Who Brought Putin to Power?
[source] It wasn’t me
We have to admit that we also always believed that it was oligarch Boris Berezovsky who played a decisive role in bringing Vladimir Putin to power in Russia in 2000 and made a gigantic mistake by doing so from a viewpoint of oligarchic interests (read: US interest). The story was that the oligarchs brought Putin, a total nobody, to power because they thought they could handle him from behind the scenes.
Today Alexander Mercouris claims that this was not the case:
It needs to be said clearly and unambiguously that the story of Putin being hand-picked by Berezovsky is untrue and is a fantasy invented by Berezovsky himself… at the very time Berezovsky was supposedly lobbying for Putin to be made President he was simultaneously accusing the FSB — headed by Putin — of trying to kill him. The idea that Berezovsky would want the man who headed the organization he said was trying to kill him to become President of Russia is just too bizarre, even for the convoluted world of Kremlin politics in the late Yeltsin era… the publication of recently declassified U.S. government documents… show conclusively that Putin was not Berezovsky’s man and that Berezovsky did not hand-pick him for the Presidency…
The documents show that Berezovsky’s choice to lead Russia was not Putin, whom he hardly knew, but the then foreign minister Igor Ivanov…
Graham Stack’s article is worth reading in its entirety because of the astonishing picture it gives of politics in Russia in the 1990s, with a group of seven oligarchs including Berezovsky having effectively usurped power while assuring the U.S. of their intention to subordinate Russia to U.S. interests – to the point of even welcoming the eastward expansion of NATO.
So why was Putin brought to power and by whom?
…almost certainly because he was known to be his own man and someone the oligarchs “had no instrument of influence over” that Putin was selected for the Presidency, almost certainly at the insistence of the more patriotically minded members of the political and security establishment, who were outraged at the oligarchs’ betrayal of Russia at a time when Yugoslavia was being bombed.
[russia-insider.com] – Putin Was NOT ‘Chosen’ by the Oligarchs
[bne.eu] – Graham Stack, The rise and fall of the Russian oligarchy
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/who-brought-putin-to-power/