Putin says he pulled Russia back from the edge of the abyss

President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he had pulled Russia back from the edge of the abyss after the chaos which accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union, and had built the country into a sovereign power able to stand up for itself. Putin, a former KGB spy who took the Kremlin's top job just eight years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, is the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin who died at his dacha outside Moscow in 1953 aged 74. Asked by the BBC if he had looked after Russia, something that Boris Yeltsin had asked him to do before handing over the presidency at the end of 1999, Putin said he had.