| Igor Kostikov | ||||||
As president Vladimir Putin celebrated a year as president on March 26 it was still not clear exactly what he intended to do with Russia, but he can already mark down several major achievements.
The biggest is that business has been decoupled from government, Under Boris Yeltsin there was a strong connection between success and how close a company was to the Kremlin. In Putin's Russia this is no longer true.
Only two months after he was inaugurated last May, Putin called in most of Russia's business elite to what has been dubbed the oligarchs meeting and laid down the law: steal from each other if you want, but don't touch state assets.
The oligarchs took Putin's warning to heart and have been busy getting their act together. Companies now talk about shareholder value and corporate governance through increasingly slick PR machines.