Russian acting president Vladimir Putin promises to clean up widespread corruption. Following this background report, Gwen Ifill leads a discussion of with experts.

GWEN IFILL: For more on the situation in Russia, we turn to Michael McFaul, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. He returned from Moscow two weeks ago. Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, and author of After the Collapse: Russia Seeks its Place as a Great Power. Leon Aron, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Yeltsin, a biography that will be published in March. And Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at New York University, and author of Rethinking the Soviet Experience.

GWEN IFILL: Let's speak first about Vladimir Putin, about whom we know very little. Michael McFaul, he is the first Russian president born after World War II, in much the same way that Bill Clinton was the first American president born after World War II. What does that tell us about him, if anything?

MICHAEL McFAUL: I think this tells us a lot. Boris Yeltsin was a transitional figure between the Communist system to this new political and economic system that we have in Russia today. Putin is not a transitional figure. He made his career, most of it, you got to remember most of his career has been in the post communist era - and I think says a lot about him. It says that when he turns to economic advice, he doesn't turn to Soviet bureaucrats or KGB apparatchiks, he turns to market reformers. It says when he looks to the outside world, the western world, he is not caught back in superpower Soviet American confrontation -- he is a new guy. And I think that's a very positive thing for Russia.

GWEN IFILL: Stephen Cohen, Michael McFaul says it's a positive thing for Russia, do you agree with that?

STEPHEN COHEN: Well, I hope Michael is right. What we know for the moment is what we know for the moment; that Putin is a career KGB officer and that at the moment he waging, he is the architect of a war in Chechnya which all the international human rights organizations say commits war crimes every day. That is what we know for a fact. All the rest is speculation.

GWEN IFILL: Dimitri Simes, what does it mean what we say he is a career KGB officer, does that mean now what it used to mean?

DIMITRI SIMES: Yes, it means exactly what it means, because first of all he was a career KGB officer, not just in intelligence but also in counterintelligence in political -- I do not know what exactly he had done, but it was at the end of the Soviet Union -- he was in Germany fighting the end of Communism then he went to work for KGB in Russia. When he was the director of KGB successor agency, working already for Yeltsin, I have to say he behaved very awful. In a typical KGB tradition, he was involved in activities which were very questionable morally and I would say legally, and he obviously on a number of occasions put interests of his boss, Boris Yeltsin, above the Russian institution and above the Russian democracy.

GWEN IFILL: Leon Aron, we just heard Madeleine Albright say that Putin is riding the tiger in terms of his war with Chechnya and sailing along on that. Is she correct? Is that a dangerous place for him to be?

LEON ARON: There are such things in democracies as popular wars. We all know examples - especially they start as popular wars, and then the media turns against it and the people turn against it usually when our boys begin to be killed in big numbers. Unlike the first war in Chechnya the Russians are trying to keep that number low. I think that Putin understands. I think he knows very well, for example, Yeltsin won presidency in '96 only in part because he finished the first war in Chechnya or at least put a stop to it. It was finished a year later. So I think we will see moves by Putin to end that war. But he has to be careful because the war, as you have mentioned, is very popular. It's considered by the majority of the Russians, 70, 80% as a just war as a response to terrorism, as a response to the death of their brothers and sisters who were killed -- peaceful citizens. So he cannot just say the war is over. He will have to, I think, take Grozny but my feeling is that he will open negotiations shortly after that. And I'm almost confident that one way or the other, this war will be either over or put in a very, very kind of slow basis by the time election comes presidentially at the end of March.

GWEN IFILL: Stephen Cohen, what is the danger of being a single issue president? This war is the only thing we know of him practically and what if the economy were to take a downturn or if the war were to take a downturn?

