Putin and Medvedev never, at this stage, openly contradicted each other. But a battle of ideas was being waged by their proxies. A liberal think-tank, the Institute of Contemporary Development (INSOR), was set up just after Medvedev was elected president, and he became chairman of its Board of Trustees. The institute’s chairman, Igor Yurgens, says the president agrees with ‘some but not all’ of his views, but over the few years of its existence Medvedev has in fact veered more and more towards INSOR’s ideas. In February 2010 it published a long report titled ‘Russia in the 21st Century: Vision for the Future’, which suggested undoing many of Putin’s political reforms. It envisaged a Western-style two-party system, a media free of state interference, independent courts, directly elected regional governors and a scaled-back security service. The report was at once denounced by Putin’s spin doctor, Vladislav Surkov, who declared: ‘You can’t create democracy in three days, you can’t turn a child into an adult just like that.’
But in November Medvedev himself turned his guns on Putin’s much vaunted ‘stability’. He used words reminiscent of Gorbachev’s, who branded the period of communist government just before he came to power as years of ‘stagnation’. In a video blog Medvedev appeared to condemn the de facto one-party rule of Putin’s United Russia party: ‘It is no secret that for some time now signs of stagnation have begun to appear in our political life and stability has threatened to turn into stagnation. And such stagnation is equally damaging for both the ruling party and opposition forces. If the opposition has no chance at all of winning a fair fight it degrades and becomes marginal. If the ruling party never loses a single election, it is just coasting. Ultimately, it too degrades, like any living organism which remains static. For these reasons it has become necessary to raise the degree of political competition.’
Despite Medvedev’s apparent encouragement to the media to take risks, the Kremlin maintained its total control of the central television channels. At the end of November the popular presenter Vladimir Pozner had his closing remarks on his weekly show censored when he referred to the death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky. Another respected television journalist, Leonid Parfyonov, used an award ceremony to launch a stinging attack on how television news was controlled – mostly by the very people sitting at the tables at the ceremony. He said news bulletins had come to resemble Soviet propaganda, with no room for critical, sceptical or ironic commentary about the prime minister or president. ‘The correspondent is ... not a journalist but a bureaucrat, following the service and logic of obedience,’ he said.
The irony was that Medvedev himself, as recently as September, had used his control over state television – resorting to black propaganda techniques straight from the Communist Party handbook – to discredit and then oust the corrupt mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. Here, there was no hint of Medvedev’s democratic inclinations. Since Putin had abolished mayoral elections, there was no question of getting rid of Luzhkov through the ballot box. It had to be done by presidential decree – but you couldn’t just do that, with no good reason, certainly not with a mayor as powerful as Luzhkov. His corruptness was just about as blatant as it could possibly be: everyone knew his wife had become Russia’s richest woman principally by securing the vast majority of Moscow’s most lucrative building contracts for her own company. But he was part of the Kremlin furniture, in office since Yeltsin’s days, and still popular; he had transformed Moscow into a glittering showcase of post-communist revival; and he had Putin’s support. But Medvedev wanted rid of him, and the last straw was Luzhkov’s public criticism of the president’s decision to halt construction of a controversial highway being built through an ancient forest north of Moscow. At a meeting with newspaper editors in St Petersburg, Medvedev adopted Putin-like language when he accused Luzhkov of ‘rattling his balls’, a quaint Russian expression meaning to talk nonsense.
Medvedev cranked up the old propaganda machine, and the journalist ‘bureaucrats’ described by Parfyonov were asked to oblige their masters. All three main television channels aired documentaries that blackened Luzhkov’s character. They criticised his policy of ‘reconstructing’ Moscow’s architectural heritage by allowing developers to retain only the facades of eighteenth-century buildings, while demolishing everything within. They blamed him for the city’s traffic jams and described his wife’s fabulous wealth. And they derided Luzhkov for spending the scorching summer of 2010, when Moscow was engulfed by poisonous smog from peat fires, on holiday abroad or tending to his bee-hives instead of helping Muscovites survive.
