“At significant cost to the principles and ideas that free nations prize, he has performed an extraordinary feat of leadership in imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it and brought Russia back to the table of world power,” Stengel wrote.
“For that reason, Vladimir Putin is Time’s 2007 Person of the Year.”
“Putin is not a boy scout. He is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech,” he wrote.
“He stands, above all, for stability - stability before freedom, stability before choice, stability in a country that has hardly seen it for a hundred years.”
