Russian President Vladimir Putin was inaugurated as president for the fourth time on May 7, following his landslide victory in the elections in March in which he won 77% of the vote – his best result ever.

Putin will rule for another six years. By the end of this fourth term, he will have ruled over the country for 24 years, making him Moscow's longest-serving leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

The swearing-in ceremony took place in the Grand Kremlin Palace with more than 5,000 of Russia’s political and business elite in attendance. Amongst the foreign guests were former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Hollywood actor Stephen Segal. 

The next big event is to appoint a new government, with its predecessor automatically resigning on the day of the inauguration. A major reshuffle is expected that could be announced as soon as May 15. The consensus is that incumbent Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will keep his job, but the wild card is whether former Finance Minister and co-head of the presidential council Alexei Kudrin will be appointed to the government to oversee a renewed reform drive.

In his brief remarks, Putin played on familiar themes of Russia’s greatness, long history and multicultural make-up and also repeated the new deal for the people that he laid out at the start of March.

Putin unveiled a very ambitious reform plan during his state of the nation speech on March 1. The president wants productivity growth to accelerate to 5% per year (since 2009, average growth was only 1%) during the next decade, the share of SMEs in GDP to go up to 40% (from the current level of 20%), the number of people employed in SMEs to go up from 19mn to 25mn people and a halving of the number of people living below the poverty line (currently 13.8% of the population or 20mn people).

In the new deal, Putin is calling on Russians to actively participate in Russia’s transformation. In the noughties the state fuelled a boom by hiking public sector wages by some 10% a year for a decade. That largesse has come to an end and Putin has said several times that if Russians want more pay they will have to work “harder and better.”

“We need trust in our society. We all have to engage. Transformation depends on all of us,” Putin told the crowd in the Kremlin Palace. He went on to emphasise Russia’s growing role in international affairs but said Russia must “deal with our domestic issues first… We need breakthroughs in all walks of life.”

The reshuffle will be closely watched as Putin himself said in his short remarks after the swearing-in ceremony that the shape of the new cabinet could set the tone of the government and its programme for years to come.

The pomp of the ceremony was overshadowed by protests in central Moscow on May 5 led by anti-corruption blogger and opposition activist Alexei Navalny. Police brutally cleared the square in Moscow and protests in regional cities where parallel demonstrations were held briefly, detaining some 1,000 demonstrators, including Navalny.

While there is clearly a group of increasingly vocal Russians who disapprove of the president, the vast majority are genuine supporters of Putin – not because they think he is doing a good job, but because he represents stability and a guarantee that they can keep the hard won gains of the last decade. What is not clear is just how broadly spread these views are.

As Putin readies to begin his fourth term as Russia's president, state-run pollster VTsIOM found that 82% of Russians approve of the work he is doing. However, a different poll published on May 7 by the independent Levada Center found that Russians are most unhappy with Putin over wealth inequality: 47% of Levada’s respondents praised the president for “returning the status of a great respected power to Russia” and 38% lauded him for “stabilising the situation in the North Caucasus.”