Vladimir Putin has now served as Russia’s supreme leader longer than anyone since Stalin. With 17 years in office and counting, Putin last month surpassed the record of Leonid Brezhnev, the bushy-browed Politburo chief whose seemingly endless tenure from the 1960s to the early 1980s became a byword for Cold War stagnation. And Putin shows no signs of giving up power anytime soon; the former KGB lieutenant colonel who became president on New Year’s Eve in 1999 at age 47 faces certain reelection to another six-year term next year.
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Susan Glasser: Putin’s Russia, guided by its totalitarian past, has no future
Russian President Vladimir Putin (L), accompanied by Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, watches the joint Zapad-2017 (West-2017) Russian military exercises with Belarus at the Luzhsky training ground in the Leningrad region on Sept. 18.
