Strong year for the new Tsar of Russia

This was the year that President Vladimir Putin began to look more and more like Tsar Vladimir I.

It was also the year that Putin declared the collapse of the Russo-centric Soviet Union in 1991 was "a national tragedy on an enormous scale", and that Russia started to rein in its experiment with Western-style democracy in favour of a "managed" home-grown version.

Putin dismisses such talk as nonsense but there is no doubt the former KGB spy became a markedly more authoritarian leader this year.

Thirteen years after the USSR collapsed, statues and plaques commemorating Yuri Andropov, the former KGB head and Communist Party General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, former General Secretary and premier and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, went up.

On Putin's orders, even Joseph Stalin's name made a comeback, as the plaque at the foot of the Kremlin wall commemorating the epic World War II battle of Stalingrad was restored to its former glory and Stalingrad's politically correct name, Volgograd, was erased.

Putin made a determined effort to bolster Russia's waning influence in the former Soviet Union, most notably and clumsily in Ukraine.

This was a public relations disaster for him. He backed the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, but it was soon revealed that Yanukovych's supporters had rigged the vote and poisoned his rival, the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians poured onto Kiev's streets and succeeded in overturning the results.

Putin's attempts to defuse the crisis were condemned as meddling.

Centralisation, Soviet-style rhetoric, censorship, tight Kremlin control and state intervention in business were "in" during 2004.

Free-thinking newspaper editors, programme makers, politicians who weren't part of Putin's United Russia party and uppity oligarchs were "out".

Putin and his colleagues always had the courtesy to explain why they felt it necessary to curtail freedoms.

Political talk shows had to be pulled because "they were too expensive", elections of regional governors had to be abolished in favour of presidential appointments "to preserve territorial integrity"; and oil giant Yukos had to be dismembered because its incarcerated majority shareholder Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his associates were "part of a criminal enterprise".

There was always a reason and the horrific September school siege in Beslan, North Ossetia, gave Putin one more. He justified many of his subsequent actions by stressing the need to fight "global terrorism".

As befits a modern-day Tsar, Putin's "coronation" was grand.

A 30-gun salute boomed out across the Kremlin in May when he was sworn in for his second term as leader of the world's largest country.

On paper there was nothing unfair about Putin's landslide election victory, in which he took 71 per cent of the vote.

Putin's closest challenger, the Communist Nikolai Kharitonov, got just 13.7 per cent of the vote, while the four other candidates polled less than 5 per cent each.

Putin finished the year as he had started it: as master of all that he surveys.

- INDEPENDENT