Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in power for over 10 years, ruled out a departure from politics yesterday, telling a questioner: "Don't hold your breath."

Mr Putin, 57, also said he "will think about" taking part in the 2012 presidential election, when many Russians expect him to return to the Kremlin for a six-year term.

The Russian Prime Minister even weighed into a fierce national debate on the legacy of Soviet leader Josef Stalin yesterday, calling for a balanced assessment and saying he was not all good or bad.

Russians historically yearn for strong rulers and many still feel deep sympathy for the Georgian-born iron-fisted leader. They like Stalin for having turned an illiterate peasant nation into an industrialised nuclear superpower and for having crushed Nazism.

The Communists, Russia's largest opposition party, plan lavish celebrations of Stalin's 130th birthday later this month and his grandson recently sued a newspaper for accusing Stalin of ordering mass murders.

"If you say you are positive (about Stalin's rule), some will be discontented. If you say you are negative, others will grumble," Mr Putin said during an annual marathon question-and-answer session with the Russian people.

"It is impossible to make a general judgment. It is evident that, from 1924 to 1953, the country that Stalin ruled changed from an agrarian to an industrial society."

Echoing millions of Russians, Mr Putin praised Stalin's leading role in winning World War II.

"You know, if we return to the issue of human losses, nobody can now throw stones at those who organised and stood at the head of this victory, because if we'd lost this war, the consequences for our country would have been much more catastrophic."

A new school textbook, compiled with the help of an historian from Mr Putin's ruling United Russia party, mentions the repressions but also depicts Stalin as a talented manager.

Soviet-era dissident and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was sent to a Gulag labour camp for making a joke about Stalin, was buried last year in a religious ceremony which bore all the hallmarks of a state funeral. But shortly afterwards Stalin was voted in a nationwide TV show as Russia's third most popular historical figure of all times, and a Moscow metro station restored a phrase praising him which ran around the cupola of its roof.