The Brain Trust Polishing Putin's Image

A former dissident and a career KGB man. A young St. Petersburg lawyer and a battle-scarred veteran of Boris N. Yeltsin's team. On the surface they have little in common. But soon they may be trading toasts and ideas in the Kremlin. After three weeks as Russia's acting President--and nine weeks before the Mar. 26 presidential election--Vladimir V. Putin is assembling a brain trust of advisers to help him flesh out his policies and buff his political image.

The new team, mostly handpicked by Putin, is as eclectic as Putin's career. His political outlook has been shaped by two quite different experiences: his Soviet-era tenure as a KGB spy in Germany, and his later effort, in the 1990s, to help the city of St. Petersburg attract foreign investment. If the KGB training nurtured the mindset of a cold warrior, Putin's experience in St. Petersburg instilled what many Western business figures see as a genuinely pro-market, pro-West disposition.