Post by temur on Feb 25, 2007 16:37:05 GMT 3
Dear Stuff and members, I happened to a interesting article concerned about Russian political reform in new New York Times.
The article is very long but detailed. Russia , to some extent, is a steppe country, so we need to learn something about it.
" Post-Putin "
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: February 25, 2007
Sergei B. Ivanov walked in late to the holiday performance of the army¡¯s Academy of Song and Dance. He sat in a seat saved for him between a mop-haired boy and a girl with a fluffy white ribbon in her hair. He watched, stiffly tapping his foot, as Soldier Ivan danced with fairies on his way to saving the children¡¯s New Year¡¯s presents from the old witch Baba Yaga. Grandfather Frost Russia¡¯s Santa Claus arrived in the end, of course, with gifts for the children in the audience, sons and daughters of Russia¡¯s military men. The soldier/actor¡¯s voice boomed as he introduced ¡°a very big present,¡± ¡°our wonderful guest¡±: Ivanov, then the country¡¯s minister of defense (and soon to be named first deputy prime minister), the man who might well be the next president of Russia.
The Outsider: Garry Kasparov, ex-chess champion and opposition party leader, at a rally in Moscow for the Other Russia. At right is Mikhail Kasyanov, the former prime minister ousted by Putin.
¡°Dear friends,¡± Ivanov began, his voice tinny by comparison. His face appeared pinched, his lips as thin as the hair parted sharply on the left. Pale, trim, dressed in a dark suit with an open collar, he looked like a secret agent. Which, in fact, is what he was in Finland and Kenya (and maybe in Sweden and England), working for the K.G.B. as the Soviet Union was collapsing. As history shows, a former intelligence officer might be just what Russia wants in a leader.
It might still be. Ivanov, who is 54, is a leading contender to become only the third elected president in Russia¡¯s history, replacing Vladimir V. Putin, the steely, steady president who, according to the country¡¯s adolescent Constitution, must step down early in 2008 after two full terms in office. At least he is presumed to be a contender, just as there is presumed to be an election, scheduled for March 2, 2008.
Ivanov has never expressed the desire to be president ¡ª neither in public nor, as far as anyone who knows will tell, in private. Neither has Dmitri A. Medvedev, the other first deputy prime minister and the other presumed-to-be-leading candidate. Nor have Valentina I. Matviyenko, the energetic governor of St. Petersburg; Vladimir I. Yakunin, another former K.G.B. agent who heads the state-owned Russian Railways; Sergei S. Sobyanin, a former governor and the president¡¯s chief of staff; Dmitri N. Kozak, the presidential envoy to the turbulent Caucasus; Boris V. Gryzlov, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament; Sergei M. Mironov, the chairman of the upper house; or Sergei V. Chemizov, director of the state arms-marketing monopoly who served as an intelligence officer with Putin in East Germany.
Putin had never been elected anything in his life. And yet he went into his first election in March 2000 as the incumbent (albeit as acting president) and cruised through the process with all the trappings of power, including decisive control of most of television. He beat Zyuganov comfortably in the first round with 52 percent of the vote (bolstered perhaps, as The Moscow Times reported, by ballot stuffing in some regions).
By 2004 he faced a diminished crop of candidates, second-tier party leaders who either expressed support for Putin¡¯s re-election or foundered in oblivion, barred from television appearances and harassed by such government tactics as untimely fire inspections at campaign rallies. It was a rout, one so skewed in favor of Putin ¡ª who, officially, won 71 percent ¡ª that it became farcical.
Putin has unquestionably transformed the country, righting it, to a degree, after its perilous stagger through the 1990s, when chaos, crime and corruption raged, but he has done so by creating an authoritarian system that is only nominally democratic (in that Russia still holds elections, as the Soviet Union did). He reined in elected governors from the provinces and their representatives in Moscow. He chased into exile or into prison prominent businessmen seen as political challengers. He pulled all of the national television networks back under state control. He so imposed the Kremlin¡¯s will on the legislative bodies that they are now controlled by political parties lacking any real identity except as vassals of Putin. He has been accused of creating a Soviet Union Lite or, alternatively, a new imperial Russia, with himself as a 21st-century czar, a unifying figure above politics, beyond criticism, in absolute control. His supporters dispute this, but there is no question that he has consolidated virtually all political and, increasingly, economic power into his hands, or at least into the hands of the small cadre of aides whom he has entrusted as stewards of the country¡¯s natural resources and strategic enterprises.
Kremlin Inc. has become the name for the hybrid system Putin created: capitalism with an authoritarian face. The search for his replacement has started to look less like a political campaign and more like a boardroom struggle to select a new C.E.O. As at most corporations, the process is out of the public eye, the result presented to shareholders as a fait accompli. And like most executives, Putin is susceptible to choosing someone most like himself. ¡°I don¡¯t think it¡¯s going to be a radical change,¡± Ivanov said in December.
Announcing one¡¯s own candidacy is, in fact, tantamount to declaring one¡¯s open opposition to the Kremlin, to the smooth transition of power, to Putin himself. Even the parliamentary opposition is wary of doing that. So far in this quasi-election season only two people have done it: a former prime minister, Mikhail M. Kasyanov, and, improbably, Aleksandr V. Donskoi, the youthful mayor of Arkhangelsk, a small port city on the White Sea.
