OPINION:Now that Dmitry Medvedev is president, will he sacrifice his ambitions for the man who brought him to Moscow?
WINSTON CHURCHILL is said to have compared Russian politics to watching dogs fighting under a carpet, but even that sometimes fails to convey the impenetrability of machinations in Moscow.
With less than a year to go until presidential elections, it is still unclear whether Dmitry Medvedev will run for a second term or allow his mentor, Vladimir Putin, to return to the top job, after constitutional limits forced Putin to swap the Kremlin for a spell in the prime minister’s office.
Both men have suggested they will not engage in an unseemly scrap at the ballot box, but instead decide privately which of them is best suited to lead Russia, a country with huge energy resources and great potential in other areas, but encumbered by corruption, inefficiency, outdated institutions and infrastructure, and bloody unrest in the Caucasus.
But as the election nears, neither man seems inclined to give way, competing cliques are ramping up rhetoric in support of their favoured leader, and Kremlin-watchers are starting to wonder whether Medvedev is enjoying power too much to step aside for an old boss.
Those who spy a split in the ruling “tandem” note how Medvedev rebuked Putin for likening the West’s intervention in Libya to a “medieval crusade”, and then ordered several of Putin’s ministers and close allies to leave the boards of some of Russia’s biggest state companies.
In what sound like attempts to associate himself with the country’s more progressive elements while depicting Putin as yesterday’s man, Medvedev (45) backs the urgent modernisation of Russia and warns of “stagnation”. Putin’s obsession with security and stability was appropriate after the chaos of the 1990s but is now holding the country back, he said.
“It is high time for changes. He who does not change remains in the past,” Medvedev said earlier this month. “What was good 10 years ago isn’t good today. At some point we had to strengthen the foundations of our state and gather the parts of the destroyed economy together, but we are not going to build state capitalism, this is not our choice.”
Putin has been building something like state capitalism for a decade, by stripping assets from unfriendly oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and handing them to tame tycoons and state-controlled behemoths such as Gazprom and Rosneft, while at the same time dramatically boosting the power of the security services in the business world.
The former KGB colonel has not modernised Russia – corruption is worse than ever, bureaucracy is still stifling, the law courts are not independent and justice is still selective – but his allies have flourished at the expense of many of the people who thrived under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
Having turned the tables on the 1990s elite, Putin’s clique knows that a shift in Russia’s power balance can cause a swift reversal of fortune. And the country’s Byzantine system of patronage means that a vast swathe of officials at all levels and in a myriad agencies and companies have something riding on whether Putin or Medvedev – who has his own complex web of support – is top dog.
When Medvedev said this month that a decision would be made “fairly soon” on whether he or Putin would run for president next March, the spasm of reaction suggested a certain nervousness among Russia’s ruling class.
“Of course, this decision should be taken sooner or later. But there is almost a year before the polls, and all this fuss does not contribute to a normal working structure,” Putin said the day after Medvedev’s remarks. “If we give some improper signals now, half the [presidential] administration and more than half the government will stop working in anticipation of some changes.”
The admonishment did not stop a senior member of the ruling United Russia party from saying that it would back Putin for president, a comment that prompted the premier to order the party leadership directly “not to talk about [the election], not to get excited about it”.
Putin might love skiing, judo, flying in fighter jets and other adrenaline-fuelled pursuits, but he is allergic to excitement in politics. He likes to control everything, remove all danger of unpredictability. He likes his democracy, and his economy, managed by people he can trust.
He anointed Medvedev as his successor because he had been loyal and reliable over many years of co-operation, right back to the early 1990s in St Petersburg city hall. But is the protege still willing to sacrifice his own ambitions – and perhaps his own distinct vision of modern Russia – for the man who brought him to Moscow and his now-stale platitudes about stability and security?
“Putin does not have a political programme. What he has are objections,” said analyst Gleb Pavlovsky, who is close to the Kremlin. “Putin is being irritated by what he thinks looks like his political funeral . . . It’s obvious that the prime minister is nervous, since he does not see a clear shape for his future in the president’s comments.”
Both leaders deny the existence of any rift, however, and some experts look at the writhing Russian carpet and ask not which dog is winning the scrap, but whether they are really fighting or only playing under there, or perhaps play-fighting for the greater befuddlement of their audience. Both men want gradual change, such commentators argue, and fear above all a war among the elite.
“The aim of Medvedev and Putin is to keep up the intrigue until the end and once again to sell to Russian society, as well as to the world community, the idea that Medvedev is the lesser of two evils and an ideological alternative to Putin,” said analyst Stanislav Belkovsky.
Sergei Mitrokhin, a leader of Russia’s beleaguered liberals, agreed that “they are just playing their roles”.
Daniel McLaughlin reports on central and eastern Europe for
The Irish Times
, and has just returned from assignment in Russia