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Since the announcement, observers and journalists have speculated as to whether this man, a former head of the KGB, will bring desperately needed economic leadership to Russia -- and at what cost to democracy. Though the Russian presidential election is less than 12 weeks away, the acting president appears to have virtually no opponents.

The war against the breakaway region of Chechnya has shown to be a major factor in Putin's incredibly high 75 percent approval rating. Already bitterly devastated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians lost a war with Chechen insurrectionists in 1996 -- at a cost of up to 100,000 Chechen lives -- which made Chechnya a de facto, but not legal, independent state. The staunchly separatist region, which lies between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, is predominantly Muslim, and has had a long history of anti-Russian sedition since the time of the czars.

The war erupted again last October, after reports that Chechen separatists had bombed apartment buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities. In the face of international protest of human rights violations against the fierce but militarily weak Chechens, Russians insist that crushing the rebellion is a matter of national security.

Will public approval of a patriotic war eclipse any possibility for change in the chilly halls of the Kremlin? Michael Urban, professor of politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has authored several books on Soviet and post-Soviet politics. He spoke with Salon News about how to read between the lines of both Russian and Western reports on current events.

Is it inevitable that he will be elected president?

As much as anything can be inevitable, this seems to be. It seems that he really has no rivals at the moment. The party that borrowed his name in the election last December, the Unity Party -- which is not a party at all, just a collection of people thrown together by the people running the Kremlin and placed on the ballot, and which was associated with Putin day after day in the news -- surprised everybody by almost winning, missing first place by one percentage point. That and public opinion polls in which Putin scores about a 75 percent rating of approval -- which is simply unbelievable for Russia -- suggests that his popularity at the moment is soaring. A quick election would probably put him in the presidency for the next four years.

But he came out of nowhere, didn't he?

Exactly.

People don't know what his stands are on issues?

Of course not.

Is that contributing to his popularity?

Yes. At the moment, the Russians seem to be very grateful for one thing: There are tremendous symbolic victories, that are bought with blood, that appear on their television sets every day [in Chechnya]. This is the only thing they have to show for themselves for the last 10 years.

Russia feels itself pushed around. Its empire collapses. The country itself, the Soviet Union, disintegrates. Russia thereafter is not taken seriously in international affairs. NATO expands into its former sphere of influence. NATO plans to absorb the former Soviet republics. It would be a bit like the U.S.S.R. winning the Cold War, and the U.S. seeing Canada and Mexico join the Warsaw Treaty Organization, to be followed by Maine, Washington state and Michigan. This naturally would set off a great deal of concern, bordering on hysteria in our country. We can imagine how that would appear for the Russians themselves.

We can extend the analogy a little further, against the backdrop of an economic collapse. Everything is underfunded -- education, health, investment -- to the tune of maybe 15, 20 percent of what it was being funded 10 years ago. On the face of all that, if there were a rebellion in East Los Angeles, and the U.S. Army went in there to stop it and failed, and East L.A. became de facto independent, that would be the analogy with Chechnya. You can imagine how crazy people would be in this country. That's how crazy the Russians are today.

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