Both promptly came under the scrutiny of prosecutors, even as the mass media piled on in the way they never do with today¡¯s authorities, certainly not the likes of Putin, Ivanov or Medvedev. Kasyanov was accused of arranging the shady privatization of a luxury summer house on the Moscow River, Donskoi of falsifying a university diploma when he first ran for mayor two years ago.
On the day in November when I first met Donskoi in Moscow, intrigued by the audacity of his decision to run for president of all Russia, investigators raided his office up in Arkhangelsk. As we spoke, his wife, Marina, and an aide answered insistent phone calls from home and relayed progress reports. ¡°I realize all the responsibilities,¡± Donskoi, a supermarket tycoon, told me. ¡°I understand there could be difficulties, including physical threats. It¡¯s already taking place.¡±
A month later he was back visiting Moscow and called a sparsely attended news conference to denounce an intensifying campaign against him. He denied having falsified his diploma and went on to explain, among other things, his interest in ¡°gypsy hypnosis.¡± Marina Donskaya interrupted him, having lost patience with the pressure. ¡°He¡¯s not gay!¡± she shouted, referring to slurs that had been appearing in the Arkhangelsk press. ¡°He impregnated me.¡±
By February, prosecutors had opened three cases against him. Donskoi, only 36 years old, unknown outside of Arkhangelsk and perhaps better off for it, would stand little chance in a real campaign to be the leader of a country as sprawling, complex and deeply troubled as Russia. That¡¯s not the point. The point is that Putin¡¯s Russia does not dare to hold an open competition for the highest office in the land ¡ª one where even a long shot like Donskoi could at least make a case for himself. That, more than anything else Putin has done, is the biggest threat to democracy.
¡°All of us believed in the new, democratic Russia,¡± Kasyanov, the other upstart candidate, told me. He served as Putin¡¯s prime minister from 2000 to 2004, representing the continuity from the presidency of Boris N. Yeltsin. On the eve of his re-election, though, Putin sacked him, setting him adrift in political obscurity to ward off prosecutors, so far successfully. From an office tower in southern Moscow, Kasyanov now runs a consultancy devoted mostly to his campaign. A large telescope stands beside an enormous plate-glass window. It points at the Kremlin.
¡°There is no possibility for a free and fair election,¡± he said, his tone evoking those democrats and liberals who once occupied positions of influence inside the Kremlin during the 1990s but now sound simply discouraged. ¡°Right now there is an issue of the survival of the democratic state.¡±
Last year, Putin said that he had been thinking about his replacement from the moment he became president in 2000, but Operation Successor, as it has been called, began in earnest in November 2005, when the Kremlin announced that Putin had given promotions to two of his closest aides, loyal men he brought to Moscow with him when he began his rise to power in the 1990s: Dmitri Medvedev and Sergei Ivanov.
Medvedev had previously served as his chief of staff and chairman of a huge state-owned utility, Gazprom, which he still is. He became first deputy prime minister, a newly created position under Prime Minister Mikhail Y. Fradkov, a jowly bureaucrat whose three years in office have been notable for a lack of influence. Ivanov, Putin¡¯s comrade and eventual superior in the Soviet K.G.B., became deputy prime minister ¡ª a rung below Medvedev ¡ª having served as head of the state security council and, significantly, the first civilian minister of defense in Russia¡¯s (and the Soviet Union¡¯s) history. Like Putin, neither has ever been elected to office.
While it was never stated, the significance was clear: both were being groomed for higher office. When I asked Aleksandr Y. Lebedev, a former K.G.B. officer, member of Russia¡¯s lower house of Parliament and one of the world¡¯s richest men, about Operation Successor, he suggested I watch television. His advice recalls the old cold warriors analyzing the array of Soviet leaders on Red Square¡¯s grandstand: Kremlinology on the nightly news. Lebedev could tell that Putin¡¯s mind was not yet made up. ¡°You can take a chronometer,¡± he said when we met in November. ¡°If one is given seven minutes, the other will be given seven minutes.¡±
The news is not as propagandistic as it was in Soviet times, but it has also ceased to be a forum for a national discussion or debate on matters involving politics and Putin personally. He is never criticized. His two anointed aides receive the same deference. Ivanov and Medvedev now appear almost as often as Putin and certainly more than their nominal boss, Prime Minister Fradkov. They preside over meetings of ministers, make statements, explain to ordinary Russians the duties the president has assigned to them. Anything critical ¡ª say, questions about the exoneration of Ivanov¡¯s son, Aleksandr, after his car struck and killed a pedestrian ¡ª never appears.
Few Ivanov or Medvedev events pass unheralded. Ivanov¡¯s appearance at the army¡¯s holiday concert was utterly inconsequential, yet it appeared on the evening news programs on all three state networks anyway. Rossiya, one of the state channels, even repeated an expanded version on its prime time news. Two children asked him to let the troupe perform for the military in Vladikavkaz, the southern city that has served as the staging base for troops waging war in Chechnya. Of course, Ivanov promised ¡ª as long as the performers on the stage beside him agreed. (The performance had already been scheduled.) Not long after the New Year, the troupe performed in Vladikavkaz and again was featured on the news, along with a reminder of the man who had made sure it happened.
