He has successfully co-opted the media through intimidation, and some would say, via murder. He has successfully co-opted the industrial sector by way of coercive takeovers and bogus prosecutions. He has re-engineered the government to assure that whoever succeeds him as President will be someone of his own choosing. The result is a "stability" of sorts that many Russians seem to find more comforting than the relative chaos of freedom.
There are three separate features available today on Vladimir Putin's Russia, and all are worth a look. All three are depressing to one degree or another in what they describe as a return to the bad old days of totalitarian government.
The Guardian: "Who's Killing Putin's Enemies?" - Part One - Part 2
NY Times Magazine - "Post-Putin"
John O'Sullivan - "Putin's Cold War"
Here's one excerpt from the Guardian piece, on Putin's manipulation of media...
The 1996 election 'put a poison seed into the soil,' Andrei Norkin, a former anchor for NTV, told me. Norkin now works for the satellite network RTV1, which is owned by Vladimir Gusinsky. 'And, even if we did not see why, the authorities understood at once: mass media could very easily be manipulated to achieve any goal. Whether the Kremlin needed to raise the rating of a president or bring down an opponent or conduct an operation to destroy a business, or a man, the media could do the job. Once the Kremlin understood that it could use journalists as instruments of its will, and saw that journalists would go along, everything that happened in the Putin era was, sadly, quite logical.'Posted by dan at February 26, 2007 8:50 PM---
Putin had seen what true press freedom could accomplish during the first Chechen war, and he was not about to repeat Yeltsin's mistake. In 1999, after the explosions that terrorised Moscow and provided the rationale for instigating the second Chechen war, the Kremlin quickly assumed control of essentially all television in Russia and responded harshly to those who tried to resist. On 14 April 2001 the state-controlled energy monolith, Gazprom, forcibly took over NTV - cutting Andrei Norkin off in the middle of a sentence as he tried to explain what was happening inside the studios. The screen filled with coloured stripes. Igor Malashenko referred to the seizure - a decisive moment in the muffling of free speech in Russia - as 'a creeping coup'. Networks soon became wholly owned by the state or by companies - like Gazprom, which owns three networks and also Izvestia - that function as corporate arms of the government.