There’s a long cover story on Vladimir Putin’s democratic credentials running in the Wall Street Journal today, even including this great photo with the 1980s haircut. Ever since the TIME selection, every newspaper and magazine out there seems to be fighting to have the next big scoop on Russia. They write: “The Kremlin squeezed the politically connected Russian tycoons who had consolidated former state industries and bought up media properties in the 1990s. The government wrested the main television station from an erstwhile Putin ally, Boris Berezovsky. It gained control of another independent TV station, Vladimir Gusinsky’s NTV, engineering its sale to state-owned gas giant Gazprom. The Kremlin jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil, banking and media baron who had supported opposition politics, on fraud and tax-evasion charges. The mastermind of the arrest of Mr. Khodorkovsky was Mr. Sechin, the KGB veteran from Africa, current and former officials say. (The Kremlin says Mr. Sechin was a student, not an agent, in Africa.) Mr. Sechin was later named chairman of the board of OAO Rosneft, the state oil company that acquired most of Yukos’s assets. To Mr. Medvedev, meanwhile, Mr. Putin entrusted state-controlled Gazprom, the world’s No. 2 oil company behind Exxon Mobil. Those close to the company say Mr. Putin keeps a close watch on its affairs. Foreign officials who’ve met Mr. Putin have been shocked by the president’s detailed knowledge of prices and pipeline routes, diplomats say. Mr. Rybakov, the Soviet-era dissident on the Leningrad city council, mourns the tough-fisted turn Mr. Putin took. “It will take a generation for us to make up for the lost ground,” he said. “We had all hoped for much better.”