Ivanov seems, in person, far more pragmatic and less prone to nationalistic declarations than his public statements would lead you to expect. At a dinner in late December with foreign reporters, he outlined a reasoned view of geopolitics and his own goals for modernizing Russia¡¯s military. Ivanov rose through the ranks of the K.G.B. and its successor agencies, including the foreign intelligence service and the Federal Security Service. Still, ever since he met Putin in 1977 while both were studying to be K.G.B. officers ¡ª ¡°I don¡¯t want to go into the details,¡± he said ¡ª his public prominence has owed itself to Putin¡¯s rise to power.
When it came to his own future, he demurred. ¡°I do not think about it,¡± he said. ¡°You may not believe it, but I don¡¯t. The presidential campaign hasn¡¯t started,¡± he added, crossing himself as the Russian Orthodox do, ¡°and I hope it won¡¯t start for a long time.¡±
It was hard to believe this diffidence when, a few weeks later, I joined him on a visit to an artillery training base and a MiG testing facility in Kolomna, two hours southeast of Moscow. He touted his plan to create family advisory councils to combat abuse and corruption and his negotiations to sell the newest MiG 35 to India. Both are ostensibly chores of Ivanov¡¯s current job, but his trip to a youth hockey championship in a small city, Sudogda, sponsored by a youth sports organization that he created, called New Generation, was nothing more than image building. It was all on the news again, with Ivanov appearing in one instance before a military recruiting poster. ¡°Make Your Choice,¡± it said.
Ivanov is portrayed as a hard-liner, part of the clan of Putin aides known as the siloviki, or people of power. Medvedev is the (comparatively) liberal, democratic reformer, from the clan representing the modernizing businessmen. Both are oversimplifications, since their singular positions are entirely dependent on their close, personal relations with and loyalty to Putin, who is unquestionably in charge. Having (apparently) launched Operation Successor, he later suggested that there could be still more candidates. ¡°Yes, that¡¯s possible, especially since the list is not very long,¡± he said in Shanghai last June. Pressed if it could be a dark horse, someone unknown, someone like he was under Yeltsin, he threw out more bait. ¡°Completely unknown?¡± he said. ¡°Not really. Such people are known to everyone, but their names are simply not mentioned.¡±
Valentina I. Matviyenko has, in fact, been mentioned ¡ª as someone who could be the first woman to rule Russia since Catherine the Great. She has been governor of St. Petersburg, Russia¡¯s second city, since Putin removed her predecessor and cleared the way for her election in 2003. A former apparatchik in the Communist Party, she became a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Malta when the Soviet Union was falling apart and then to Greece during Yeltsin¡¯s presidency, before becoming a deputy prime minister in 1998. As governor, she has demonstrated unwavering loyalty to Putin, even when he ended direct elections of governors like her following the Beslan siege in 2004. In a magazine interview at the time, she declared that Russians were not ready for experiments with electoral democracy. ¡°The mentality of the Russian demands a lord, a czar, a president,¡± she said.
When I met her in December, Matviyenko expressed disdain for electoral politics. Her own election campaign in 2003 she called ¡°the most difficult point in my life,¡± and she deplored the ¡°dirty side¡± of elections: money and lies, understandably, but also what she derided as the ¡°million promises¡± made by her opponent, as though campaign promises were somehow inappropriate. She said that legislative bodies should be elected, but executive power could not risk elections. ¡°This is because, unfortunately, if a mistake is made during the elections, it would be practically impossible to correct it during the official¡¯s term,¡± she told me in her office inside Smolny Institute, built in the 19th century as a school for the daughters of Russian nobility.
She is no longer accountable to the voters, to the people. Putin¡¯s post-Beslan decree means that she, like governors or presidents of Russia¡¯s 88 regions, serves at his will, ratified by the local legislative assembly. (Not one has balked at any of Putin¡¯s choices.) When I asked her about 2008 and her own prospects as a candidate, she said she would take herself out of the running: she had work yet to do in St. Petersburg. To end speculation, she explained, she would resign, which she in fact did two days later. She then petitioned Putin for a vote of confidence. He obliged a day later, reappointing her to a new term. On Dec. 20, the city¡¯s Parliament, following a speech by another of Putin¡¯s potential successors, Sergei Sobyanin, voted 40 to 3 to confirm the president¡¯s choice. Matviyenko began a new term as governor that will last until the end of 2011, when, unless something revolutionary happens in the meantime, Putin¡¯s chosen successor will reconsider her appointment.
Her reappointment showed how seamlessly Putin has imposed order on the unpredictable whims of electoral politics, removing chance, surprise and competition. ¡°People do not want any more revolutions,¡± Matviyenko told me in the Smolny Institute, which Lenin chose as his headquarters during the Bolshevik revolution and where he lived and worked in two modest rooms, preserved to this day as they were in 1917. ¡°People want the quiet development of the country, stable development, without shake-ups. They would like to see a president who can guarantee the succession of power.¡±
Medvedev jotted notes, fidgeted, shuffled papers; he often speaks to the floor or table in front of him. Physically, he is not an imposing figure: short and compact, and having lost weight over the last year, he is very much like Putin. He commands detail like his mentor, and with increasing confidence.
At the clinic, Medvedev acknowledged that much work remained to be done, but he boasted that the ¡°national projects¡± were working. ¡°This kind of quick rehabilitation of medical institutions has never occurred in history,¡± he said in remarks broadcast that night.
After an hour of questions about the national projects, about his hobbies (he swims every evening and tries to teach his son to distinguish right from wrong) and about his plans to visit various regions, Khozova asked the final question. ¡°Lately the topic of a successor to Vladimir Putin has been circulating,¡± she began.
