Why Putin is a truly likeable lad

Over the last 90 years Russia has been ruled by two types of men: short, malevolent cholerics or plump, bragging buffoons.

Together with his great predecessors Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, Vladimir Putin falls in the former category, while Boris Yeltsin was the archetype of a hard-drinking Russian peasant with no table manners. This was also the style of comrades Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev before him.

Yeltsin allowed the worst to happen, opening the doors of the ‘Workers’ Paradise’ to looters and wrecking what was left of the Soviet Empire. He also proved much too soft on such enemies of the state as writers and other so-called intellectuals.

Putin has corrected this error, showing he knows how to deal with negative elements. Last week Russia banned most foreign NGOs, including subversive outfits like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for infringing some bureaucratic rule or other.

This kind of brisk tidying-up operation is nostalgic for those of us who remember the old Soviet Union. So was the comment of Russia’s envoy to the EU on the murder of Anna Politkovskaya: "Journalists tend to die." Not a word wasted.

But Putin also knows how to play the charmer in international politics. World leaders appear to like him. They even honoured him with the G8 presidency.

George W. Bush likes Putin because they both dislike men who stick out their behinds at them in order to bow towards Mecca. "I shall piss on them in the craphouse," Putin said wittily, meaning Chechen rebels and other Islamic crack-pots who have been giving him trouble.

Even if some in the EU are more politically correct than that, few will say much, because Putin has the gas. This is not gas of the laughing variety, except possibly for Gerhard Schröder, whose new job is to guard the gas pipeline’s stopcock at the receiving (this) end.

There is even some gassy chuckling in Sweden, where ministers had to resign when the press discovered they had not been paying all their taxes. But the new foreign minister Carl Bildt owns shares in Gazprom, which it seems is not worth talking about, and is quite legal, even normal in Ikealand.

Real men also have a soft spot for Vlad because he reacted in the approved, manly way when he heard about the sexual harassment allegations against Israel’s President Moshe Katsav. "He is some guy," said our hero. "Ten women? We all envy him!" Of course we do.

Lenin took his country towards the Great Goal step by step, noting that "sometimes you have to take one step back before taking two steps forward".

The Putin rate of stepping makes him the most likely, and likeable, candidate for tap dancer of the year.

Over the last 90 years Russia has been ruled by two types of men: short, malevolent cholerics or plump, bragging buffoons.