President Vladimir Putin is Russia's most popular leader since the 1917 revolution, far outstripping Communist icons such as Lenin and Stalin, but Russians remain wary of democracy in the Western sense, according to an opinion poll published Thursday.
The poll by the ROMIR (Russian Public Opinion and Market Study) institute showed that most Russians would prefer the country to pursue their own model of development rather than blindly follow Western democracy.
With a 39 percent rating, Putin is Russia's most popular leader since the demise of the tsars, according to the poll of 1,484 respondents questioned in late August and early September.
Putin, elected president in March 2000 and accused by liberal critics of encroaching on democratic freedoms, faces a presidential election in March next year. Opinion polls have consistently given him a high popularity rating and he is considered likely to win easily.
The second-most popular leader with 10 percent support is Leonid Brezhnev, the neo-Stalinist Communist party general secretary whose name is associated with a heightening of repression in the 1970s and a long period of economic stagnation.
He is followed by Lenin, the father of the revolution, with nine percent, and Joseph Stalin, who consigned millions to their death in forced labour camps, with eight percent.
Ranked last was Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet president held responsible for the economic collapse and soaring inflation of the early 1990s that wiped out personal savings and created immense hardship. He scored just three percent.
A substantial majority (76 percent) of Russians said the government was not doing enough to solve the country's problems.
Nearly two thirds (65 percent) of those questioned said that economic development is now the most important task for Russia's leaders, according to the World Economic Forum which opened Thursday in Moscow and which commissioned the poll.
The next most important tasks involve social support for the population and the fight against corruption and organised crime, the poll showed.
Only 13 percent said "development of democracy" should be the priority task.
A huge majority of Russians (79 percent) believed their country should develop in its own way, with only 11 percent saying they saw Western democracy as the best model. Two percent spoke in favour of the Asian development model, the poll indicated.
More than a decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, 25 percent of Russians questioned admitted that "we have nothing to be proud of as a nation," and only eight percent considered Russia to be a great power.
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