That was as far as she got. Medvedev cut her off with a laugh. ¡°I am not now working on anything directly,¡± he said. ¡°I am engaged completely with those affairs that we just discussed. And I like this work. It surprises me in a good way. I experience a kind of ¡®drive,¡¯ if you will, from these activities and will take that which I have received to its logical conclusion.¡±
Putin¡¯s greatest legacy would be a smooth succession of power, still a rare occurrence in a country with the violent, authoritarian past that Russia has. History might ultimately judge him as Russia¡¯s George Washington, the man who did not let the possibility of retaining personal power overrule a young country¡¯s laws and democratic principles. Still, there are those who wish that he would stay, that the Constitution would be amended to allow him to run for a third term he would undoubtedly win. He could do so easily, given the unwavering obsequiousness of Parliament. Regional Parliaments across Russia have drafted referendums on the issue from Primoriye on the Pacific Coast to Chechnya, the battered ruin of a republic whose war for secession Putin has effectively crushed, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.
¡°We think that Putin should complete both the political and economic reforms that he began and should have at minimum two more terms ¡ª three or four more terms,¡± the speaker of Chechnya¡¯s Parliament, Dukuvakha B. Abdurakhmanov, told me by telephone in mid-January. Chechnya¡¯s petition by that point had already garnered the support of two dozen of Russia¡¯s regions, raising the possibility the issue could yet come to a vote in the Parliament. ¡°The number of terms should not decide the end of his presidency, but rather his age and health.¡±
Putin continues to demur, even as he opens the door for speculation. ¡°As for myself, as I have said, the Constitution ¡ª even though I like my work ¡ª the Constitution does not give me a right to stand for a third consecutive term,¡± he said in an annual televised call-in program in October. His use of ¡°consecutive¡± prompted many to believe he might yet come back for re-election in 2012.
Part of what fuels the uncertainty surrounding the succession is what Putin will do once a second term ends. He will be only 55. It is hard to imagine him slipping into quiet retirement. Speculation abounds that he intends to remain an unelected power, overseeing the country from behind the scenes. He could take over a party (though he has yet to join one), become the speaker of Parliament or emerge as the leader of the as-yet unrealized union of Belarus and Russia. Rumor has long had it that he could take over Gazprom, the huge state gas and oil company, now one of the world¡¯s largest corporations and still growing. He could reap the rewards that his authoritarian capitalism has brought Russia, though he once said he was not a businessman by temperament.
On Feb. 1, Putin held his annual full-dress press conference and swatted aside repeated questions about his successor and his future. ¡°There will be no successor,¡± he said. ¡°There will be candidates for the post of president of Russia.¡± He did not mention Medvedev, Ivanov or the others, not once, which prompted a new round of speculation that the speculation about Medvedev and Ivanov had, perhaps, been misplaced. Pressed, he would say only that he reserved the right to express a choice. ¡°But I will do it only when the election campaign starts,¡± he said.
Opposition to Putin exists. In December, Andrei N. Illarionov, a former economic adviser of Putin¡¯s until he resigned more than a year ago to protest the government¡¯s authoritarianism, described the succession process as something out of the Middle Ages. ¡°It does not matter what kind of successor one is, smart or not too smart, a pleasant one or not too pleasant,¡± he said at a news conference. ¡°It does not matter. The choice between this and that makes no sense. One thing matters. It is that the transfer of power to one¡¯s heir should not happen in a modern, civilized and normal country.¡± There are candidates who will run against Putin¡¯s chosen heir, representing the greatly diminished Communist Party or the Liberal Democratic Party, whose nationalist leader, Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, has long ago ceased opposing the Kremlin. But they will enjoy none of the advantages of Putin¡¯s heir, and they will lose.
Still, Valentina Matviyenko might be right. Russians are not in a revolutionary mood now that the country is more stable, now that salaries and pensions are paid, now that consumers can indulge in everything Europeans can ¡ª except political choice.
In December, the authorities refused to grant a permit for a march organized by Other Russia, an amalgam of disaffected political organizations, including one created by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion who retired in 2005 to wage a lonely campaign to make Russia politically free. The authorities authorized only a rally, to be held on Triumphal Square. Four days before it, the interior ministry¡¯s counterterrorism police raided Kasparov¡¯s office and seized posters advertising the march. As I approached on the morning of the rally, truckloads of soldiers lined every street in the area; a helicopter hovered overhead. Street sweepers, snowplows and buses blocked the main street while soldiers stood in formation, two layers deep.
Inside a fenced area were perhaps 2,000 protesters; organizers¡¯ estimates of 4,000 or more were exaggerated. The organizers later said that hundreds of participants had been stopped at checkpoints on the roads or at train stations. Those who made it included aging liberals of Mikhail S. Gorbachev¡¯s Glasnost, now 20 years past, and radical youth, including the committed members of two organizations, the National Bolsheviks, known for stunts like being arrested while occupying government offices, and the Red Youth Vanguard, whose red-and-black flag incorporates an AK-47. The police and soldiers on hand outnumbered them by four to one or more.
¡°They are afraid that one day we will say, ¡®Enough,¡¯ ¡± Kasparov yelled from the back of a flatbed truck with a Dolce & Gabbana billboard as a backdrop. His voice was drowned out by the chopping thud of the helicopter overhead. He led a chant ¡ª ¡°We need the Other Russia,¡± after the movement¡¯s name ¡ª but the chants faded after a couple of rounds.
