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Thu 05 May 2004Putin pledges to double GDP in key speechRUSSIA: President Vladimir Putin used his annual state of the nation address to give Russians an economic pep talk yesterday, while gliding swiftly over the grinding war in Chechnya and the Kremlin's tense relations with the country's billionaire "oligarchs"."The success of top-priority tasks depends only on us," he told a Kremlin gathering of about 1,000 top political, religious, and military and law-enforcement figures.