His defence appeared to gain a boost when the industry minister, Viktor Khristenko, and the former economics minister, German Gref, both appeared in court as witnesses, and cast doubt on the charges. If embezzlement had been discovered, I would have been made aware of it,’ said Gref. Khristenko admitted he was unaware of millions of barrels of oil having disappeared.
Any hopes Khodorkovsky’s lawyers had were short-lived, however. The judge was due to deliver his verdict on 15 December, but reporters turning up at the courthouse that morning found a note pinned to the door announcing, without explanation, that it was postponed until the 27th. Perhaps there was an explanation: the next day, the 16th, the prime minister was due to take part in his annual television phone-in, and he would have surely faced questions about the trial. That might have been awkward – and certainly too late for Putin to influence the verdict. By having the verdict delayed, he was able to use the phone-in to interfere quite brazenly in the course of justice. Asked about the case, Putin said, ‘a thief should sit in jail’. It sounded like a direct order to Judge Danilkin, who was at that moment considering his options. Even President Medvedev took exception to such blatant interference. He said in a television interview: ‘No official has the right to express their position on a case before the court announces its verdict.’ It was the first time Medvedev had gone further than merely expressing views that differed a little from Putin’s; this was, in effect, a public reprimand.
It made no difference to the outcome of the show trial, however. Judge Danilkin found Khodorkovsky guilty, as the siloviki desired, and sentenced him to 14 years behind bars, to run concurrently with his first sentence and backdated to his arrest in 2003. He would not be free until 2017.
If 2009 and 2010 saw President Medvedev speaking a lot about democracy and human rights, and occasionally taking action to support them, his prime minister’s response became more and more bizarre. It was during this period that Vladimir Putin began to find more and more time in his busy schedule for publicity stunts – extravagant displays of virility that appeared designed to demonstrate that, despite being 13 years older than Medvedev, he was fitter and stronger.
In August 2009 Putin bared his chest and swam butterfly stroke in an icy Siberian river. Kremlin cameras clicked furiously as he went fishing and horse-riding. In 2010 scarcely a month went by without a photo-shoot. He put a tracking collar on a polar bear. He rode a Harley Davidson at a bikers’ rally. He sprayed wildfires with water from an aeroplane. He fired a dart from a crossbow at a whale in a stormy sea. He drove a Formula One car at 240 kilometres an hour. In October the press was full of speculation that he had gone one step too far to rejuvenate his image. He appeared in Kiev with his face looking puffy and bruised, and heavily made-up. ‘There are no bruises there,’ said his spokesman. ‘He was just really tired after several flights and extra meetings. Also, the light may have fallen on him in an unfortunate manner.’ But the press wondered if he had had a facelift, or botox injections, like his friend, the ever youthful Silvio Berlusconi.
Medvedev did not try to match Putin’s strongman appearances – though he did begin to walk with an exaggerated swagger and to talk with rather aggressive mouth movements, not unlike Putin’s. But for the most part, his props were not fast cars and wild animals but iPads and tweets.
Image was crucial to both men. They were appealing to different constituencies. By the end of 2010, with just a year to go before the coming parliamentary and presidential elections, two things were becoming crystal clear: that both men wanted to be the next president of Russia, and that it would be Putin who would decide which of them would go forward. Ultimately, the tandem was more of a penny-farthing.
2011: Paralysis again – the phoney campaign
In a sense the whole of Medvedev’s presidency was a slow-burning campaign for the next election. But as the final year began, paralysis once again afflicted the president’s Kremlin and the prime minister’s White House – just as it had done prior to the last election. The agreed line was that the two men would ‘decide together’ which of them would be the candidate in 2012, and they would announce their decision when the time was ripe. Officials in both camps began manoeuvring, uncertain of how the dice would fall. At the top levels, Medvedev’s and Putin’s spokespeople weighed every word like a raw diamond that could tip the scales. At lower levels, bureaucrats positioned themselves to jump ship if necessary when the situation became clear. At every level, officials were afraid of saying anything that might be a hostage to fortune.
Mikhail Dvorkovich (the brother of Arkady, the president’s economic adviser) wrote in his blog: ‘Ministers, not knowing who is their real boss, are tripping up, trying to carry out often contradictory instructions. It’s no joke, having to choose between two people, either of whom could become president in 2012. One mistake and in a year you’re a “political corpse”.’
At the end of February, Peskov told me to expect ‘hysteria’ around the world in a few months’ time. I took it to mean that Putin was going to announce his intention to run for re-election. But nothing was made public and the uncertainty continued.
Both ‘candidates’ began an undeclared campaign, starting with a farcical argument over the choice of mascot for the Sochi Winter Olympics. Putin decided to demonstrate his ability to influence any decision in the country merely by expressing an opinion. Just as he had put the judge in the Khodorkovsky trial in an impossible position by declaring that ‘a thief should sit in jail’, so he casually opined that the snow leopard would make a fine Olympics mascot – just hours before a nationwide television vote on the matter. Naturally, the snow leopard was chosen. Medvedev was not happy. Two days later, talking about something completely different – the idea that possible designs for a new universal electronic ID card should be discussed on the internet – he added caustically: ‘I hope it will be fairer than the discussion of the Olympic symbols.’
There were more serious spats to come. In March open disagreement broke out between the ‘candidates’ over the world’s response to Colonel Gaddafi’s crackdown on dissenters in Libya. At the United Nations, Russia abstained on Resolution 1973, which authorised the use of air strikes against Gaddafi’s forces. Russia’s position was a compromise: Medvedev had wanted to back the Western stance, his foreign ministry was against it. But Putin was outraged by it, and said so publicly. Visiting a ballistic missile factory in the republic of Udmurtia, he likened the UN resolution to a ‘medieval call to crusade’. He said he was concerned by the ‘ease with which decisions to use force are taken in international affairs’. He saw it as a continuation of a tendency in US policy: ‘During the Clinton era they bombed Belgrade, Bush sent forces into Afghanistan and then under an invented, false pretext they sent forces into Iraq. Now it is Libya’s turn, under the pretext of protecting the peaceful population. But in air strikes it is precisely the civilian population that gets killed. Where is the logic and the conscience?’