Vladimir putin came to power on May 7th 2000 under the banner of economic reform, modernisation and anti-corruption. In a bow to Russian history he ordered that "The Gulag Archipelago", Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1973 book about Stalin's Soviet forced-labour camp system, be made a set text for Russian schoolchildren, a radical move as the book is both searing and unrelenting and had been banned in the Soviet era.
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