Russian analysts speaking to DW agree that he will remain president for a long time.

Vladimir Putin completes twenty-five years in the Kremlin today.

On August 9, 1999, the then president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, appointed him prime minister.

Since then he has ruled almost continuously.

While politicians in the West come and go, Putin stays.

In the last 25 years, the Russian president has turned his country into the “strongest personalized dictatorship in the world”, estimates political scientist Mikhail Komin, speaking to DW. In his estimation, Putin achieved his goal by systematically undermining the country’s political institutions.

According to the Russian political scientist Grigory Nishnikov, who lives in Finland, the Kremlin responds to any resistance from the population with even stronger repression. At every opportunity, says the Russian expert, potential opponents are sidelined. Thus, today there is no one who could argue with Vladimir Putin: “In the first years of his rule, there were various poles of power in Russia, even unofficial ones, such as the oligarchs. All of them were a kind of counterweight to the KremlinGrigory Nishnikov estimates.

A beautified image of the country is promoted by the Kremlin

At the same time, the Kremlin is trying to cultivate an image in Russian society in which the state has historically played an exclusively positive role. According to the Russian sociologist Alexander Bibkov, everything negative is eliminated. He calls this tactic “manipulation of the collective historical memory”. The sociologist also believes that the Putin regime likes to present Russia as an almost heavenly country, referring to the golden rooster, a mythical symbol of Russian fairy tales: “The golden rooster expresses a happy Russia, a country in which the tsarist family as well as the dictator Joseph Stalin are presented as custodians of traditions, despite the fact that they represented diametrically opposed political forces in Russian history.”

All three experts who spoke to DW agree that these beautification trends will intensify in the future and that Vladimir Putin will remain in power for many years to come. “The problem is that there is no other candidate for the presidency. The last election that President Putin won with his sword was the presidential election of 2004,” says political scientist Mikhail Komin, visibly disappointed.

Editor: Stefanos Georgakopoulos