On 17 September Luzhkov was summoned to the Kremlin and asked by Medvedev’s chief of staff to ‘go quietly’. But he didn’t go quietly. He went on holiday to Austria for a week, and then, on 27 September, wrote a letter to Medvedev, in which he laid into Medvedev’s pretensions to be a democrat, accusing him of unleashing an ‘unprecedented defamation campaign’, designed to get rid of a mayor who was ‘too independent and too awkward’. Luzhkov demanded that mayoral elections be reinstated. And he suggested that Medvedev’s only motive for wanting rid of him was to move one of his own allies into the mayor’s seat to boost his own chances in a future presidential election. ‘You have two options,’ Luzhkov wrote: ‘fire me, if you have weighty reasons, or else publicly distance yourself from those who have done you this favour [the black propaganda campaign].’ The next morning, Medvedev sacked the mayor, citing ‘loss of trust’.
It took another fortnight for a new mayor to be appointed, however – a sign that Putin and Medvedev could not agree on a candidate. The choice finally fell on Putin’s right-hand man, Sergei Sobyanin. He was Putin’s chief of staff and owed his entire career to him (and, incidentally, knew little about the capital he was about to run, having lived there for only five years – during which he had observed the notorious traffic jams only through the darkened windows of his government limousine as it sped down the special lane reserved for the elite). If Luzhkov was right to suspect that Medvedev had wanted to install one of his own supporters, then this was an important battle he had lost to Putin. He was about to lose more.
Since the start of his presidency, Medvedev’s attempt to project a liberal image had been undermined by the continuing imprisonment of the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky. His jail sentence was due to end in 2011, but his enemies (Khodorkovsky specifically names deputy prime minister Igor Sechin) were determined to keep him behind bars for longer. They certainly did not want him released just before parliamentary and presidential elections. And so a second trial was launched in February 2009. The fresh case against him was implausible. The first trial had already found him guilty of fraud and tax evasion. This time the prosecutors wanted to prove that he and his co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, had embezzled the total amount of oil that Yukos produced from 1998 to 2003 – oil that prosecutors had previously argued Yukos had sold, while failing to pay the correct taxes. How could Khodorkovsky have ‘stolen’ the oil if it was previously accepted that he had ‘sold’ it?
His defence appeared to gain a boost when the industry minister, Viktor Khristenko, and the former economics minister, German Gref, both appeared in court as witnesses, and cast doubt on the charges. If embezzlement had been discovered, I would have been made aware of it,’ said Gref. Khristenko admitted he was unaware of millions of barrels of oil having disappeared.
Any hopes Khodorkovsky’s lawyers had were short-lived, however. The judge was due to deliver his verdict on 15 December, but reporters turning up at the courthouse that morning found a note pinned to the door announcing, without explanation, that it was postponed until the 27th. Perhaps there was an explanation: the next day, the 16th, the prime minister was due to take part in his annual television phone-in, and he would have surely faced questions about the trial. That might have been awkward – and certainly too late for Putin to influence the verdict. By having the verdict delayed, he was able to use the phone-in to interfere quite brazenly in the course of justice. Asked about the case, Putin said, ‘a thief
should sit in jail’. It sounded like a direct order to Judge Danilkin, who was at that moment considering his options. Even President Medvedev took exception to such blatant interference. He said in a television interview: ‘No official has the right to express their position on a case before the court announces its verdict.’ It was the first time Medvedev had gone further than merely expressing views that differed a little from Putin’s; this was, in effect, a public reprimand.
It made no difference to the outcome of the show trial, however. Judge Danilkin found Khodorkovsky guilty, as the siloviki desired, and sentenced him to 14 years behind bars, to run concurrently with his first sentence and backdated to his arrest in 2003. He would not be free until 2017.
If 2009 and 2010 saw President Medvedev speaking a lot about democracy and human rights, and occasionally taking action to support them, his prime minister’s response became more and more bizarre. It was during this period that Vladimir Putin began to find more and more time in his busy schedule for publicity stunts – extravagant displays of virility that appeared designed to demonstrate that, despite being 13 years older than Medvedev, he was fitter and stronger.