STEPHEN COHEN: I think what we know is the timing of Yeltsin's resignation was dictated by the concern that Putin's popularity - and after all Putin has been appointed as a kind of Praetorian minister to protect the Kremlin from any retribution for what has happened in the country -- that waging war is a form of electoral politics could not be sustained for six months, when an election was supposed to take place. So by resigning Yeltsin brought the election forward three months. It's now 90 days to the election. It's now manageable and you mentioned something else. There is disagreement about this. And I'm not sure. I mean, I don't have a final opinion on this, but there are some people in Russia, serious economists, that think that the ruble may collapse within 90 days or certainly within six months, and that would reduce the purchasing power of voters, and that would hurt whomever sits in the Kremlin.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Putin -- Mr. McFaul, I'm sorry, I've just promoted you.

MICHAEL McFAUL: I don't want that job, thank you. Yes and no. I mean, yes, Yeltsin resigned when he did to help Mr. Putin become president. I think it is a slam dunk now that he will be elected but he will be elected because 75% of the Russian people support what he is doing. By the way, it's not just the war in Chechnya. If you look at opinion polls now, people feel much better about the economy. It's gone up to 55% say they are better off now than they were six months ago. When you ask the question have you adapted to the reforms of the Soviet Union, traditionally for the last ten years that number has been about 25%, under Putin it has jumped to 54%. That says that there is something else going on here. It is not just a one-issue guy; it is a young guy with a pulse in the Kremlin which they haven't had for a long time, and so people are cautiously optimistic about the Putin regime.

GWEN IFILL: And he is a tough talker, right, as well.

LEON ARON: You got to be both. But I agree with Michael. You know, the Russian economy is probably going to post the first real growth of the GDP, at least one and a half, probably 2%, the industrial portion of it has grown 8%. You know, 12 million Russians traveled abroad. They cannot all be oligarchs. If they are, the economy is really in good shape. You know, there are all kinds of indicators that might cautiously be judged as showing that the economy is clawing from under the crisis of the essentially the last ten years. So that plus let's not forget the generational factor is extremely important. Anybody who travels in Russia in the last few years across the political spectrum, across the board, they want somebody who did not spend their, his entire most of his life under the old regime.

DIMITRI SIMES: Up to now, Putin was covering up for Yeltsin's corruptions. A number of people, most notably the results came, Anatoly Chubais, were claiming that put Putin was in his pocket. Up to a point it was convenient for Putin because these people made Putin. These people funded Putin. TV stations controlled by these people promoted Putin. But now if Putin wants to establish himself as a genuine national figure, he has to develop his own identity and it is a very smart move on his part to get rid of Tatanya Duchenka. There is one minor point, however. I was told that Tatanya Duchenka -

GWEN IFILL: Yeltsin's daughter.

DIMITRI SIMES: Yeltsin's daughter -- obviously knew there was no place for her in the Putin administration because her whole role was based on her unique relationship with her father, so there is there a little bit less to this move than meets the eye.

GWEN IFILL: Let's turn to the Yeltsin legacy. Mr. Aron, Boris Yeltsin presided over seven prime ministers, three ruble crises, two wars in Chechnya, he survived two heart attacks and then shocked the world with the millennium eve resignation. What is his legacy going to be?

LEON ARON: Well, I think as the secondary and the tertiary kind of falls off history and as we take a longer distance, I think he will emerge as one of the last revolutionary giants of the past century and certainly somebody of that caliber will not be seen in a long time. He will be remembered I think as a man who took over a great country at the time of a mortal social crisis, imperial crisis, economic crisis in the fall of 1991. He was also - he will also be remembered as somebody who took over a decaying, fairly corrupt totalitarian state, decentralized it, demilitarized it, withdrew every last Russian soldier from Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and put in place elements, I repeat elements of democracy and real elements of markets economy, not sufficient but real and necessary. And I think this is enough to make a place in history for ten men.

