Why didn’t Putin’s past as a KGB agent destroy his post-USSR political career?

[Cassius]

Nothing akin to the lustration of former government employees and party members occurred in Russia post-1991 as happened in some other Eastern Bloc countries (such as Hungary). Outside of liberal circles (not a particularly powerful constituency in post-1991 Russia), there wasn’t and isn’t much in the way of stigma attached to having been a member of the KGB, especially given that the latter effectively became the FSK (predecessor of the FSB) in 1991 with relatively few changes in personnel. Anyway, Putin was a low ranking KGB desk bureaucrat in East Germany for most of his service with the organisation, and thus had nothing to do with any domestic KGB activities that might, conceivably, have been more controversial.

Besides that of course, electoral politics in Russia has never functioned in a way intelligible to that of western democracies; Putin was originally manoeuvred into power by a cabal of Yeltsin cronies in order to prevent power passing out of their hands in 1999/2000. His background and ‘qualifications’ were not particularly important, other than the fact that he had no real independent power base of his own, unlike the likes of Primakov, Zyuganov and Luzhkov, who could not be counted upon to be friendly to Yeltsin’s people (his family, Berezovsky, Abramovich et al). Unfortunately for some of those aforementioned (Berezovsky), Putin quickly consolidated his position as President and became popular in his own right, and the rest, as they say, is history.

[Cassius]

Yeah, basically by mid-1991 the Soviet Union was falling apart, and the failed coup attempt by Yanayev, Kryuchkov and the other hardliners in August sent that process into overdrive, with most of the Republics declaring independence unilaterally. By this point Gorbachev was basically irrelevant and Yeltsin saw dissolving what was left of the Union as an opportunity to remove him completely from the political scene, which is of course what happened. There was a broad spectrum of attitudes towards the dissolution of the Soviet Union in Russia, but in 1991 the general feeling was one of apathy (and an unwillingness to fight to keep the secessionist republics under Russian dominance).