%, pulled out on Friday, complaining that the election was a "farce".

Faced with such an easy win, Putin’s campaign managers admit they need to do little more than sit back and enjoy the show.

Putin refused to participate in debates with other candidates and is not using broadcast or billboard advertising. But then he doesn’t have to, as state television is covering his every move.

His supporters say the president has created stability and his popularity is hard-won. The Russian economy grew by 7.3% last year, capping five years of rapid recovery since the 1998 financial crisis.

Certainly ‘Putin the Great’ pulls all the strings. Harsh rhetoric against Chechen terrorists and the legal assault on Russia’s super-rich ‘oligarchs’ such as oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky - arrested in October on charges of tax evasion - have only served to boost his image.

"In this country a tough president is popular," said a senior member of his campaign team, who agreed to meet Scotland on Sunday in a swish restaurant overlooking Red Square.

"We had a meeting in the Kremlin last month. Two ministers were speaking to each other and the president very firmly interrupted and told them to be quiet, saying: ‘When I am in the room you should listen to me.’

"The meeting was televised and - to our surprise - this part was incredibly popular with viewers."

Putin’s campaign headquarters has little to do. Tucked away in a building behind St Basil’s Cathedral, his team of fewer than 30 workers for a nationwide election have twiddled their thumbs since an initial spurt of energy to collect the two million signatures needed to register their candidate.

Plucked from obscurity by his predecessor Boris Yeltsin four years ago, Putin has undergone an astonishing transformation into an icon of his own power.

A former KGB officer who briefly headed the spy agency’s successor, the FSB, he built his reputation as prime minister in 1999 when Russian forces charged into breakaway Chechnya. Elected president the next year after a dubious handover of power by Yeltsin, Putin soon moved to erode the strength of the oligarchs and consolidate power in the Kremlin.

His current popularity is a reminder that, historically, Russians have often yearned for a sense of national purpose and the need for a ‘father figure’ has overridden desires for democratic freedom.

But while supporters point to a growing economic recovery and stronger state institutions, critics say Putin has quashed opposition by installing a shadowy clique of former military and security service men known as the ‘siloviki’ in the Kremlin.

Irina Khakamada, a liberal opposition candidate in the presidential race, accuses the president of "leading a return to the Soviet past". She launched her campaign with a blistering attack on Putin, blaming him for covering up the facts of the Moscow theatre siege in October 2002, when 129 captives of Chechen militants were killed as special forces stormed the building.

"We have failed in combating terrorism: our special services don’t get enough money to combat it and, on the other hand, they, like the interior ministry and police, are involved in corruption on a large scale," she said.

Khakamada and Communist Party candidate Nikolai Kharitonov were rebuffed when they lodged an official complaint about excessive television coverage of Putin.

Executives at state channel Rossiya defended their decision to break into normal programming with coverage of a 29-minute speech by the president at Moscow State University (MGU), including several minutes of his supporters waiting in reverential silence for him to start.

They said the event did not amount to campaigning, and the Central Election Commission agreed, ruling that the bulletin was justified "information programming".

Putin’s campaign manager, who asked not to be named, insisted there was nothing anti-democratic in the way state television covered his candidate.

"People are interested. Look at the way US television follows Mr Bush," he said.

And volunteers at the public information centre of Putin’s campaign in Moscow agreed.

Yury Borodin, 65, a pensioner who heads the centre’s team of 26 unpaid employees, said Putin

"has taken it upon himself to put the country in order".

But many from the trickle of visitors to the centre resemble the ‘khodoki’, peasant delegates who once approached the tsars and Soviet leaders with pleas for tax breaks on grain or other largesse.

Today’s khodoki come not to request campaign material or pledges for action from their elected leader, but hoping for crumbs from the table of power such as help with a complaint against a police officer, to get medication or to find a flat.