Putin Finds Expedient Hero In Four-Term U.S. President

"We want him to stay!"

"We don't need change!"

"He should stay!"

"Of course it's about the third term, and a fourth term, and I'm sure it's organized from the Kremlin," said Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst and head of the independent Mercator Group, a Moscow consulting firm. "Roosevelt is now very popular in Russia. It's very artificial because Russians do not understand the specifics of American history. But it's successful. It has created the myth, not only of a strong leader, but that state capitalism improves the fortunes of a country."

Putin has insisted that he will not run for a third consecutive term as president, which is barred by the constitution. But he has hinted that he may become prime minister and has agreed to run at the head of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party in December's parliamentary elections.

"For now I can say I want to be there, where I will serve the people of Russia," he said this week, while again declining to specify what role he will assume after his term ends next year.

In the early years of his presidency, Putin was most often compared to Peter the Great, according to a study by G808, a private media analysis group that often works for the government.

"Peter was great but severe, a harsh modernizer," Sergey Nikulin, deputy director of G808, said in an interview. "And until 2005, Putin was Peter."

According to Nikulin, Putin bested his opponents and consolidated the state's power, just as Peter the Great had beheaded his enemies and shaved off the beards of noblemen.

"But in 2006, Peter is pushed out, and there is a dramatic change," Nikulin said. "The image of Putin as Roosevelt took off."

"There is no need to pretend that we are not referring to Putin when we talk about Roosevelt," said Gleb Pavlovsky, the Kremlin's leading political consultant, at a conference held earlier this year to mark the 125th anniversary of FDR's birth, a date that passed largely unnoticed in the United States. "And then when Putin -- I mean Roosevelt -- when Roosevelt was contemplating the possibility of running for a third term, he chose to do this against his own wishes."

The conference, held at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, also featured Vladislav Surkov, Putin's deputy chief of staff and a leading Kremlin strategist on domestic politics.

"You could say that Roosevelt was our military ally in the 20th century and he is becoming our ideological ally in the 21st," Surkov told an audience that included the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, William J. Burns. "I think the ideas and emotions motivating our society today are amazingly similar to the ones that motivated the Americans in the era of Franklin Roosevelt."

Almost every line in the RTR documentary has echoes of today's Russia.

"Oligarchs refused to accept one simple thing: Businessmen should deal with business and politicians should deal with politics," the narrator said when the documentary was covering Roosevelt's clashes with big business. That almost exactly mirrors the message of a famous meeting in the Kremlin in July 2000, when Putin warned the country's tycoons that they could conduct business as long as they did not interfere in politics.

Or as Putin himself put it in his State of the Nation address last year, "The toes of some people are being stepped on and are going to be stepped on."

The line came from one of Roosevelt's fireside chats in 1934.