By MARTIN SIEFF WASHINGTON, May 8 (UPI) -- Vladimir Putin's first actions as prime minister of Russia were typical of the man, emphasizing the qualities with which he has transformed his nation's standing over the past eight years as its president.
Putin wasted no time in proclaiming that the modernization of Russia's dilapidated conventional ground forces and of its still world-class strategic nuclear forces would push ahead as the nation's No. 1 priority.
He also proclaimed his determination to assure public housing for veterans of World War II -- known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War -- and he voted to increase the wages of armed forces servicemen.
It would be a mistake to doubt the sincerity or seriousness of these pledges on Putin's part. He has been focusing on the same issues ever since his surprise appointment as prime minister of Russia by President Boris Yeltsin in September 2000.
Even then, here at UPI Analysis, we were the first to point out that Putin from the very beginning moved fast and effectively to pay Russia's struggling teachers, nurses, coal miners, doctors and other public service workers the endless months of back pay that Yeltsin and his prime ministers had held back from them during their own chaotic and shameful stewardship of Russia's public affairs.
From the very beginning, Putin was determined to re-establish the credibility of the Russian state and to fulfill its financial and social obligations to the people who were dependent on it.
Putin also made clear from the very beginning his determination to "restore the vertical" -- to re-establish the national unity and coherence of the Russian state. This was not merely a preference for autocratic government over democratic government: Essentially it marked a conclusion Putin and his policymakers had reached that the corrupt, nightmarish chaos that had wracked the Russian state in the years under the ever drunken and often incoherent Yeltsin after the collapse of communism resulted in millions of lives cut short through appallingly deteriorating living conditions.
Those years of hardship and instability were a modern "time of troubles" for Russia, renewing the broad national consensus that had endured for so many centuries that the dominant land power of the Eurasian plain over the past half a millennium had to remain united and strong to ensure the very physical survival of the Russian people.
Finally, we also noted all those years ago in UPI Analysis -- when Putin was still prime minister and before Yeltsin had appointed him as the nation's next president -- that in a few short weeks Putin had already established himself as the first really good administrator to run Russia since Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, who died in 1980.
Indeed, during the entire past century -- the most bloody, tragic and catastrophic in Russia's long history -- the nation has ever only had three national leaders who can truly have been said to have administered it with skill, competence and true success, without squandering millions of lives on one disastrous war or half-baked communist policy or another: Those three leaders were Pyotr Stolypin, who was the last effective prime minister under Czar Nicholas II before World War I, Kosygin from 1964 to his death in 1980, and now Putin.
Putin can therefore be expected to take the technical duties of being prime minister under the 1996 Yeltsin Constitution as a duck takes to water. His own handpicked successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, who was sworn in Wednesday, can be under no illusion that he has any power base except Putin's favor.
