Profile: Putin's critics claim Russia's richest man faces fraud charges because he is funding opposition parties prior to next month's elections, reports Daniel McLaughlin in Moscow.
Russia's teenagers were left to their own devices after the death of the Komsomol, the Soviet youth movement that reared generations of good Communist boys and girls. Then, in 2000, the nation elected an ex-KGB man to the Kremlin, and as once the hammer and sickle adorned the chests of proud young Komsomoltsy, now teenagers began wearing T-shirts that boldly bore the visage of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Thousands of young Russians gathered at mass meetings on Red Square, united by that image of their diminutive idol, whose gaze somehow mingled the idealism of Che Guevara with the stolid pedantry of a provincial bank manager.
This fresh-faced vanguard of the Putin personality cult, which goes by the name Moving Together, admits only members who accept its code of conduct. As a rallying cry, it is more overdraft statement than revolutionary call-to-arms, but it does serve as a useful pocket guide to the public principles of Russia's president - don't drink, swear or take drugs, and be nice to animals and old people. Be a patriot, not a nationalist or a chauvinist, and fulfil your civic duty.
Most Russians loved Boris Yeltsin because he was like the incorrigible, vodka-soaked grandad that they knew or half-remembered from their own childhood. No matter how many airplanes he was unable to disembark, or how many orchestras he drunkenly conducted, they would forgive him, and slightly pity him his failings.
No one pities Vladimir Putin. He has none of Yeltsin's charm, spontaneity or rapport with ordinary Russians. He is a small man, in terms of physique and aura, in a way Yeltsin could never be, regardless of how many drinks or heart attacks he has had.
Russians may not pity Putin, or even feel much warmth towards him, but three-quarters of the country supports him, if opinion polls are to be believed.
He represents a different kind of power to that embodied by Yeltsin.
Yeltsin was a natural leader: fearless, reckless, occasionally hopeless; but always a political tsar, a liberal sometimes afflicted by his authoritarian streak.
Putin is a manager, a bureaucrat, an organiser. Russians most often describe him in Soviet-sounding terms such as gramotny - "capable" or "organised" - and poryadochny - "orderly".
He would not, as his acolytes in Moving Together know well, be rude to his mother or get drunk at a summit meeting.
He brings to Russia the order that Yeltsin could not.
The 1990s here were Yeltsin's, and he approved the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the start of war in Chechnya, the shelling of parliament to evict his opponents and perhaps the world's quickest and most corrupt privatisation scheme, which created a handful of billionaire "oligarchs" and left ordinary Russians in penury.
Putin came to power as a youthful, teetotal, sport-loving dullard. He offered respite from the chaos of the Yeltsin era, and vowed to submit Russia to a "dictatorship of the law".
His promise of stability was underpinned by a seam of KGB steel, a security service CV that is short on details but commands mingled fear and respect in a country scarred by the state terror of purges and labour camps.
Caught in the headlights of the world's press when Yeltsin resigned and made him acting president on December 31st, 1999, a clearly uncomfortable Vladimir Putin seemed ill-equipped to lead the world's largest country.
Born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), in 1952, Putin graduated in law in 1975. He joined the KGB and spent years in Dresden, then in East Germany, where, depending on who you believe, he either shuffled papers around his desk or was instrumental in some of the most clandestine operations of the time.
His political career began in his home town in 1990, when he became an aide to St Petersburg's former mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. He rose to become deputy mayor and was praised for bringing foreign investment to Russia's second city, before the Kremlin summoned him to Moscow in 1996.
As deputy head of the Kremlin administration, he served under Pavel Borodin, who was later convicted by a Swiss court of laundering millions of dollars in kickbacks from construction companies which had deals to refurbish the Kremlin during the mid-1990s.
By 1998, Putin had quietly amassed considerable influence, as head of both the FSB - successor organisation to the KGB - and the Presidential Security Council.
After changing prime ministers like socks during a torrid 18 months, the increasingly erratic Yeltsin named Putin for the post in August 1999, and, after an emotional resignation speech on national television four months later, he made Putin acting president.
In his first term in office - and with re-election beckoning in a vote scheduled for next March - Putin has played the hand of a cool pragmatist, quickly aligning Russia with the US after the September 11th attacks, and portraying the vast nation as a trusty friend to Europe on one side and Asia on the other.
Putin's support for the so-called international war on terror has blunted any criticism of his policy on Chechnya, where Russian forces are accused of raping, kidnapping and killing civilians with impunity, or of his attitude to independent media (which has been emasculated under his watch).
He has grown in stature as a statesman, and now seems happy to ad-lib and occasionally speak in public in English, as well as in German, which he honed during his KGB years.
The ice in Putin rarely cracks. But when it does, it does so spectacularly.
Back in 1999, defining his attitude to Chechnya's separatist rebels, he urged Russia's troops to "wipe them out in the shithouse".
Last year, a French journalist's questions on the region riled him again, and he offered him a free circumcision in Moscow, "if you want to be a real Muslim".
"I will recommend they carry out the operation in such a way that nothing ever grows back," he told the reporter, to the momentary bafflement of his interpreter.
In September, he told leaders of ex-Soviet states that Western Europe worked efficiently because people there "no longer chew snot from year to year and have started working".
None of these gaffes dents Putin's sky-high popularity. Most Russians couldn't care less if he offends liberals at home and abroad, and they like his action-man image and big-power rhetoric. This is a man who skis and does judo, and has flown to Chechnya in a fighter jet. A man who not only has his own youth movement, the slightly sinister Moving Together, but a group of pneumatic Russian pop stars who pay homage to his charms, the predictably named Singing Together.
"I saw him on the news yesterday, he says that our world's a mess - Now I want a guy like Putin!" they trilled last year.
"Someone like Putin, full of strength, someone like Putin who doesn't drink, someone like Putin who won't hurt me, someone like Putin who won't abandon me!"
The president - married to Lyudmila for 20 years and with two teenage daughters, Katya and Maria - did not respond to their beseeching.
For her part, Lyudmila keeps a low profile. She probably made most waves when, in a book written by a German friend, she described her husband as "a vampire".
"And he has two golden rules," she said in a later interview. "A woman must do everything at home; and you should not praise a woman otherwise you will spoil her." Such comments would rattle even the most solid ratings in the West, but not here.
Millions of Russians like a man who can reinstate the Soviet national anthem and still be called "a true friend" by President George Bush. A man who can preside over steady economic growth and be welcomed by the financial powerhouses of the G8, while quietly filling the Kremlin with comrades from the KGB.
Many Russians still long for a return to the certainties of the Soviet era, and deplore "oligarchs" like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Russia's biggest oil firm, Yukos, and the country's richest tycoon. He made billions while they lost everything in pyramid-scheme scams and banking crises.
Now Khodorkovsky is behind bars, charged with massive fraud and tax evasion. Liberals say he is being punished for daring to fund opposition parties and hinting at a tilt at the presidency in 2008. Then, last Thursday, Putin removed his long-serving chief of staff Alexander Voloshin, who was seen as close to Khodorkovsky, from his job, appointing an ally from his native St Petersburg.
Most Russian voters, however, seem set to support the Kremlin's party in parliamentary elections next month and Putin in a presidential vote in March.
They remember, perhaps better than Khodorkovsky, Putin's pledge in 2000 to submit Russia to a "dictatorship of the law", and "eradicate oligarchs as a class". Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the liberal Yabloko party, had a different name this week for the system being built by Putin: "capitalism with a Stalinist face".