How would you describe the difference between Obama and Russian President Putin

Again , you have no clue , what your taking about Putin is evil!

Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 30, 2000;

Putin defends the Soviet-era intelligence service to this day. In recent comments to a writers' group in Moscow, he even seemed to excuse its role in dictator Joseph Stalin's brutal purges, saying it would be "insincere" for him to assail the agency where he worked for so many years. Fiercely patriotic, Putin once said he could not read a book by a Soviet defector because "I don't read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland."

Such is the professional background of the man who emerged unexpectedly last month as Russia's new leader. Today, Putin is acting president and the clear favorite to win the March 26 election and a four-year presidential term. Yet a review of his career shows that Putin previously has thrived in closed worlds, first as an intelligence agent and later in city government.

Until he was handpicked in August by then-President Boris Yeltsin to become prime minister, Putin had never been a public figure. He spent 17 years as a mid-level agent in the Soviet KGB's foreign intelligence wing, rising only to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Later, as an aide to a prickly, controversial mayor of St. Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city and Putin's home town, he made a point of staying in the background.

Yet Putin's career also suggests that he witnessed firsthand the momentous finale of the Cold War. From the front line in East Germany, Putin saw how the centrally planned economies of the East staggered to disintegration. In St. Petersburg, he had a taste of the ragged path of Russia's early transition to a free-market, democratic system.

What Putin has taken from these experiences is not entirely clear. He has embraced the conviction that "there is no alternative" to market democracy, and soberly acknowledged Russia's economic weaknesses. But he also has expressed enthusiasm for reasserting the role of a strong state. He has said the Russian economy has become "criminalized," but so far only hinted that he would tackle the powerful tycoons who lord over it. Putin has vowed Russia will not revert to totalitarianism, but he has not demonstrated much skill working with Russia's fledgling, competitive political system.

Putin has never campaigned for office, and he told an interviewer two years ago he found campaigns distasteful. "One has to be insincere and promise something which you cannot fulfill," he said. "So you either have to be a fool who does not understand what you are promising, or deliberately be lying."

Stasi and 'the Friends'

Putin later recalled that the KGB targeted him for recruitment even before he graduated in 1975. "You know, I even wanted it," he said of joining the KGB. "I was driven by high motives. I thought I would be able to use my skills to the best for society."

After a few years spying on foreigners in Leningrad, Putin was summoned to Moscow in the early 1980s to attend the elite foreign intelligence training institute, and then was assigned to East Germany. He arrived in Dresden at age 32 when East Germany was a major focus of Moscow's attention. The German Democratic Republic was home to 380,000 Soviet troops and Soviet intermediate-range missiles. Berlin was a constant source of Cold War tensions and intrigue.

At the time, several thousand KGB officers reported to a headquarters at Karlshorst, outside Berlin; Soviet military intelligence also was stationed in East Germany. But the biggest intelligence operation was the East German secret police, the Stasi, who monitored hundreds of thousands of citizens and kept millions of documents on file.

The broad Stasi network was used often by the KGB, and the raw intelligence sent directly to Moscow. The East German dictatorship, headed in those years by Erich Honecker, remained steadfastly rigid even as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was beginning to experiment with political and economic reforms at home.

In Dresden, the KGB outpost at No. 4 Angelikastrasse was located directly across the street from the city's main Stasi headquarters. The Stasi poked into every aspect of life; in Dresden alone, the documents they preserved on citizens now stretch nearly seven miles in the archives here, according to Konrad Felber, a spokesman for the commission that maintains the documents.