Putin Named 2nd Runner-Up to Time's 2014 Person of the Year

By The Moscow Times

Dec. 10, 2014

Time Magazine said Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was its second runner-up to be 2014's "Person of the Year," with Ebola fighters and Ferguson protesters occupying the top two slots, respectively.

Time referred to Putin as an isolated "imperialist," whose aim is to restore the Russian Empire and project its influence into the world by offering an alternative to liberal Western democracies.

Every year Time's editors declare a person, idea, group or project as person of the year, who "for better or for worse has done the most to influence the events of the year."

Mikhail Gorbachev, Yury Andropov, Nikita Khrushchev and Josef Stalin were among the Russian leaders to have been declared Time's "Person of the Year" in the past. In 2007, Time named Putin "Person of the Year," declaring him a "tsar."

Among Time's readers, who voted in a separate ranking, Putin came in sixth with 4.3 percent of the vote. The incumbent Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, came first.

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