The article is very long but detailed. Russia , to some extent, is a steppe country, so we need to learn something about it.
" Post-Putin "
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: February 25, 2007
Sergei B. Ivanov walked in late to the holiday performance of the army¡¯s Academy of Song and Dance. He sat in a seat saved for him between a mop-haired boy and a girl with a fluffy white ribbon in her hair. He watched, stiffly tapping his foot, as Soldier Ivan danced with fairies on his way to saving the children¡¯s New Year¡¯s presents from the old witch Baba Yaga. Grandfather Frost Russia¡¯s Santa Claus arrived in the end, of course, with gifts for the children in the audience, sons and daughters of Russia¡¯s military men. The soldier/actor¡¯s voice boomed as he introduced ¡°a very big present,¡± ¡°our wonderful guest¡±: Ivanov, then the country¡¯s minister of defense (and soon to be named first deputy prime minister), the man who might well be the next president of Russia.
The Outsider: Garry Kasparov, ex-chess champion and opposition party leader, at a rally in Moscow for the Other Russia. At right is Mikhail Kasyanov, the former prime minister ousted by Putin.
¡°Dear friends,¡± Ivanov began, his voice tinny by comparison. His face appeared pinched, his lips as thin as the hair parted sharply on the left. Pale, trim, dressed in a dark suit with an open collar, he looked like a secret agent. Which, in fact, is what he was in Finland and Kenya (and maybe in Sweden and England), working for the K.G.B. as the Soviet Union was collapsing. As history shows, a former intelligence officer might be just what Russia wants in a leader.
It might still be. Ivanov, who is 54, is a leading contender to become only the third elected president in Russia¡¯s history, replacing Vladimir V. Putin, the steely, steady president who, according to the country¡¯s adolescent Constitution, must step down early in 2008 after two full terms in office. At least he is presumed to be a contender, just as there is presumed to be an election, scheduled for March 2, 2008.
Ivanov has never expressed the desire to be president ¡ª neither in public nor, as far as anyone who knows will tell, in private. Neither has Dmitri A. Medvedev, the other first deputy prime minister and the other presumed-to-be-leading candidate. Nor have Valentina I. Matviyenko, the energetic governor of St. Petersburg; Vladimir I. Yakunin, another former K.G.B. agent who heads the state-owned Russian Railways; Sergei S. Sobyanin, a former governor and the president¡¯s chief of staff; Dmitri N. Kozak, the presidential envoy to the turbulent Caucasus; Boris V. Gryzlov, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament; Sergei M. Mironov, the chairman of the upper house; or Sergei V. Chemizov, director of the state arms-marketing monopoly who served as an intelligence officer with Putin in East Germany.
Putin had never been elected anything in his life. And yet he went into his first election in March 2000 as the incumbent (albeit as acting president) and cruised through the process with all the trappings of power, including decisive control of most of television. He beat Zyuganov comfortably in the first round with 52 percent of the vote (bolstered perhaps, as The Moscow Times reported, by ballot stuffing in some regions).
By 2004 he faced a diminished crop of candidates, second-tier party leaders who either expressed support for Putin¡¯s re-election or foundered in oblivion, barred from television appearances and harassed by such government tactics as untimely fire inspections at campaign rallies. It was a rout, one so skewed in favor of Putin ¡ª who, officially, won 71 percent ¡ª that it became farcical.
Putin has unquestionably transformed the country, righting it, to a degree, after its perilous stagger through the 1990s, when chaos, crime and corruption raged, but he has done so by creating an authoritarian system that is only nominally democratic (in that Russia still holds elections, as the Soviet Union did). He reined in elected governors from the provinces and their representatives in Moscow. He chased into exile or into prison prominent businessmen seen as political challengers. He pulled all of the national television networks back under state control. He so imposed the Kremlin¡¯s will on the legislative bodies that they are now controlled by political parties lacking any real identity except as vassals of Putin. He has been accused of creating a Soviet Union Lite or, alternatively, a new imperial Russia, with himself as a 21st-century czar, a unifying figure above politics, beyond criticism, in absolute control. His supporters dispute this, but there is no question that he has consolidated virtually all political and, increasingly, economic power into his hands, or at least into the hands of the small cadre of aides whom he has entrusted as stewards of the country¡¯s natural resources and strategic enterprises.
Kremlin Inc. has become the name for the hybrid system Putin created: capitalism with an authoritarian face. The search for his replacement has started to look less like a political campaign and more like a boardroom struggle to select a new C.E.O. As at most corporations, the process is out of the public eye, the result presented to shareholders as a fait accompli. And like most executives, Putin is susceptible to choosing someone most like himself. ¡°I don¡¯t think it¡¯s going to be a radical change,¡± Ivanov said in December.
Announcing one¡¯s own candidacy is, in fact, tantamount to declaring one¡¯s open opposition to the Kremlin, to the smooth transition of power, to Putin himself. Even the parliamentary opposition is wary of doing that. So far in this quasi-election season only two people have done it: a former prime minister, Mikhail M. Kasyanov, and, improbably, Aleksandr V. Donskoi, the youthful mayor of Arkhangelsk, a small port city on the White Sea.
