When the result was announced Putin and Medvedev walked out together on to Red Square in leather jackets and jeans, Medvedev trying to ape Putin’s macho gait. Interrupting a rock concert in front of St Basil’s Cathedral, Medvedev made a short speech affirming that the course of the last eight years would be continued. When Putin took the microphone to praise his protégé, the crowd of supporters drowned him out, chanting, ‘Putin, Putin, Putin…’ Nobody chanted ‘Medvedev!’
Even after the election, and for a month or so after Medvedev’s inauguration in May, the turmoil continued, as bureaucrats scrambled for what they thought would be the best seats. What I observed in the Kremlin press department was probably mirrored throughout the administration: officials were trying to work out where the real power would lie, in President Medvedev’s Kremlin or in Prime Minister Putin’s government, ten minutes away in the ‘White House’ on the Moskva river. In retrospect, the clever ones were those who moved to the White House, hoping to have a supervisory role over their counterparts in the Kremlin. Dmitry Peskov took us on a valedictory tour of the Kremlin in April, as Putin appointed him as his spokesman.
‘How will it feel to move away from here?’
Peskov twisted his moustache: ‘Who knows? Who knows…?’
Peskov’s move was part of a clever matrix of appointments designed to maintain Putin’s control over the new president. Peskov took with him to the White House his long-time deputy Alex Smirnov, who became head of the prime minister’s press service, an entity that had scarcely functioned under its predecessors. It was Peskov (rather than the president’s press secretary) who appointed a new, young team to the president’s press service, making it clear that they answered to him. Putin’s old spokesman and ally, Alexei Gromov, remained in the Kremlin, promoted to become President Medvedev’s deputy chief of staff, in a blatant attempt to maintain ‘ideological control’ over the president’s media operation. But there was a fly in the ointment. Medvedev retained Natalia Timakova, who had been his press adviser during the election campaign, as his spokeswoman. She was a rival rather than a protégé of Peskov’s, and soon began to co-opt the team Peskov had put in place in the presidential press service. She was fiercely devoted to the president, not the prime minister. Within a year, a clear split was developing: not surprisingly, Medvedev’s team soon felt they owed their allegiance to the president, not to the people who had appointed them. Over the next years I gained a strong impression that the two press offices grew rather far apart, to the extent that each no longer knew what the other was planning.
I understand from well-connected sources that this situation was echoed in other departments too, so that by 2010–11 two competing bureaucracies existed, each knowing that their futures depended on their respective bosses, and each therefore dedicated to their own boss’s survival. This was not what Putin had intended.
Putin took with him from the Kremlin to the White House his presidential chief of staff, Sergei Sobyanin, and also the influential economist Igor Shuvalov. But he left behind some of his trusted senior staff, to ensure ‘continuity’ under Medvedev. They included not only Alexei Gromov, in charge of the mass media, but also Vladislav Surkov, who became Medvedev’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Prikhodko, his foreign affairs adviser, and Arkady Dvorkovich, his economics adviser. The goal was to intertwine the two branches of the administration while ensuring that Putin’s appointees in the Kremlin held sway. Instead they became drawn into their separate teams, serving their new masters. Even the ‘ideologue’ Surkov changed his colours to support Medvedev’s new initiatives, some of which contradicted what he had earlier preached for Putin.
Putin’s presidential legacy
On 8 February 2008, in the middle of the election campaign, Putin gave his last major speech as president – effectively his own assessment of his achievements. In foreign policy, he insisted that ‘we have returned to the world arena as a state which is taken account of’. Yet the detail sounded more like a bitter admission of failure: ‘We drew down our bases in Cuba and in Vietnam. What did we get? New American bases in Romania, Bulgaria. A new third missile defence region in Poland.’ Russia had failed to prevent the United States from ‘unleashing a new arms race with its missile defence system’, obliging Russia to respond by producing ‘new types of arms, with the same or even superior specifications compared to those available to other nations’. And he protested, like a stuck gramophone needle, that ‘irresponsible demagogy, attempts to split society and to use foreign assistance and interference in the course of political struggle in Russia are not only immoral, but also illegal.’
But he delivered a glowing account of his own achievements at home. Russia, he said, was now one of the seven biggest economies in the world. ‘The main thing we have achieved is stability. We have established that life will continue to improve. [Under Yeltsin] wealthy Russia had turned into a country of impoverished people. In these conditions we started to implement our programme to take the country out of crisis. We consistently worked to create a robust political system. We were able to rid ourselves of the practice of taking state decisions under pressure from financial groups and media magnates.’
Economic growth was at its highest in seven years. Russia’s foreign debt had been reduced to just 3 per cent of GDP. The last two years had seen a ‘real investment boom’ in Russia. The birth rate was rising.
And there was a reason, he implied, for certain political restrictions. ‘Political parties,’ he said, ‘must realise their huge responsibility for the future of Russia, for the stability of society. It is never worth taking the country to the edge of chaos.’ This was a subtle reminder of the specious, unspoken deal Putin had offered, or rather imposed on, the country: that in exchange for growing prosperity and stability, political freedoms had to be curbed.
Putin’s opponents decried both elements of his claim: there was no correlation between authoritarianism and economic growth, they said, and there was no real economic success anyway because the early liberal reforms had run their course.
In a damning report published in February 2008, two of Putin’s major political opponents, Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, conceded that some of the official statistics looked good: under Putin the country’s gross domestic product had grown by 70 per cent; incomes had more than doubled; poverty had been reduced, so that only 16 per cent lived below the poverty line (as opposed to 29 per cent in 2000); the budget was balanced, gold reserves stood at $480 billion, and the Stabilisation Fund had reached $157 billion.
But… most of this had been achieved thanks to the soaring price of oil, which had gone from an average of $16.70 a barrel under Yeltsin to an average of $40 under Putin (and was now heading for $100). Instead of using the oil windfall to modernise the economy and carry out economic reforms, the authors argued, ‘our army, pension system, health care and primary education have all degraded under Putin’.17 Meanwhile corruption had attained ‘gigantic proportions, without analogy in Russian history’, and those oligarchs whom Putin had not driven into exile or put in prison were making themselves fabulously rich at the state’s expense. The recovery from the post-communist collapse had begun, they argued, not under Putin but earlier, in the final years of the Yeltsin presidency. Under Putin, instead of ‘authoritarian modernisation’ – which, had it worked, theoretically might have allowed one to forgive some of the anti-democratic tendencies of his rule – there was ‘authoritarianism without modernisation’. The brief period of progressive reforms had been replaced by ‘the greedy redistribution of property and the transformation of Russia into a police state’.