He also took measures to defend the right to demonstrate. Since July opposition activists had begun holding unauthorised rallies on the last day of any month with 31 days, to draw attention to Article 31 of the constitution, which guarantees the right of assembly. The rallies were invariably broken up within minutes by riot police, and protestors arrested. The Duma then passed a bill to restrict street protests even further, but in November Medvedev vetoed it. Putin’s view of protests, by contrast, is that it is normal for police to ‘beat demonstrators about the head with a baton if they’re in the wrong place’.
In June 2010 a Duma bill broadened the functions of the security services to ‘fight extremism’. The law would have allowed the FSB to issue warnings to people it believed were ‘about to’ commit a crime, and threaten, fine or even arrest them for up to 15 days for disobeying its orders. After his Human Rights Council complained that the bill ‘revived the worst practices of the totalitarian state’, however, President Medvedev watered it down – and insisted: ‘I want you to know that this has been done on my personal orders.’
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?