What Medvedev outlined was the translation of public wealth into private welfare. Pensions should be doubled. Private property should be protected – ‘we will support free enterprise’ – and the conservation of the environment should be inscribed into the constitution. His programme could best be described as a social market economy. Wohlstand für alle – Ludwig Erhard’s famously effective formula has found, at long last, a Russian echo: well-being for all and sundry, and respect for mother nature.
Medvedev poses as a pragmatist. Vis-à-vis a nation deeply tired of big ideas, he does not waste his time on ideologies. His family background is middle-class, a techno-elite with liberal leanings. He poses as a technocrat, above party and politicking. Does he have a national vision? Even less so than Putin: ‘Each nation should have multiple ideas and objectives which bring people together sharing the same state, the same country.’ He presents himself as open to a pluralism of ideas and social concepts. ‘We do not have to reinvent anything of importance. The basic values have long been pronounced. What matters is to adapt them to Russia’s present and future.’ Will he have the courage and the power to reduce the role of the intelligence services and the police while opening Russia to liberal market forces? In the 1990s privatization gained a bad name, making many poor and few rich. The early years of the twenty-first century have seen a reverse movement, towards state corporations, national champions and sovereign wealth funds. Medvedev will have to face not only the losers of the past two decades but also the winners. His challenge will be to turn the windfall profits from oil and gas into the basis of a future middle-class society and, in order to turn theory into practice, to find allies for all of this, both at home and abroad.
The making of a president
‘Dima’ Medvedev had been, ever since Putin had returned from his Dresden assignment to St Petersburg in 1989, a loyal assistant and adviser, more than ten years his junior. In the mid-1990s he had followed Putin to Moscow and into the Kremlin. When Putin was anointed by the ailing Yeltsin to be the future president, Medvedev organized – and won – the dicey 1999–2000 election campaign.
In recent years, combining the key dossiers of public welfare with supreme control of Gazprom made him central to Putin’s programme. Although Putin’s chosen successor, he is unlikely to be the absolute master of the Kremlin. The Kremlin administration is a spookocracy, and Medvedev, while the nominal master, comes from a different tribe. So far, his role was to be the moon to Putin’s sun. What made him attractive to Putin as a potential successor is also his greatest weakness: he lacks traction with the power ministries (Interior, Emergencies, Defence, Foreign Affairs).
Medvedev’s tenure will be a continuation of Putin’s policies, and Putin, in whatever incarnation, will continue to be for some time the ultimate authority. To the Moscow White House, where the Premier resides, he will take with him his enormous popularity and influence, and it will last for a year or two. Within this period he will have finally to determine what kind of future he envisages for himself. Kremlin or no, Putin is able to redesign the organization of government in his favour without much difficulty and keep the levers of power – most of them.
United Russia will wave anything through the state Duma if and when Putin so decides. Just how thorough a revision of the power structure Putin will want to make depends on whether he is considering a renewed bid for the presidency in 2012 – or at any time before. Questions remain: can Putin be safe and content in a second-rate position? And can the wielders of power in Moscow live comfortably with a split leadership? And what about the Russian people: can they imagine supreme power residing anywhere but in the Kremlin’s hallowed halls?
Putin will probably remain Russia’s voice for high politics, world affairs and the occasional confrontation with the West and he will be able and willing to make foreign policy an instrument to shape the domestic power structure. Medvedev will embody reliability and be a partner for big business. When he was named successor to Putin the Russian share index jumped forward. But he will also need to be the man to grasp the nettle and be serious about Russia’s ailments old and new.
The implications of Dmitry Medvedev
So what are, finally, the foreign policy implications of Dmitri Medvedev? The short answer is: more of the same, but sotto voce.
The long answer has to start from inside Russia and take into account the country’s vast strengths and its equally vast weaknesses, and the power structure at the top. Medvedev and Putin will need each other. Medvedev needs Putin because otherwise he would be alone among the wolves, a king without a country, moving the levers of power without much effect, not feared and therefore not followed. This is the reason why, when nominated by Putin in mid-December 2007, Medvedev responded, almost in a reflex, that he would need Putin as a tutor and, please, Putin should be prime minister.
But Putin, too, needs a non-threatening, reassuring successor with proven loyalty. Not only in a formal way, the incumbent of the Kremlin sooner or later invariably acquiring the magic of Russia’s centre and the mantle of the Tsar, but also in political reality to protect Putin from a backlash by all those whom the president from St Petersburg bypassed, removed or pushed aside, and the many powerful men who have an axe to grind with yesterday’s power-holder. Will Putin conform to the role of Number Two in the Russian hierarchy? Or will he signal a comeback to the Kremlin’s gilded halls, power and prestige, thus pulling the rug from under his successor’s feet? When asked whether he would hang a picture of Medvedev in the White House, Putin’s answer was, cryptically: ‘I have known Dima for so many years, I do not need a picture of him.’ If this was a joke, it was an ambiguous one.
So the question invariably arises: will Dmitri Medvedev be his own man? And, if he can manage to emancipate himself from Putin’s powerful presence as well as from the spookocracy around the Kremlin, what policies will he stand for? Everything is still in flux and the world may see what Russians fear most: an uneasy competition for power at the top. In the public mind this is associated with a new time of troubles, while the one thing all Russians, high and low, have come to crave is: stability, stability, stability. They have had too much trouble over the last hundred years, and the economic implosion, just nine years ago at the time of writing, when oil was at ten dollars and the Russian economy down and out, is still fresh in everybody’s mind. Compare the fall of the Soviet Union, the melt-down of the economy and run-away inflation with Weimar Germany, and then you realize what the stakes were a few years ago, and what could have happened but, mercifully, did not. Medvedev takes over at a time when Russia has 500 billion petrodollars in its state coffers. This is the upside, and one can observe the conspicuous glitz and unashamed glitter in the heart of Moscow and St Petersburg and even in Western Siberia in the oil-town of Khanty-Mansiysk – just as in Paris, Munich, London and Cannes, Baden-Baden or wherever the rich and beautiful of the international jet set mingle.
But there is a downside, too, and it is serious. Russia’s economy is a one-dimensional giant, based exclusively on high prices for oil and natural gas. Apart from natural resources and robust weaponry there is little that Russia has to offer on the world markets. At home, everything from fresh fruit to computers has to be imported. Foreign companies are only just beginning to set up shop in Russia, still wary of corruption, unpredictable tax regimes and extortion.