The other obvious candidate from the opposition side is lawyer and anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny. Born in 1976, he has enthusiastically indicated his willingness to run and is in the opinion of some prominent pundits the only electable member of the opposition. Navalny has Russian good looks, projects confidence, and has a gift for turning a phrase. He branded Putin’s United Russia Party “the party of crooks and thieves,” and it stuck.
He has several advantages over Khodorkovsky—he is young, he belongs to the generation that is absolutely at home on the Internet, but he also has a feel for the street. Not limited to the predictable positions of the human rights intelligentsia, he has a strong streak of anti-immigrant Russian nationalism and knows how to appeal to it in others, an increasingly valuable political skill in a global era of fast-moving rightward currents. A self-described nationalist democrat, he has, according to a New York Times story, “Rousing Russia with a Phrase,” “appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, ‘I recommend a pistol.’”[399] But the violent language is not reserved for non-Russians. To those who call him a network hamster, he replies: “I am a network hamster and I will slit the throats of these cattle!”[400] At the same time he is not above posing in various high-end brand-name clothes for the Russian GQ while giving the magazine a hard-hitting interview. This would win him points with other “network hamsters” but would alienate the sort of Russians who would see this, like his time at Yale as a World Fellow in 2010, as proof of his treacherous otherness.
Though disapproving of Putin’s methods, Navalny is already on record as saying that Crimea is now an inalienable part of Russia. Like Khodorkovsky, he too has been singled out for persecution, but, so far at least, it has been more serial harassment than the hard blow of prison. Currently, Navalny, who won 27 percent in the 2013 Moscow mayoral elections, is barred from politics by a felony conviction specifically imposed for that purpose. Under different conditions that conviction could of course be overturned. Also, unlike Khodorkovsky, he does not have the experience of running a vast and complex organization. Perhaps the two of them working together in a new party could prove a formidable force in the event of a suddenly Putin-free Russia.
The first post-Putin leader will, however, probably emerge from the inner circle of high government officials and military/security types. Dmitri Medvedev is one possibility, assuming that his years in power have made him tougher and wilier. The joke about Medvedev that began circulating as soon as he appeared on the political scene went like this: Putin and Medvedev go into a restaurant. The waiter asks Putin: “What will you have?” Putin says: “A steak.” And the waiter says: “And the vegetable?” Putin says: “The vegetable will have a steak too.”
Still, Medvedev ran Gazprom, a serious organization, before being chosen to replace Putin as president. Foreign leaders, especially Obama, felt comfortable with him as a twenty-first-century type, an aura Putin has never projected. Medvedev might be the right person to lead Russia out of its current political and economic impasse with the West, but most likely he would be a transitional figure, more figurehead than actual leader.
When Putin was deciding who would replace him as president while he served as prime minister to honor the letter of the Constitution, Medvedev’s main competition was Sergei Ivanov. Ivanov was, however, too much like Putin for Putin’s liking. Of the same generation, a fellow Leningrader and KGB officer, Ivanov, in his capacity as Putin’s chief of staff, could say that on many issues he and Putin “think more or less identically.”[401] They served together in the Leningrad KGB in the seventies, and Ivanov would later be Putin’s deputy when Putin took charge of the FSB. Rumor has it that Putin envied Ivanov’s height, fluency in English, and success in the KGB—Ivanov reached the rank of general as opposed to Putin’s lieutenant colonel—and for those reasons chose the pliable and stubby Medvedev as his replacement. Though Ivanov insists that when it comes to being Putin’s successor, “I have never regarded myself as such,”[402] others see that as a mere formal demurral. As political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky put it: “Ivanov wants the throne.”[403]
To speculation there is no end, but one thing at least is sure—short of grave illness or death, Putin would never surrender his post as Russia’s leader without a fight. And his own personal army, the 400,000-strong National Guard, which includes the OMON teams that attacked the anti-Putin marchers on the day before his inauguration, will stand him in good stead if that fight takes a literal turn. Apart from that unlikely though not impossible eventuality, the National Guard is always a part of the pressure Putin can bring to bear on any internal political situation.
What Condoleezza Rice said of him in a WikiLeaked cable—that Putin fears “law enforcement investigations”[404]—is no doubt true. He may well believe that he has to die in the Kremlin, in prison, or in sumptuous exile, perhaps living statelessly on the $35 million yacht the oligarch Roman Abramovich gave him as a present.
A new Russian leader almost always defines himself in stark opposition to his predecessor. Anyone replacing Putin would need to show that many of Putin’s actions were not only ill-considered, but criminal. Putin’s successor would look deeply into his affairs and no doubt find any number of crimes ranging from rank corruption to murder most foul.
Economic crimes are easier to trace than murder though their trail is often labyrinthine, shell company within shell company until half of Siberia disappears into a tiny Caribbean island.
The Panama Papers of early 2016 did not directly implicate Putin in any questionable dealings. However, they did reveal that symphony cellist Sergei Roldugin, the friend of his youth and later godfather to his daughter, controlled some $2 billion in offshore financial assets. Putin was pleased that no direct line could be traced between him and Roldugin, but he couldn’t have been happy that that particular cover was blown.
There is an almost Shakespearean profusion of corpses on the stage of Putin’s presidency—the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, gunned down just after entering her apartment building; former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko, wasting away from polonium poisoning in London; opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, shot dead in sight of the Kremlin. Still, there’s little chance of Putin ever being implicated in those crimes.
Putin doesn’t have to ask: Who will rid me of this meddlesome person? No direct orders from Putin are necessary for this, no winks, no nearly imperceptible nods (except, one assumes, for murders committed on foreign soil). Before himself being assassinated, former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko explained how such assassinations are conceived and carried out now under Putin as opposed to in Soviet times. Back then, the KGB was tightly controlled by the party’s Central Committee. Nothing as important as a killing was possible without direct party approval and control. Now it’s the opposite. There’s no party, no Central Committee to which the security services must kowtow and report. It’s all much more relaxed, informal, humdrum. As Litvinenko tells it, deals are made in the lunchroom: “I’m having a little soup and a guy from another section walks over and says: ‘Sasha, you got any criminal connections?’ ‘I do,’ I say. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘there’s this guy I’m sick of, get rid of him for me.’”[405]
404
Luke Harding, “WikiLeaks Cables Claim Vladimir Putin Has Secret Wealth Abroad,”
405
Vladimir Bukovsky,