Both promptly came under the scrutiny of prosecutors, even as the mass media piled on in the way they never do with today¡¯s authorities, certainly not the likes of Putin, Ivanov or Medvedev. Kasyanov was accused of arranging the shady privatization of a luxury summer house on the Moscow River, Donskoi of falsifying a university diploma when he first ran for mayor two years ago.
On the day in November when I first met Donskoi in Moscow, intrigued by the audacity of his decision to run for president of all Russia, investigators raided his office up in Arkhangelsk. As we spoke, his wife, Marina, and an aide answered insistent phone calls from home and relayed progress reports. ¡°I realize all the responsibilities,¡± Donskoi, a supermarket tycoon, told me. ¡°I understand there could be difficulties, including physical threats. It¡¯s already taking place.¡±
A month later he was back visiting Moscow and called a sparsely attended news conference to denounce an intensifying campaign against him. He denied having falsified his diploma and went on to explain, among other things, his interest in ¡°gypsy hypnosis.¡± Marina Donskaya interrupted him, having lost patience with the pressure. ¡°He¡¯s not gay!¡± she shouted, referring to slurs that had been appearing in the Arkhangelsk press. ¡°He impregnated me.¡±
By February, prosecutors had opened three cases against him. Donskoi, only 36 years old, unknown outside of Arkhangelsk and perhaps better off for it, would stand little chance in a real campaign to be the leader of a country as sprawling, complex and deeply troubled as Russia. That¡¯s not the point. The point is that Putin¡¯s Russia does not dare to hold an open competition for the highest office in the land ¡ª one where even a long shot like Donskoi could at least make a case for himself. That, more than anything else Putin has done, is the biggest threat to democracy.
¡°All of us believed in the new, democratic Russia,¡± Kasyanov, the other upstart candidate, told me. He served as Putin¡¯s prime minister from 2000 to 2004, representing the continuity from the presidency of Boris N. Yeltsin. On the eve of his re-election, though, Putin sacked him, setting him adrift in political obscurity to ward off prosecutors, so far successfully. From an office tower in southern Moscow, Kasyanov now runs a consultancy devoted mostly to his campaign. A large telescope stands beside an enormous plate-glass window. It points at the Kremlin.
¡°There is no possibility for a free and fair election,¡± he said, his tone evoking those democrats and liberals who once occupied positions of influence inside the Kremlin during the 1990s but now sound simply discouraged. ¡°Right now there is an issue of the survival of the democratic state.¡±
Last year, Putin said that he had been thinking about his replacement from the moment he became president in 2000, but Operation Successor, as it has been called, began in earnest in November 2005, when the Kremlin announced that Putin had given promotions to two of his closest aides, loyal men he brought to Moscow with him when he began his rise to power in the 1990s: Dmitri Medvedev and Sergei Ivanov.
Medvedev had previously served as his chief of staff and chairman of a huge state-owned utility, Gazprom, which he still is. He became first deputy prime minister, a newly created position under Prime Minister Mikhail Y. Fradkov, a jowly bureaucrat whose three years in office have been notable for a lack of influence. Ivanov, Putin¡¯s comrade and eventual superior in the Soviet K.G.B., became deputy prime minister ¡ª a rung below Medvedev ¡ª having served as head of the state security council and, significantly, the first civilian minister of defense in Russia¡¯s (and the Soviet Union¡¯s) history. Like Putin, neither has ever been elected to office.
While it was never stated, the significance was clear: both were being groomed for higher office. When I asked Aleksandr Y. Lebedev, a former K.G.B. officer, member of Russia¡¯s lower house of Parliament and one of the world¡¯s richest men, about Operation Successor, he suggested I watch television. His advice recalls the old cold warriors analyzing the array of Soviet leaders on Red Square¡¯s grandstand: Kremlinology on the nightly news. Lebedev could tell that Putin¡¯s mind was not yet made up. ¡°You can take a chronometer,¡± he said when we met in November. ¡°If one is given seven minutes, the other will be given seven minutes.¡±
The news is not as propagandistic as it was in Soviet times, but it has also ceased to be a forum for a national discussion or debate on matters involving politics and Putin personally. He is never criticized. His two anointed aides receive the same deference. Ivanov and Medvedev now appear almost as often as Putin and certainly more than their nominal boss, Prime Minister Fradkov. They preside over meetings of ministers, make statements, explain to ordinary Russians the duties the president has assigned to them. Anything critical ¡ª say, questions about the exoneration of Ivanov¡¯s son, Aleksandr, after his car struck and killed a pedestrian ¡ª never appears.
Few Ivanov or Medvedev events pass unheralded. Ivanov¡¯s appearance at the army¡¯s holiday concert was utterly inconsequential, yet it appeared on the evening news programs on all three state networks anyway. Rossiya, one of the state channels, even repeated an expanded version on its prime time news. Two children asked him to let the troupe perform for the military in Vladikavkaz, the southern city that has served as the staging base for troops waging war in Chechnya. Of course, Ivanov promised ¡ª as long as the performers on the stage beside him agreed. (The performance had already been scheduled.) Not long after the New Year, the troupe performed in Vladikavkaz and again was featured on the news, along with a reminder of the man who had made sure it happened.
Ivanov seems, in person, far more pragmatic and less prone to nationalistic declarations than his public statements would lead you to expect. At a dinner in late December with foreign reporters, he outlined a reasoned view of geopolitics and his own goals for modernizing Russia¡¯s military. Ivanov rose through the ranks of the K.G.B. and its successor agencies, including the foreign intelligence service and the Federal Security Service. Still, ever since he met Putin in 1977 while both were studying to be K.G.B. officers ¡ª ¡°I don¡¯t want to go into the details,¡± he said ¡ª his public prominence has owed itself to Putin¡¯s rise to power.