In August 2009 Putin bared his chest and swam butterfly stroke in an icy Siberian river. Kremlin cameras clicked furiously as he went fishing and horse-riding. In 2010 scarcely a month went by without a photo-shoot. He put a tracking collar on a polar bear. He rode a Harley Davidson at a bikers’ rally. He sprayed wildfires with water from an aeroplane. He fired a dart from a crossbow at a whale in a stormy sea. He drove a Formula One car at 240 kilometres an hour. In October the press was full of speculation that he had gone one step too far to rejuvenate his image. He appeared in Kiev with his face looking puffy and bruised, and heavily made-up. ‘There are no bruises there,’ said his spokesman. ‘He was just really tired after several flights and extra meetings. Also, the light may have fallen on him in an unfortunate manner.’ But the press wondered if he had had a facelift, or botox injections, like his friend, the ever youthful Silvio Berlusconi.
Medvedev did not try to match Putin’s strongman appearances – though he did begin to walk with an exaggerated swagger and to talk with rather aggressive mouth movements, not unlike Putin’s. But for the most part, his props were not fast cars and wild animals but iPads and tweets.
Image was crucial to both men. They were appealing to different constituencies. By the end of 2010, with just a year to go before the coming parliamentary and presidential elections, two things were becoming crystal clear: that both men wanted to be the next president of Russia, and that it would be Putin who would decide which of them would go forward. Ultimately, the tandem was more of a penny-farthing.
2011: Paralysis again – the phoney campaign
In a sense the whole of Medvedev’s presidency was a slow-burning campaign for the next election. But as the final year began, paralysis once again afflicted the president’s Kremlin and the prime minister’s White House – just as it had done prior to the last election. The agreed line was that the two men would ‘decide together’ which of them would be the candidate in 2012, and they would announce their decision when the time was ripe. Officials in both camps began manoeuvring, uncertain of how the dice would fall. At the top levels, Medvedev’s and Putin’s spokespeople weighed every word like a raw diamond that could tip the scales. At lower levels, bureaucrats positioned themselves to jump ship if necessary when the situation became clear. At every level, officials were afraid of saying anything that might be a hostage to fortune.
Mikhail Dvorkovich (the brother of Arkady, the president’s economic adviser) wrote in his blog: ‘Ministers, not knowing who is their real boss, are tripping up, trying to carry out often contradictory instructions. It’s no joke, having to choose between two people, either of whom could become president in 2012. One mistake and in a year you’re a “political corpse”.’
At the end of February, Peskov told me to expect ‘hysteria’ around the world in a few months’ time. I took it to mean that Putin was going to announce his intention to run for re-election. But nothing was made public and the uncertainty continued.
Both ‘candidates’ began an undeclared campaign, starting with a farcical argument over the choice of mascot for the Sochi Winter Olympics. Putin decided to demonstrate his ability to influence any decision in the country merely by expressing an opinion. Just as he had put the judge in the Khodorkovsky trial in an impossible position by declaring that ‘a thief should sit in jail’, so he casually opined that the snow leopard would make a fine Olympics mascot – just hours before a nationwide television vote on the matter. Naturally, the snow leopard was chosen. Medvedev was not happy. Two days later, talking about something completely different – the idea that possible designs for a new universal electronic ID card should be discussed on the internet – he added caustically: ‘I hope it will be fairer than the discussion of the Olympic symbols.’
There were more serious spats to come. In March open disagreement broke out between the ‘candidates’ over the world’s response to Colonel Gaddafi’s crackdown on dissenters in Libya. At the United Nations, Russia abstained on Resolution 1973, which authorised the use of air strikes against Gaddafi’s forces. Russia’s position was a compromise: Medvedev had wanted to back the Western stance, his foreign ministry was against it. But Putin was outraged by it, and said so publicly. Visiting a ballistic missile factory in the republic of Udmurtia, he likened the UN resolution to a ‘medieval call to crusade’. He said he was concerned by the ‘ease with which decisions to use force are taken in international affairs’. He saw it as a continuation of a tendency in US policy: ‘During the Clinton era they bombed Belgrade, Bush sent forces into Afghanistan and then under an invented, false pretext they sent forces into Iraq. Now it is Libya’s turn, under the pretext of protecting the peaceful population. But in air strikes it is precisely the civilian population that gets killed. Where is the logic and the conscience?’
