When Medvedev heard Putin’s words – a direct criticism of his own decision to allow the Western air strikes to go ahead – he hit the roof. Foreign policy was his domain, not the prime minister’s. Within a couple of hours he called a handful of Russian journalists to his dacha, and emerged into the garden to deliver a stern and lengthy rebuttal of his prime minister’s remarks. He looked nervous, swallowing hard and jerking his shoulders, as he called Putin’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Talking about ‘crusades’, he said, could lead to a clash of civilisations. ‘Let us not forget,’ he went on, ‘what motivated the Security Council resolutions in the first place. These resolutions were passed in response to the Libyan authorities’ actions. This was why we took these decisions. I think these are balanced decisions that were very carefully thought through. We gave our support to the first Security Council resolution and abstained on the second. We made these decisions consciously with the aim of preventing an escalation of violence… It would be wrong for us to start flapping about now and say that we didn’t know what we were doing. This was a conscious decision on our part. Such were the instructions I gave to the foreign ministry, and they were carried out.’
For only the second time (after the Khodorkovsky incident), President Medvedev had put Prime Minister Putin firmly in his place. It came as no surprise when, a week or so later, Medvedev’s press secretary, Timakova, made urgent calls to all the television stations, banning them from showing footage of Putin driving Medvedev around in an new experimental car. The phoney campaign was now in full swing: there would be no more images of Putin in the driving seat.
It was a surreal battle: the only people who really had to be convinced were Putin and Medvedev themselves – it was they who would decide which of them would run. (As one commentator put it, the only election going on was the one inside Putin’s head.) But Medvedev decided to take his pitch to the people, perhaps hoping to gather support in the press and put pressure on Putin to allow him to remain as president. On 3 March he used a speech commemorating the 150th anniversary of Tsar Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in Russia to set out his ideological platform, arguing that ‘freedom cannot be postponed’. A few months later, not to be outdone, Putin chose his own historical role model – not the ‘Tsar Liberator’ but Pyotr Stolypin, the reformist but repressive prime minister of the last tsar, Nicholas II. Stolypin carried out liberal agrarian reforms but had so many dissenters executed that the hangman’s noose became known as ‘Stolypin’s necktie’. Putin praised him in terms he could have used for himself, and called for a monument to Stolypin to be erected in front of the government White House.
Medvedev followed up his call for freedom with his economic pitch. In a speech in Magnitogorsk he listed ten priorities to improve the investment climate. Sensationally, he demanded that government ministers who held directorships of state companies should give them up. They included Putin’s closest ally, Igor Sechin, the chairman of Rosneft. Medvedev (who himself used to be both deputy prime minister and chairman of Gazprom) said it could no longer be the case that ‘government leaders who answer for the rules and regulations in a certain industry also sit on the board of directors of competitive companies’. The newspaper Kommersant called the proposal to replace the state officials with independent directors revolutionary: ‘Dmitry Medvedev essentially demanded the liquidation of state capitalism.’
Arkady Dvorkovich says it was a ‘difficult step’ for the government (that is, Putin) to agree to.2 Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who specialises in studying the composition of the elite, says the move was part of a trend, however, which has seen the presence of siloviki in state structures weakened since Medvedev became president. At their height, in 2007, officials from the security services and military accounted for 47 per cent of the government elite, whereas by the summer of 2007 the figure had shrunk to 22 per cent. That does not mean Putin has forfeited his powers of patronage to the new president, however. Kryshtanovskaya says that of 75 ‘key figures’, all but two remain ‘Putin’s men’.3
Significantly, the country’s biggest state-controlled company, Gazprom – with its web of political, business and media connections – turned out to be exempt from the new requirement for government ministers to leave their directorships (just as it survived the reformers’ attempts to demonopolise it a decade earlier). It was revealed at the end of August that first deputy prime minister Viktor Zubkov would remain chairman of Gazprom (though he had given up all his other directorships). Zubkov was Putin’s former financial crime-buster, and also a St Petersburg friend and trustee of his judo club. Dvorkovich explained that Gazprom directors had access to a great deal of ‘secret information’, which made the appointment of independent directors ‘complicated’.4 The news seemed to confirm Gazprom’s untouchable status at the very hub of the Putin system, used to control the media, to exert pressure on foreign states and to fill the pockets of a network of cronies.
Putin responded to Medvedev’s ‘manifesto speech’ in Magnitogorsk with his own long speech to the Duma on 20 April, in which he warned against ‘jerks or rash experiments based on liberalism’ in the economy. It was beginning to look as if Putin no longer entirely trusted his protégé to stick to the right path.
For a while in the spring it looked as if Putin – and possibly Medvedev – were casting around for alternative political solutions. An official attempt was made to boost, and apparently co-opt, a small centre-right party called Right Cause, perhaps as an approved liberal ‘opposition’. The first deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov and the finance minister Alexei Kudrin were initially courted as potential leaders of the party, but after a week or so of intrigue both turned the offer down. Then one of the country’s richest men, the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, became leader. But he pledged to turn the party into a real alternative to United Russia, and began fiercely criticising the Kremlin. This was not at all the ‘loyal’ opposition that was intended, and at a farcical party conference in September Prokhorov was ousted. He accused the Kremlin’s ‘puppeteer’, Vladislav Surkov, of ‘privatising the political system’.
Finally, on 6 May, came an announcement so redolent of the Soviet past that it seemed that all pretence at democracy had at last been dropped. Without any public consultation or prior discussion, Putin announced, during a speech in Volgograd, that he was setting up a new organisation, the All-Russia People’s Front. At its heart would be his United Russia Party, but ‘non-party supporters’ – organisations and individuals – were welcome to join. By the very next day the People’s Front already had a ‘Coordination Council’, which met at Putin’s dacha to plan its election campaign. Over the next weeks, thousands of individuals and organisations were recruited. Whole streets joined, as did factories and offices, youth groups and war veterans, associations of music producers and reindeer herders. Trade unions signed up – often without even consulting their members. Some refused to be corralled in this way. The Union of Architects later voted to overturn the decision taken on its behalf. Individual members of the Composers’ Union protested loudly, insisting they would not help Putin to stage ‘sham elections’.5
Ostensibly the People’s Front was formed to help United Russia fight the coming Duma election in December. The party’s poll ratings were collapsing so dramatically that this might be the only way to ensure victory. But Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, revealed its true purpose. The Front would ‘operate above the party, it’s not based on the party,’ he told reporters. ‘It would more likely be based around Putin, who came up with the idea.’