Vladimir Putin is TIME’s 2007 Person of the Year
Vladimir Putin’s mission is not to win over the West. It is to restore to Russians a sense of their nation’s greatness, something they have not known for years. This is not idle dreaming. When historians talk about Putin’s place in Russian history, they draw parallels with Stalin or the Tsars. Putin, one can’t stress enough, is not a Stalin. There are no mass purges in Russia today, no broad climate of terror. But Putin is reconstituting a strong state, and anyone who stands in his way will pay for it. “Putin has returned to the mechanism of one-man rule,” says Talbott of the Brookings Institution. “Yet it’s a new kind of state, with elements that are contemporary and elements from the past.”
Runners up for the TIME’s 2007 Person of the Year include Al Gore, nobel laureate and famous for addressing the global warming issue; J.K. Rowling, the author of the best-selling 7-part Harry Potter books; Hu Jintao, China’s leader depending on both ancient wisdom and communist doctrine; and David Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq.
