The popular Russian weekly Vlast has published a lengthy account of how President Putin spent his time over the last year. It seems Putin has been burning up the Kremlin's anytime minutes chatting with President Bush. Putin spoke with Bush eight times over the last year, more often than he spoke with any other head of state. However, the surname most frequently repeated by Putin in public was not Bush, but Merkel. Other than Russia, Germany was also the country most frequently mentioned by the Russian president.

More worrisome is the frequency with which Putin speaks to, visits, and hosts the world's despots. There were only three countries that Putin visited more than once: Belarus, China, and Finland. And the foreigner he met most often with over the past year was Belorussian strong man Alexander Lukashenko. While the rest of Europe has been working to isolate the continent's "last dictator," Putin has been a stalwart supporter, receiving Lukashenko at the Kremlin on three occasions, for a total of five meetings between the two in the last year.

Vlast also dissects public opinion of the Russian president, showing 59 percent of Russians support a third term, even though Putin is currently barred from seeking one by the Russian constitution. The president's current approval rating stands at a whopping 81 percent, up six points from the same time last year. Beneath that impressive number though, there does seem to be some Putin-fatigue.

Although he managed to keep his popularity fairly steady and even saw it grow slightly in 2005-2006, the same respondents who said that they approved of him personally reported being disillusioned with the results of his activities in office and said that they have few hopes for improvement in the future.

Usually, when leaders encounter such depressing statistics, they either try to play for a few points by tinkering with social programs and perks or they try to pep things up by declaring a campaign against some real or perceived common enemy. The Russian authorities, who had already launched a series of projects to support ordinary citizens and to chase out unwanted immigrants, turned out to be both luckier and shrewder than others in their predicament. According to data from the Levada Center, the president's popularity rating rose over the last year from 75% to 81%, but even that was nothing compared to the findings by the social research center VTsIOM, which show that Russians have discovered changes for the better in almost all areas of their lives. It is impossible not to lay a large part of the responsibility for this amazing turnaround at the feet of Mr. Putin: in particular, the perception among ordinary Russians of Russia's position on the world stage has improved not only thanks to high gas and oil prices but also as a result of the Russian leadership's harsh rhetoric and a series of trading spats with Russia's neighbors. In addition, the country's calm outlook on the situation in Chechnya is due not only the death last summer of the Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev but also to the Kremlin's engineering of a peaceful transfer of power from Alu Alkhanov to Ramzan Kadyrov. Under these circumstances, not even a spate of high-profile murders has been able to dampen the optimistic outlook of most Russians, who are now feeling safe and relatively free of pessimism for the first time in a long while.

Asked for a one word description of their attitude to Putin, only one percent of Russians answered "hostile," another one percent answered "skeptical," and 39 percent answered "respectful." Nine percent said they were "disillusioned."

Putin receives Belorussian President Alexander Lukashenko at the Kremlin in December 2006.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov