MOSCOW - Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin celebrated his 70th birthday Thursday in a country profoundly changed just over a year since he left office, with new faces at the center of power under his protege Vladimir Putin.
Naming this young former KGB agent from Saint Petersburg to head the post-Soviet FSB secret services, then the government, and finally annointing him his "successor" before handing over the reins on December 31, 1999, Yeltsin "created" Putin.
But 13 months after the transfer of power, which was succeeded by a presidential poll in March 2000 in which Putin won a resounding victory on the first round, Yeltsin has witnessed big changes in the country he once ran.
The most symbolic was the restoration of Stalin's Soviet-era national anthem, with new words, ditching the Mikhail Glinka version adopted by Yeltsin after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
The intelligentsia denounced a measure which they saw as reflecting the true face of the Putin "regime".
Yeltsin, who began his ascent to power after tearing up his membership of the Soviet Communist Party in 1990, and governed Russia from 1991 under the banner of anti-Communism, cast aside his usual silence to criticize his former protege's initiative.
But over and above the symbolism, the country in which Yeltsin turned 70 has become increasingly run by Putin's former KGB colleagues, whom the new president has appointed to a number of posts of responsibility.
In contrast, the clique of insiders known as the "Family" which surrounded Yeltsin, ill during his last years in power, has largely been swept from the centre of power.
In the most telling episode, the former Kremlin property manager Pavel Borodin, a close aide to Yeltsin whose largesse in dispensing state assets was reportedly a tool of Kremlin policy, was all but abandoned by Putin after his arrest in January in New York.
Swiss judicial authorities accuse Borodin of laundering 25 million dollars in bribes, pointing the finger at the corruption and personal connections that flourished during the Yeltsin era.
Putin, for his part, had promised before his election in March to install a "dictatorship of the law."
Declaring war on the "oligarchs", the group of fabulously wealthy businessmen who built their empires on insider privatizations, and who in return gave Yeltsin their support, Putin has sidelined the two least accommodating.
Boris Berezovsky, who had privileged access to the Kremlin and was considered as part of the "Family," has had to flee into exile after being pursued by prosecutors for alleged embezzlement.
As for Vladimir Gusinsky, whose private Media-MOST empire and its NTV national television channel were one of the main supports for Yeltsin's re-election bid in 1996, he is fighting extradition from Spain on fraud charges.
The campaign against Media-MOST has raised fears for the future of free press in Russia, one of the most incontestable achievements of the Yeltsin years.
Putin's moves to "strengthen the state" and restablish a "vertical power" structure after a decade of liberalism verging on chaos, have already relegated Yeltsin to the history books.