ANALYSISRussians seem happy to trade their democratic purity for economic stability and a smooth transfer of power, writes Dan McLaughlin
Barely eight years on, the contrast could hardly have been more stark. When Russians last witnessed a change of president, they saw a bloated, unwell Boris Yeltsin being helped into the back of a limousine by aides who for years had hovered around him fearing imminent physical or mental collapse.
On Sunday night, they saw Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, stride across Red Square with the man he chose to replace him, Dmitry Medvedev, and climb onto a snowy stage to assure a cheering crowd the new man in the Kremlin would continue his policies.
Putin has brought some calm and stability to a people who were battered by 15 years of crises and momentous change.
When Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985, his predecessors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko had just died in swift succession, and Moscow was losing the cold war and about to be shorn of its empire as communism crumbled across eastern Europe.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was followed by the hardline coup against Gorbachev in 1991, which Yeltsin denounced from atop a tank with a speech that propelled him to power, ousting Gorbachev and signing the death certificate of the Soviet Union.
The collapse of Soviet power led to an economic crisis which prompted a political revolt against Yeltsin, which he resolved in October 1993 by firing tank shells at Moscow's White House, the government building in which his adversaries were holding out.
That trauma was followed a year later by the first Chechen war, a disastrous campaign that Yeltsin's advisers had convinced him would boost his popularity, but which only ended in the humiliating withdrawal from the region of the once-mighty Russian army.
Yeltsin won re-election in 1996 by making an infamous pact with Russia's emerging "oligarchs" to trade their cash and support in the media for the country's finest industrial assets. His second term was most notable for its rapid turnover of failed prime ministers and a 1998 financial crash which destroyed millions of people's wages and savings.
Against this backdrop of almost perpetual uncertainty, Putin's eight years in power have come as a blessed relief to Russians. How he has achieved this stability is of relatively little importance to most of them.
Chechnya's rebels have been suppressed by a horrendously dirty second war; the oligarchs have been cowed by the imprisonment of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the destruction of his company, Yukos; the state has been strengthened by its imposition of control over Russia's huge oil, gas and metal wealth; and the Kremlin has crushed political opposition and emasculated critical media.
The net result is a Russia that is enjoying robust economic growth and paying rising wages to its people, one which can brush off criticism from western countries because it knows they are thirsty for its oil and gas.
Many Russians felt humiliated by Yeltsin's antics on foreign trips, and by the huge loans their country had to accept from the US and Europe in the 1990s, along with lectures on how to run a market democracy.
Putin has repaid those loans, amassed €315 billion in foreign currency reserves and created a €94 billion "stabilisation fund" to help cushion any economic downturn. (While Washington has been fighting a war in Iraq and duelling diplomatically with Iran, Moscow has been raking in profits from record oil and gas prices.)
No wonder then, that most Russians cheer when Medvedev vows to follow Mr Putin's path, and join him in sticking up a metaphorical two fingers to western governments which, they believe, preferred dealing with Yeltsin's Russia not because it was more democratic than today's, but because it was much weaker.
The vast majority of Russians who have nothing to do with opposition politics, media, big business or civil society feel secure under the leadership of Putin - still only 55 - and a quiet, competent protégé 13 years his junior.
No one doubts Putin, who has agreed to be Medvedev's prime minister, will continue to pull the levers of power for now, as the new double act seeks to tame rising inflation while modernising infrastructure across the world's biggest country. The arrangement represents a strange reversal of roles in Russian politics, with the constitutionally superior president playing pupil to his official underling.
Putin has a vital role to fulfil, however, not only in guiding and advising Medvedev but in shielding him from potentially vicious power struggles between Kremlin clans.
The uncertainty that preceded Medvedev's anointment as successor saw different factions jostling for position, in a wrestling match made extremely dangerous by the fact that most of the protagonists represent rival branches of the security services.
The presidency of former KGB officer Putin saw the so-called siloviki - men from ministries and agencies with security and intelligence duties - oust the tycoon oligarchs of the Yeltsin era as the main brokers of power and wealth in Russia. Putin played off one faction against another, never allowing one to dominate, and his choice of Medvedev - a lawyer without a security service background - was seen as a way of maintaining the status quo and preventing the kind of destabilising redistribution of wealth and power that followed the Soviet collapse and Yeltsin's departure.
Medvedev's lack of allegiance to the siloviki, and his background in law and business, have raised hopes in the West that he will offer "Putinism with a human face" - a more conciliatory presidency that opens Russia to more foreign investment and strengthens democracy and the rule of law.
But if the new man in the Kremlin does show a softer side of Russia to the world, it will be in the knowledge that Putin's steel is always close at hand.
Dan McLaughlin reports on eastern Europe and Russia for The Irish Times