Strongman (42 page)

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?

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?’

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.