Former Russian president Vladimir Putin, right, and Dmitry Medvedev, his successor, attend a meeting outside Moscow on Dec. 30. Medvedev nominated Putin as his prime minister after he was sworn in on May 7. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press)
Don Murray
Russia moves into orbit around its binary czars
May 6, 2008
You could call it the supermarket strategy: vote for one, get two! That's what Russians bought — excuse me, voted for — two months ago. On May 7, they took delivery on the two-for-one deal.
Dmitry Medvedev steps into the Kremlin's big presidential office, occupied for eight years and four months by Vladimir Putin. Putin leaves the Kremlin, but not the government. Rather, he goes a few streets away to a big bureau in what is called the Russian White House. It holds the cabinet offices, where Putin's post will be that of prime minister.
Just so no one would miss the point, a few weeks before the official inauguration of the new president, Putin was acclaimed as the leader of United Russia, the party that controls two-thirds of the seats in the Russian parliament. Putin wasn't even a member of the party when he was made its leader.
The official emblem of the Russian Federation is a two-headed eagle. The emblem has now been made political flesh, and no one below the neck really knows how the heads will act.
Putin is a known quantity. The bigger mystery is what lies inside the head of the new president. Medvedev is a lawyer and from St. Petersburg. Both those facts are keys to his present position. He was a law student of Anatoly Sobchak, a crusading lawyer in the days of perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Soviet Union.
When the U.S.S.R. crumbled and crashed and Russia rose from the ashes of the dead empire, Sobchak wrote its new constitution. Then he became the mayor of St. Petersburg, and Medvedev went with him as his adviser. A year later, Putin also joined Sobchak's staff. The two men became inseparable.
So far, Medvedev has shown his talents in a uniquely Soviet way. During the annual potato harvest, all students were required to pick potatoes for free for a day. Sobchak, who has since died, came back from the day in the mud and spuds and told his wife, Ludmila Narusova, of the extraordinary talent of Dmitry Medvedev at organizing the potato-picking brigades.
When Putin became Russia's president, Medvedev became his chief of staff. Putin humbled the oligarchs, the Russian multi-billionaires who had grabbed most of Russia's resources at firesale prices, and grabbed back the resources for the state. Gazprom became the state's vehicle, the economic arm of the Kremlin, and Medvedev became its chairman while remaining the president's chief of staff and later becoming deputy prime minister. Gazprom isn't just any company. Its market capitalization is valued at $350 billion, its gas reserves are the largest in the world, its pipeline network the longest, its oil reserves the third largest. Add to that banks, insurance companies, a major television network and newspapers, and you have Russia's political-industrial complex under one roof, with Medvedev at its heart.
The key to Russia's power elite today is that most are drawn from a small group from St. Petersburg, and most of them have KGB backgrounds, though Medvedev does not possess this second merit badge. Rather, as a lawyer, he is given to musing about the "legal nihilism" that afflicts Russia, the stain of disregard for the law and the rampant corruption at all levels of government that accompanies it. The international corruption tracker Transparency International recently reported that in the eight years of the Putin presidency, Russia slipped from 60th to 143rd in the world. It's now right down there with Indonesia and Gambia.
Since his election as president, Medvedev has promised tougher new laws to fight corruption. That, and his appointment under Putin to lead so-called national projects to improve health, education and roads, led Narusova, Sobchak's widow and a Russian senator, to describe Medvedev as a "liberal."
"He's part of the liberal wing around Putin. Putin made his choice in favour of liberalism and more investment in social policy, instead of giving in to pressure from the conservatives in favour of the security and military services."
A liberal, maybe, but how effective? In his first year in charge of "national projects," spending in Russia on health and education, already low, actually went down.
It matters little. Medvedev, the Kremlin PR machines tells us, is a nice guy who likes computers, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, and also Deep Purple. More to the point, Russia is awash in oil and gas money and people feel richer and more secure. Putin's approval ratings leaving the presidential office were 70 per cent, which is almost exactly the percentage of votes his handpicked successor won in the ensuing election.
A telling emblem of Russia's current political situation can be found in the office of Dmitry Peskov, who was the smiling face of the Kremlin to the outside world when he served under Putin as his spokesman. The computer in Peskov's large Kremlin office had a screensaver that flashed out the message, "Freedom is Slavery." Given Russia's history and the Kremlin's place in it, this homage to George Orwell's 1984 seems daringly ironic. You're left to wonder whether there's any irony to Peskov's answer to the question of Medvedev's qualifications for the job of president.
"People feel the improvements in their daily lives," Peskov says. "That's why they simply want the continuation."
There you are: Medvedev's role is to be the continuation, while his own Big Brother looks on from the Russian White House.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Biography
During his 30 years at CBC, Don Murray has filed hundreds of reports in French and English from China, Europe, the Middle East and the Soviet Union. He is currently based in London. He wrote A Democracy of Despots, documenting the collapse and rebirth of Russia. From Berlin, he reported the Bosnia peace agreement talks and, based in London, the death of Diana and Northern Ireland peace talks. He authored Family Wars for the International Journal, paralleling Northern Ireland and Bosnia. He has covered wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.