STEPHEN COHEN: Let me be a professor. I thought you might ask the question so I took the liberty of a note so I don't forget. I think there is going to be three schools of thought among Russian historians about Yeltsin. The point to remember is they cannot separate Gorbachev from Yeltsin. The two are going to be evaluated together. The first school of thought is going to be to condemn both Gorbachev and Yeltsin for destroying the Russian state. The argument is going to be Russia must always have a strong state and to destroy it is to destroy Russia. So they are both going to be condemned by historians. The second view is more or less Leon's view, it will be the Yeltsin the bold, Yeltsin the hero of history, Yeltsin who saw Gorbachev was too timid, wouldn't break with the system and Yeltsin who broke with the system. He will be Yeltsin the Great and the third school will say this - that Gorbachev was a great reformer that his gradual, incremental approach to reforming Russia was the right way and whatever his failures, he gave, he bequeathed to Yeltsin in 1991 many opportunities -- all of which, most of which Yeltsin squandered.

GWEN IFILL: It sounds like the third school is your school?

STEPHEN COHEN: This school of thought will be called the Boris the squanderer and yes, I would adhere to that school of thought.

GWEN IFILL: Michael McFaul.

MICHAEL McFAUL: The fourth school is, it is a little bit of those two views, the problem with our discussion about Russia for the last decade, maybe for decades before my time has always been it's either black or it's either white. Yeltsin is either a good guy or Yeltsin is a bad guy. The real truth, the real historians will write something different. It is a mixed bag. He destroyed communism, that's a good thing. He destroyed the Soviet empire, that's a good thing. He started capitalism and democracy, those are good things. But then he also bombed the White House in October of 1993. That's a bad thing. He also went into Chechnya twice. I consider those bad things. I think we need to get beyond is it white or black and look at the totality of Yeltsin and judge him for both his strengths and his weaknesses.

GWEN IFILL: What does it mean that he resigned early and got this pardon deal?

DIMITRI SIMES: I think you are asking most of the question because how he left his office tells a lot about his going to be remembered in history. He is the first Russian democratically-elected president who had to arrange an immunity as the first after his successor who had to fix presidential elections to make sure that his chosen successor would remain in power because otherwise he would be persecuted for his misdeeds. I agree with Leon that Yeltsin was a very effective revolutionary. I think, however, he was a lousy nation builder. If you left off before he attacked the [Russian] White House in 1993, he would be remembered as a revolutionary for those terrible things he helped to destroy, but he will be remembered for six years as a Russian president between 1993 and 1999 for what he was building. He could build a very unattractive state and his chosen successor we were kind of hopeful that Yeltsin's successor would be a more vigorous and dynamic version of great democrat and Sakharov. Instead we got a younger version of Uri Andropov.

MICHAEL McFAUL: There is a giant difference between Uri Andropov and Vladimir Putin in that Vladimir Putin will be elected in a free and fair election in March.

DIMITRI SIMES: I have not seen fair elections in Russia under Yeltsin.

MICHAEL McFAUL: Compared to what? Compared to Andropov and the Soviet period.

GWEN IFILL: Let me step in. Leon Aron, the United States obviously has interests at stake here. Is it able to say what the United States will be able to get out of this or take from this?

LEON ARON: As far as Putin as concerned?

GWEN IFILL: Yes.

LEON ARON: I think it's a mixed bag and we better get used to it. On the one hand he is, I think he will be elected. We're forgetting that -in broad parameters -- he is following public opinion. It is a struggling democracy, imperfect democracy, but there are certain consensus on certain things such as free elections and free speech. Even the Communist Party doesn't want to renationalize the privatized property and so on and so forth. So Putin unlike the days of the Cold War, we can't practice criminology, and say Putin will do whatever we wants however he wants it -- there are very important constraints that cross the entire segment, the entire Russian political class, but following public opinion, in other words we got what we prayed for, I think he might be tougher than Yeltsin, for example, on a number of issues. Take the war in Chechnya. It's very popular. Putin is pursuing it because the polls are for that war.

GWEN IFILL: Whether the US likes it or not?

LEON ARON: That's right, Yeltsin partly because of his upbringing in the party apparatchik could do things that went against public opinion such as when he helped in Kosovo to settle that conflict. I'm not sure that a popularly elected president such as Putin would be as amenable.

GWEN IFILL: Thank you very much. I feel like we've just scratched the surface but I thank you all for joining us.