When Medvedev heard Putin’s words – a direct criticism of his own decision to allow the Western air strikes to go ahead – he hit the roof. Foreign policy was his domain, not the prime minister’s. Within a couple of hours he called a handful of Russian journalists to his dacha, and emerged into the garden to deliver a stern and lengthy rebuttal of his prime minister’s remarks. He looked nervous, swallowing hard and jerking his shoulders, as he called Putin’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Talking about ‘crusades’, he said, could lead to a clash of civilisations. ‘Let us not forget,’ he went on, ‘what motivated the Security Council resolutions in the first place. These resolutions were passed in response to the Libyan authorities’ actions. This was why we took these decisions. I think these are balanced decisions that were very carefully thought through. We gave our support to the first Security Council resolution and abstained on the second. We made these decisions consciously with the aim of preventing an escalation of violence ... It would be wrong for us to start flapping about now and say that we didn’t know what we were doing. This was a conscious decision on our part. Such were the instructions I gave to the foreign ministry, and they were carried out.’
For only the second time (after the Khodorkovsky incident), President Medvedev had put Prime Minister Putin firmly in his place. It came as no surprise when, a week or so later, Medvedev’s press secretary, Timakova, made urgent calls to all the television stations, banning them from showing footage of Putin driving Medvedev around in an new experimental car. The phoney campaign was now in full swing: there would be no more images of Putin in the driving seat.
It was a surreal battle: the only people who really had to be convinced were Putin and Medvedev themselves – it was they who would decide which of them would run. (As one commentator put it, the only election going on was the one inside Putin’s head.) But Medvedev decided to take his pitch to the people, perhaps hoping to gather support in the press and put pressure on Putin to allow him to remain as president. On 3 March he used a speech commemorating the 150th anniversary
of Tsar Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in Russia to set out his ideological platform, arguing that ‘freedom cannot be postponed’. A few months later, not to be outdone, Putin chose his own historical role model – not the ‘Tsar Liberator’ but Pyotr Stolypin, the reformist but repressive prime minister of the last tsar, Nicholas II. Stolypin carried out liberal agrarian reforms but had so many dissenters executed that the hangman’s noose became known as ‘Stolypin’s necktie’. Putin praised him in terms he could have used for himself, and called for a monument to Stolypin to be erected in front of the government White House.
Medvedev followed up his call for freedom with his economic pitch. In a speech in Magnitogorsk he listed ten priorities to improve the investment climate. Sensationally, he demanded that government ministers who held directorships of state companies should give them up. They included Putin’s closest ally, Igor Sechin, the chairman of Rosneft. Medvedev (who himself used to be both deputy prime minister and chairman of Gazprom) said it could no longer be the case that ‘government leaders who answer for the rules and regulations in a certain industry also sit on the board of directors of competitive companies’. The newspaper Kommersant called the proposal to replace the state officials with independent directors revolutionary: ‘Dmitry Medvedev essentially demanded the liquidation of state capitalism.’
Arkady Dvorkovich says it was a ‘difficult step’ for the government (that is, Putin) to agree to.2 Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who specialises in studying the composition of the elite, says the move was part of a trend, however, which has seen the presence of siloviki in state structures weakened since Medvedev became president. At their height, in 2007, officials from the security services and military accounted for 47 per cent of the government elite, whereas by the summer of 2007 the figure had shrunk to 22 per cent. That does not mean Putin has forfeited his powers of patronage to the new president, however. Kryshtanovskaya says that of 75 ‘key figures’, all but two remain ‘Putin’s men’.3
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