When it came to his own future, he demurred. ¡°I do not think about it,¡± he said. ¡°You may not believe it, but I don¡¯t. The presidential campaign hasn¡¯t started,¡± he added, crossing himself as the Russian Orthodox do, ¡°and I hope it won¡¯t start for a long time.¡±
It was hard to believe this diffidence when, a few weeks later, I joined him on a visit to an artillery training base and a MiG testing facility in Kolomna, two hours southeast of Moscow. He touted his plan to create family advisory councils to combat abuse and corruption and his negotiations to sell the newest MiG 35 to India. Both are ostensibly chores of Ivanov¡¯s current job, but his trip to a youth hockey championship in a small city, Sudogda, sponsored by a youth sports organization that he created, called New Generation, was nothing more than image building. It was all on the news again, with Ivanov appearing in one instance before a military recruiting poster. ¡°Make Your Choice,¡± it said.
Ivanov is portrayed as a hard-liner, part of the clan of Putin aides known as the siloviki, or people of power. Medvedev is the (comparatively) liberal, democratic reformer, from the clan representing the modernizing businessmen. Both are oversimplifications, since their singular positions are entirely dependent on their close, personal relations with and loyalty to Putin, who is unquestionably in charge. Having (apparently) launched Operation Successor, he later suggested that there could be still more candidates. ¡°Yes, that¡¯s possible, especially since the list is not very long,¡± he said in Shanghai last June. Pressed if it could be a dark horse, someone unknown, someone like he was under Yeltsin, he threw out more bait. ¡°Completely unknown?¡± he said. ¡°Not really. Such people are known to everyone, but their names are simply not mentioned.¡±
Valentina I. Matviyenko has, in fact, been mentioned ¡ª as someone who could be the first woman to rule Russia since Catherine the Great. She has been governor of St. Petersburg, Russia¡¯s second city, since Putin removed her predecessor and cleared the way for her election in 2003. A former apparatchik in the Communist Party, she became a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Malta when the Soviet Union was falling apart and then to Greece during Yeltsin¡¯s presidency, before becoming a deputy prime minister in 1998. As governor, she has demonstrated unwavering loyalty to Putin, even when he ended direct elections of governors like her following the Beslan siege in 2004. In a magazine interview at the time, she declared that Russians were not ready for experiments with electoral democracy. ¡°The mentality of the Russian demands a lord, a czar, a president,¡± she said.
When I met her in December, Matviyenko expressed disdain for electoral politics. Her own election campaign in 2003 she called ¡°the most difficult point in my life,¡± and she deplored the ¡°dirty side¡± of elections: money and lies, understandably, but also what she derided as the ¡°million promises¡± made by her opponent, as though campaign promises were somehow inappropriate. She said that legislative bodies should be elected, but executive power could not risk elections. ¡°This is because, unfortunately, if a mistake is made during the elections, it would be practically impossible to correct it during the official¡¯s term,¡± she told me in her office inside Smolny Institute, built in the 19th century as a school for the daughters of Russian nobility.
She is no longer accountable to the voters, to the people. Putin¡¯s post-Beslan decree means that she, like governors or presidents of Russia¡¯s 88 regions, serves at his will, ratified by the local legislative assembly. (Not one has balked at any of Putin¡¯s choices.) When I asked her about 2008 and her own prospects as a candidate, she said she would take herself out of the running: she had work yet to do in St. Petersburg. To end speculation, she explained, she would resign, which she in fact did two days later. She then petitioned Putin for a vote of confidence. He obliged a day later, reappointing her to a new term. On Dec. 20, the city¡¯s Parliament, following a speech by another of Putin¡¯s potential successors, Sergei Sobyanin, voted 40 to 3 to confirm the president¡¯s choice. Matviyenko began a new term as governor that will last until the end of 2011, when, unless something revolutionary happens in the meantime, Putin¡¯s chosen successor will reconsider her appointment.
Her reappointment showed how seamlessly Putin has imposed order on the unpredictable whims of electoral politics, removing chance, surprise and competition. ¡°People do not want any more revolutions,¡± Matviyenko told me in the Smolny Institute, which Lenin chose as his headquarters during the Bolshevik revolution and where he lived and worked in two modest rooms, preserved to this day as they were in 1917. ¡°People want the quiet development of the country, stable development, without shake-ups. They would like to see a president who can guarantee the succession of power.¡±
Medvedev jotted notes, fidgeted, shuffled papers; he often speaks to the floor or table in front of him. Physically, he is not an imposing figure: short and compact, and having lost weight over the last year, he is very much like Putin. He commands detail like his mentor, and with increasing confidence.
At the clinic, Medvedev acknowledged that much work remained to be done, but he boasted that the ¡°national projects¡± were working. ¡°This kind of quick rehabilitation of medical institutions has never occurred in history,¡± he said in remarks broadcast that night.
After an hour of questions about the national projects, about his hobbies (he swims every evening and tries to teach his son to distinguish right from wrong) and about his plans to visit various regions, Khozova asked the final question. ¡°Lately the topic of a successor to Vladimir Putin has been circulating,¡± she began.
