How Putin Came to Power

Intrigue, corruption, abuse of governmental powers, and war: These are the ingredients of a power game that saw a mindbogglingly steep rise of a certain Vladimir Putin to the Russian Federation's highest office. It ended with Putin's surprise inauguration as on 31 December, 1999, and his victory in the subsequent presidential elections in March, 2000. Autumn 1998: Russian President Yeltsin is seriously ill. A sort of unofficial politburo, including Yeltsin's daughter Tatiana, her future husband and the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, de facto ran official business. The group, which has no legitimacy and is referred to as "the family" by Russian journalists, is feverishly searching for a candidate to succeed Yeltsin. The post of Prime Minister is intended as a springboard. But several proposals from the "family" for a new Prime Minister failed in the Duma, the Russian Parliament. In the end it was Yevgeny Primakov, a contemporary of both Gorbachev and Yeltsin himself, who prevailed - for the time being. Before long, Primakov's fight against corruption cost him his office. Vladimir Putin, who had already been promoted to head of the FSB domestic intelligence service, helped the "family" to discredit serious corruption allegations. Thus recommended to the Yeltsin family, Putin made the leap from head of the FSB to Prime Minister. But how could this pale apparatchik, still completely unknown to the public, make a name for himself among the electorate in just a few months? The film tells the story of the manoeuvres that brought Putin to the Kremlin, providing an in-depth insight into the political make-up of Russia in the second half of the 1990s.