Am back in Moscow for a week, working on a story. The impression I get from my meetings so far is that the West has underestimated the extent to which a new era has begun in Russian politics, and the extent to which Russia genuinely has a new leader, with his own agenda, in Dmitry Medvedev, who was elected president on Sunday.
The consensus Western view is that Medvedev is Putin’s stooge. The Western press were full of cartoons last week depicting Medvedev as a puppet sitting on Putin’s knee. Western politicians have been happy to parrot the same negative opinion of the new president. Hillary Clinton, for example, said the new president (whose name she couldn’t even remember – see this video. Man, that’s foreign policy experience for you!) is “someone who is obviously being installed by Putin, who Putin can control, who has very little independence”.
Obama was similarly down on the new guy, saying “Putin will still have the strongest hand”, while John McCain, well-known Russophile, said Medvedev’s election meant that “Putin had just made himself president for life”. Nice one fellows – how to offend the new Russian president before he’s even been inaugurated!
Russians themselves are unsure how seriously to take their new president. I haven’t met anyone who’s voted for him, in fact, I haven’t met anyone who voted at all. When he appeared on stage at a rock concert with Putin on Sunday, it was Putin’s name the crowd chanted, which must have been somewhat gutting for Medvedev. The public have already given the diminutive president a nickname though: ‘nano-president’.
But we shouldn’t be too quick to write off Medvedev. Kremlinologists tell me Medvedev is his own man, with his own team, and his own agenda. And, as president, he has vast powers of appointment. In fact, the rumours from the Kremlin are that there is already tension between him and Putin over personnel changes. Medvedev wants to bring in his own team, and get rid of some of the old guard.
What can we expect from the forthcoming personnel changes? It may mean out with the spooks, in with the lawyers.
Putin filled his administration with people who like him had a background in the KGB. He placed many of them in key positions in the presidential administration, as well as making them chairmen of powerful state corporations – the railways, the arms monopoly and the largest oil company all have spooks as chairmen.
Medvedev has already said he would like to reduce the number of state bureaucrats heading up state companies. And the man writing Medvedev’s speeches, Putin’s chief economic advisor Arkady Dvorkovich, has also spoken out against the growth of state corporations, labelling them “a dead end for the development of the Russian economy”.
What this means is that Putin’s old KGB chums, such as Igor Sechin (deputy head of the presidential administration and the chairman of oil company Rosneft), Vladimir Yakunin (head of Russian Railways) and Sergei Chemesov (head of arms monopoly Rosoboronexport) might have to start looking for new jobs. But will they go quietly, or will they consider the companies they manage to be their own private property? We could be in for another round of vicious asset battles, just as we saw in Putin’s first years in power.
The difference is that, unlike Putin’s purge of Yeltsin-era figures, Putin is still around, young, healthy and vigorous, while Yeltsin was old, sick and drunk when Putin became president. So we could see some nasty political battles between Putin and Medvedev as Medvedev brings in his own posse. The good side of this, however, is that for the first time in five years or so, we will have multiple centres of power in Russia, and something approaching pluralism.
Who’s coming into power with Medvedev? As I’ve already mentioned, one of his closest advisors is Arkady Dvorkovich, a small economist with a big brain. He’s not very well known in the West (he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry, so he can’t exist) but he’s a powerful figure in the new Russia. He wrote the speech Medvedev gave a month ago in Siberia, where he called for a more independent judiciary, more respect for private property, and less state interference in the economy.
Dvorkovich was the author of Putin’s tax reforms of 2001, which were one of Putin’s most liberal reforms. He’s a believer in more tax cuts now, and will likely press Medvedev to spend more of Russia’s petro-wealth. This is good news for the West, which could do with Russia’s sovereign wealth fund buying up some assets and giving our stock markets a boost.
We’ll also likely see a host of St Petersburg lawyers filling the presidential administration, such as Igor Shuvalov and Dmitry Kozak, and replacing the spooks.
Another rumour is that we will see the return to power of Alexander Voloshin, the chain-smoking former chief of staff of both Putin and Yeltsin. Voloshin has close links to the Yeltsin family, and to the oligarchs of the Yeltsin era. He retired in protest from Putin’s government when it arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky. If he came back to power, it would be good news for oligarchs like Roman Abramovich, and could even herald the release of Khodorkovsky (though this is a long shot).
Whatever the personnel changes, the West needs to get it into its head quickly that they are dealing with a new president, one in a position of enormous power, in a country with enormous economic resources, with the largest reserves of oil and gas in the world, and with a seat on the UN security council. And this president is a Western-friendly lawyer who is set to reduce the power of the secret services over the economy. In other words, this is an opportunity for an improvement in Russia’s relationship with the West. Pity the front-runners for the US president can’t even remember his name…
