There are a couple of ways to look at Putin's record;
This may come as a bit of a shock to you, but a lot of Russians have no idea how to go about being "free". They've been serfs of one kind or another for nearly 1,000 years.
Culturally, they are used being under the heel of a boot. They have a huge inferiority complex as a result. Many Russian defectors committed suicide after coming to the west, simply because they didn't know how to deal with the concept of freedom.
Now when Communism crumbled, a lot of opportunists (Robber Barons) the likes of which we haven't seen in nearly a hundred years moved in to fill the power vaccuum: The went about "privatizing" industry with little or no capital, then started raking in the cash.
Yeltsin had no idea how to deal with it either, and bless his boozy heart, he was on the verge of being exposed as getting kickbacks from these privatization concerns.
Putin had to put those guys in check, and he did it in a very Russian way. He also did it legally. Putin knows he has a country that's falling apart, he also knows that people there have been conditioned to believe what is written: again, that Russian mindset comes in; Why confuse the people with contradicting information? You are dealing with people not conditioned to make decisions for themselves - lest you think they are stupid, let me be the first to remind you that the Russians are a nation of thinkers, some of the best Engineers, Mathematicians and Writers in the world were born and raised from there, but as a group, they are unaccustomed to making decisions that affect their day-to-day lives.
This is very alien for the citizens of the US, but maybe it is not such a bad thing for Russia. They are going to need to be carefully weaned from the dictatorships they were born and raised with into the 21st. century and the ideas of free society. Putin knows this; He was an officer in the KGB, and he understands the West from the Russian viewpoint. He also knows that just putting the Russian people out in the woods of freedom will leave them to the wolves, too. Been there and done that in the early 1990's.
He's a good guy, and I'd trust him long before the French and German leadership now.