technology, nor Russia’s resolve to compete for global riches.
It was the type of gesture that Putin watchers had come to expect during his two terms in office. He regarded himself as a man of action, and, judging by opinion polls and election results, Russians as a whole did, too. As he made preparations to leave the presidency in 2008, Putin had become the closest thing to an all-powerful czar that Russia had known since the rule of Josef Stalin. He made no secret of his intention to remain at the pinnacle of power, and found a deceptively simple way to do so. Rather than run roughshod over the Russian constitution, which forbade a third term, he anointed himself as the next prime minister, enabling him to share power with his presidential successor. True, prime ministers after the collapse of the Soviet Union had served at the sufferance of the president; Boris Yeltsin and then Putin had fired them at will. But Putin decided that it would be different with him—Russia would have a government of equals and the new president would not, could not, arbitrarily fire him.
Achieving this arrangement required a critical mass of agreement among the Kremlin hierarchy, the military, and the security services that Putin was indeed essential. The ways of power in Russia have never been wholly visible, but this critical mass could bring down a government if it wished. Its leaders must have decided that it was in their mutual interest—professionally and probably financially as well—for Putin to remain a key player. Only one matter had to be resolved: With whom would Putin share power?
Eight years earlier, Yeltsin had set a precedent by declaring that Putin would be his successor, and had relied on the power of the Kremlin to make it happen. Now Putin set about doing the same. Many outsiders predicted that the next president would be Sergei Ivanov, a three-decade-long Putin intimate from his St. Petersburg days who had the added advantage of having served two decades in the foreign service of the KGB. Those who viewed Putin’s Russia as the “KGB State,” as Western publications and think tanks were prone to do, thought the fifty-four-year-old Ivanov was a shoo-in.
In December 2007, however, Putin announced that he would support another intimate for the job—a forty- two-year-old St. Petersburg lawyer named Dmitri Medvedev. In the post-Soviet custom, the election was rigged far in advance; Putin systematically disqualified any opponent he wanted to sideline, and state-controlled media accorded Medvedev the same worshipful coverage that Putin had enjoyed as presidential contender. Three months later, Medvedev won with about 70 percent of the vote, almost precisely Putin’s popularity rating in the country.
What explained Putin’s choice of Medvedev over Ivanov? By some measures, they were evenly matched. Both had served as first deputy prime ministers and neither was known for particularly strong leadership skills. But Ivanov, the KGB veteran, seemed far more likely to win the respect of the difficult-to-handle generals and spy chiefs. Medvedev, the son of university professors and the holder of a doctorate in law, had no experience in the military or Putin’s beloved intelligence agencies. Since Putin isn’t going to share his innermost thoughts, here is where only informed speculation is possible: Putin must have decided that Medvedev was more likely than Ivanov to tolerate, and perhaps even embrace, a subordinate relationship with the designated prime minister.
In a chat with the
Yet, one wonders if Putin was taking too much for granted. It is easy to call the undistinguished Medvedev colorless, but the same—and worse—was said of Putin himself when he took power eight years earlier. History is replete with mild-mannered understudies who became hubristic leaders once on the throne. In addition to Putin, there are the examples of Anwar el-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan; and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Would Medvedev truly be content continuing his predecessor’s policies and receiving second billing? Or would he seek more? Putin would not have been blind to that peril, but he apparently saw little cause for concern.
He and Medvedev did their best to fend off doubts about their proposed power sharing. They remarked on their history of mutual trust and noted how long they had known each other. Medvedev had worked quietly as a subordinate to Putin for some eighteen years, starting in the early 1990s, when the scholarly lawyer was a legal consultant in the office of the St. Petersburg mayor. As the story goes, when Putin became prime minister in 1999, he had no one on whom he could truly depend. So he summoned Medvedev to Moscow to be his chief administrative deputy. Then, when Putin became president, he named Medvedev chairman of Gazprom.
The latter appointment was an important demonstration of confidence, since Gazprom is Russia’s strategically most important company, accounting for a quarter of all government revenue, according to 2006 tax figures. It also served as the main lever of Putin’s foreign policy. When he decided to seize oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky’s television station, it was Gazprom, with Medvedev at the helm, who actually took over NTV. When Putin ordered that the natural gas pipeline to Ukraine be shut down, incurring the wrath of European customers who depended on the same line for their supply, it was Medvedev’s Gazprom that actually carried out the order.
The same alliance went into action in 2007 when Putin moved to reassert Moscow’s power on the Caspian Sea, a longtime Russian preserve where the United States had been laboring for a decade to establish a strong Western presence.
There was nothing Putin could do on the western side of the sea—Washington had already cemented Azerbaijan’s and Georgia’s links to the West by successfully championing the construction of a non-Russian oil pipeline to the Mediterranean that made the region somewhat independent of Moscow. But the Americans had not yet brought the eastern side of the sea into its fold, and that’s where—through Medvedev—Putin acted.
Washington was loosely championing a set of two new natural gas pipelines that would link the energy-rich eastern Caspian countries of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan with Europe. The crowning glory would be Nabucco, a two-thousand-mile line that would reach into the heart of Europe.
Putin countered by proposing that Gazprom ship the same natural gas—from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan—straight north into Russia, and from there on to Europe. The scheme would renew Moscow’s bond with the two western Caspian states, both traditional Russian dominions, and would confound the West’s attempt to deepen its penetration of the former Russian empire. Medvedev and Putin personally courted the Turkmen and the Kazakhs, and by the spring of 2008 it was clear that the Russian strategy had all but won; the two Caspian states had signed over much of their natural gas to Russia, and the transit countries in Europe had agreed as well. It appeared to be a signal Russian triumph.
How far Putin—and $100-a-barrel oil—had brought his country was demonstrated even more starkly at the annual NATO gathering in April 2008. On the agenda were applications by Ukraine and Georgia to join the Western military alliance. Many Russians felt that the West had already violated an unofficial pledge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during the late 1980s. At that time, Moscow voluntarily withdrew its army from Eastern European states, and senior Russian officials have said they were under the impression that Poland, Hungary, and the rest would not be absorbed into NATO, which, after all, was an anti-Soviet alliance. When the West did so anyway, taking in eleven former Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries, many Russians felt betrayed and humiliated. Now President Bush was strongly backing the inclusion of two more former Soviet states, an act that would push the NATO alliance smack against Russia’s western and southern territories. As Medvedev put it, “no state can be pleased about having representatives of a military bloc to which it does not belong coming close to its borders.”
But this time it didn’t go so smoothly. Lobbied heavily by the outgoing Russian president, Germany and France both suggested that, as a sign of respect, the alliance should delay consideration of the Ukrainian and Georgian applications until the end of the year, after Putin left office. Bush offered one of his trademark speeches about the march of freedom and the cause of liberty, but Germany, France, Italy, and others vetoed his proposal— solely because Putin objected.
That could not—and did not—happen during the time of Yeltsin, whose wishes NATO routinely ignored. Putin had not only made Europe listen; he had compelled it to act.
Russia’s ascendance to a new level of influence was reflected in the difficulty encountered by a second Bush proposal at the NATO meeting—the construction of a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. It was approved unanimously by the twenty-six members of the alliance. Yet, possibly for the first time in his presidency, Bush elected to give ground on what he had identified as a primary strategic objective. He agreed to freeze the actual deployment of the missile shield until Moscow could be brought on board, something that clearly could not be achieved before his presidency ended.