That was as far as she got. Medvedev cut her off with a laugh. ¡°I am not now working on anything directly,¡± he said. ¡°I am engaged completely with those affairs that we just discussed. And I like this work. It surprises me in a good way. I experience a kind of ¡®drive,¡¯ if you will, from these activities and will take that which I have received to its logical conclusion.¡±
Putin¡¯s greatest legacy would be a smooth succession of power, still a rare occurrence in a country with the violent, authoritarian past that Russia has. History might ultimately judge him as Russia¡¯s George Washington, the man who did not let the possibility of retaining personal power overrule a young country¡¯s laws and democratic principles. Still, there are those who wish that he would stay, that the Constitution would be amended to allow him to run for a third term he would undoubtedly win. He could do so easily, given the unwavering obsequiousness of Parliament. Regional Parliaments across Russia have drafted referendums on the issue from Primoriye on the Pacific Coast to Chechnya, the battered ruin of a republic whose war for secession Putin has effectively crushed, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.
¡°We think that Putin should complete both the political and economic reforms that he began and should have at minimum two more terms ¡ª three or four more terms,¡± the speaker of Chechnya¡¯s Parliament, Dukuvakha B. Abdurakhmanov, told me by telephone in mid-January. Chechnya¡¯s petition by that point had already garnered the support of two dozen of Russia¡¯s regions, raising the possibility the issue could yet come to a vote in the Parliament. ¡°The number of terms should not decide the end of his presidency, but rather his age and health.¡±
Putin continues to demur, even as he opens the door for speculation. ¡°As for myself, as I have said, the Constitution ¡ª even though I like my work ¡ª the Constitution does not give me a right to stand for a third consecutive term,¡± he said in an annual televised call-in program in October. His use of ¡°consecutive¡± prompted many to believe he might yet come back for re-election in 2012.
Part of what fuels the uncertainty surrounding the succession is what Putin will do once a second term ends. He will be only 55. It is hard to imagine him slipping into quiet retirement. Speculation abounds that he intends to remain an unelected power, overseeing the country from behind the scenes. He could take over a party (though he has yet to join one), become the speaker of Parliament or emerge as the leader of the as-yet unrealized union of Belarus and Russia. Rumor has long had it that he could take over Gazprom, the huge state gas and oil company, now one of the world¡¯s largest corporations and still growing. He could reap the rewards that his authoritarian capitalism has brought Russia, though he once said he was not a businessman by temperament.
On Feb. 1, Putin held his annual full-dress press conference and swatted aside repeated questions about his successor and his future. ¡°There will be no successor,¡± he said. ¡°There will be candidates for the post of president of Russia.¡± He did not mention Medvedev, Ivanov or the others, not once, which prompted a new round of speculation that the speculation about Medvedev and Ivanov had, perhaps, been misplaced. Pressed, he would say only that he reserved the right to express a choice. ¡°But I will do it only when the election campaign starts,¡± he said.
Opposition to Putin exists. In December, Andrei N. Illarionov, a former economic adviser of Putin¡¯s until he resigned more than a year ago to protest the government¡¯s authoritarianism, described the succession process as something out of the Middle Ages. ¡°It does not matter what kind of successor one is, smart or not too smart, a pleasant one or not too pleasant,¡± he said at a news conference. ¡°It does not matter. The choice between this and that makes no sense. One thing matters. It is that the transfer of power to one¡¯s heir should not happen in a modern, civilized and normal country.¡± There are candidates who will run against Putin¡¯s chosen heir, representing the greatly diminished Communist Party or the Liberal Democratic Party, whose nationalist leader, Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, has long ago ceased opposing the Kremlin. But they will enjoy none of the advantages of Putin¡¯s heir, and they will lose.
Still, Valentina Matviyenko might be right. Russians are not in a revolutionary mood now that the country is more stable, now that salaries and pensions are paid, now that consumers can indulge in everything Europeans can ¡ª except political choice.
In December, the authorities refused to grant a permit for a march organized by Other Russia, an amalgam of disaffected political organizations, including one created by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion who retired in 2005 to wage a lonely campaign to make Russia politically free. The authorities authorized only a rally, to be held on Triumphal Square. Four days before it, the interior ministry¡¯s counterterrorism police raided Kasparov¡¯s office and seized posters advertising the march. As I approached on the morning of the rally, truckloads of soldiers lined every street in the area; a helicopter hovered overhead. Street sweepers, snowplows and buses blocked the main street while soldiers stood in formation, two layers deep.
Inside a fenced area were perhaps 2,000 protesters; organizers¡¯ estimates of 4,000 or more were exaggerated. The organizers later said that hundreds of participants had been stopped at checkpoints on the roads or at train stations. Those who made it included aging liberals of Mikhail S. Gorbachev¡¯s Glasnost, now 20 years past, and radical youth, including the committed members of two organizations, the National Bolsheviks, known for stunts like being arrested while occupying government offices, and the Red Youth Vanguard, whose red-and-black flag incorporates an AK-47. The police and soldiers on hand outnumbered them by four to one or more.
¡°They are afraid that one day we will say, ¡®Enough,¡¯ ¡± Kasparov yelled from the back of a flatbed truck with a Dolce & Gabbana billboard as a backdrop. His voice was drowned out by the chopping thud of the helicopter overhead. He led a chant ¡ª ¡°We need the Other Russia,¡± after the movement¡¯s name ¡ª but the chants faded after a couple of rounds.
