The new Russian president's distance from the security services may see him nudge out Vladimir Putin's muscular style in favour of grater democracy, writes Tony Kinsella.
RUSSIA'S PRESIDENTIAL election, despite its security service hallmark, was described as "a reflection of the will of the electorate" by the Swiss social democrat deputy Andreas Gross, one of the few permitted foreign observers.
The fact that president-elect Dmitry Medvedev does not come from those same security services offers a clue at to where he may seek to lead his vast country. He and his predecessor are both Soviet products but their default approaches may be quite different.
The Soviet system depended on three formal pillars - the Communist Party, the armed forces and the security services (dominated by the KGB). An informal network of managers, senior civil servants and crime figures offered a fourth structural element.
In a bureaucratic system where a broken machine, or the late arrival of raw materials, could paralyse production, not only was an appeal to Moscow unlikely to offer a solution, it could destroy the appellant's career. Managers and officials came to regularly "borrow" what they needed from each other.
At one end of this reality was a network of pals offering each other "dig outs". At the other extreme lay a shadowy parallel economy that sought to control, even monopolise, the flow of certain key goods.
A replacement political structure had to be assembled from these four ingredients when the USSR collapsed in 1991. The Communist Party had spectacularly failed. The armed forces somewhat unfairly carried the entire can for the Afghanistan fiasco and they were in any case too preoccupied with the chaos of a dissolving superpower.
Under Boris Yeltsin the manager-official-criminal network predominated. It could have thrown up responsible leaders, but its leading oligarchs instead distinguished themselves by their greed, leaving the country in chaos.
Many Russians were reduced to little more than subsistence as salaries and pensions went unpaid. They blamed their predicament on the free market and democratic reforms.
Democracy having become synonymous with poverty and chaos, the security siloviki struck. Vladimir Putin, a KGB officer from his graduation in 1975 until 1990, was their presidential creation. Putin is widely suspected of using textbook KGB approaches to restore state authority and national pride.
In Russia's overt racism Chechens are very much top of the "to be blamed" list. The Second Chechen War began when Putin ordered air attacks on the Chechen capital, Grozny, in response to bomb attacks on three apartment buildings around Moscow in September 1999.
Nearly 300 people died in these attacks, which ceased following the discovery of a bomb in an apartment building in Ryazan and the arrest of three FSB (the former KGB) agents by the city police on September 23rd, 1999. The FSB has always maintained that its operatives were on a training mission, but Moscow has consistently blocked all enquiries.
The award-winning Russian-American journalist Anna Politkovskaya consistently sought to prove FSB involvement in the 1999 apartment bombings, until she was murdered in Moscow in October 2006.
The following month former FSB lieutenant-colonel Alexander Litvinenko was murdered by polonium-210 poisoning in London.
He too alleged that the 1999 bombings were organised by the FSB in his book Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within.
It is impossible to either verify or dismiss these claims. Their political importance lies in the fact that since they fit with KGB maskirova (deception/misdirection) operational practices, many Russians lend them credence, even accepting such approaches as the necessary price for stability.
The patriotic fervour of the 1999-2005 Chechen war, the fact that the state was beginning to function again, and rising oil and gas revenues all strengthened Putin's position. The Kremlin steadily extinguished serious opposition, taking more and more control of the main media, appointing regional governors and emasculating political critics.
The October 2003 arrest of the millionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky on tax charges, and the subsequent takeover of his Yukos oil conglomerate by the state-owned Gazprom, sent a clear message to even the wealthiest of Russian citizens - frontal opposition to Kremlin policies would no longer be tolerated.
Dmitry Medvedev (42) inherits a presidency whose powers have been considerably reinforced.
As a lawyer with a PhD in private law, he cut his political teeth with Putin under Leningrad's then mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, in the early 1990s. He followed his mentor to Moscow and ran Putin's 2000 presidential campaign.
He has always been careful not to be over-identified with any one Kremlin faction or clan, which may be one of the keys to his steady promotion, via the chairmanship of Gazprom, to president of Russia.
"Medvedev was intricately involved in most of the major power struggles from 1999 to 2007, without being directly associated with them," notes Russia's Kommersant newspaper.
His declared love of Deep Purple and other rock bands states that he broke Soviet laws and that those laws were idiotic. It's a statement no KGB-moulded siloviki could ever make.
Twenty million Russians live on less than €100 a month, a third of dwellings are sub-standard, while male life expectancy has fallen to 59. The renaissance of Russian agriculture depends on regulating the thorny question of land ownership.
Ownership and title are legal prerequisites for economic development and security of title requires an independent judiciary. Medvedev recognises that "no non-democratic state has ever become truly prosperous".
Will he be Putin's puppet? Probably not, as fellow Gazprom board member Burckhard Bergmann advises: "No one should confuse his politeness with weakness".
Medvedev may use his power to nudge Russia steadily towards greater democracy, slowly edging Putin and his more muscular approach aside. Should he succeed, future elections could be considerably more combative.