What happened over the next few months looked unbelievable. From August to November 1999 the number of those who answered “Yes” to the question “Do you think that Vladimir Putin is, on the whole, doing a good job?” shot up from 31 to 80 percent, and the number of those who answered “No” dropped from 33 to 12. On a graph, it looked like two vertical lines, a blue one going up and a red one shooting down.19 It looked like nothing Gudkov had ever seen.
