The New Tsar (68 page)

Putin’s words spoke volumes about his understanding of democracy: it is not for society to decide its leaders through some semblance of an electoral campaign, but to ratify those already chosen. He announced that Medvedev would, according to a “tradition” not even a decade old, head the party’s ballot in the parliamentary elections in December and thus “guarantee its anticipated and honest victory.” The applause that followed seemed rote; Putin had not yet clarified the fate of either man in the tandem.

Medvedev then followed him to the dais. “Naturally, it is a pleasure to speak here,” he began, smiling awkwardly. Even after four years in office, he had not yet mastered the art of political speech. “There is a special energy in this room. It is simply charged with emotions.” He praised Russia’s democracy and the “new level of political culture” that it had achieved, but he went on to warn that “excessive formalism and bureaucracy” posed a danger to it. The delegates listened unemotionally; his relevance seemed to dim with each word. “They lead to the stagnation and degradation of the political system,” he said. “And unfortunately, we have already witnessed this in our country’s history.” He outlined an eight-point political agenda, all of which he had promised for nearly four years and not yet delivered: modernizing the economy and industry; ensuring salaries, pensions, and health care, all precarious still; fighting corruption; strengthening the judiciary and criminal justice systems; combating illegal immigration while protecting the country’s
“interethnic and interreligious peace”; establishing a “modern political system”; building the nation’s police and armed forces; and forging a strong “independent, sensible foreign policy.”

With those words, he accepted Putin’s nomination to head the party’s list, and at last he addressed the agreement Putin had alluded to having reached years before. Medvedev spoke like a man reading his own political obituary; it was, in fact, one of the most bizarre resignation speeches in history. He was articulating and defending his vision for the country, even as he relinquished the post that might have made it achievable.

“I propose we decide on another very important issue which naturally concerns the party and all of our people who follow politics, namely the candidate for the role of president. In light of the proposal that I head the party list, do party work, and, if we perform well in the elections, my willingness to engage in practical work in the government, I think it’s right that the party congress support the candidacy of the current prime minister, Vladimir Putin, in the role of the country’s president.”

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I
n the end, perhaps, it was not a surprise. Medvedev’s political stock had been sinking day by day for most of the year. Yet the shock was audible in the cavernous stadium, a collective gasp that soon turned to thunderous applause, wave after wave of it. Putin had succeeded in creating suspense and then releasing it at the moment of his choosing. He stood in front of his seat in the audience, basking in the spotlight, his eyes sparkling though his smile was tight, wry, and fleeting. He did not raise his arms in triumph or otherwise act like a candidate offered the chance to seek higher office. He simply nodded knowingly, as if his return to the presidency was preordained.

After Medvedev finished speaking, Putin strode to the dais a second time and delivered a lengthy, richly detailed, policy-laden address that outlined his plans to support veterans and farmers, doctors, teachers, scientists, soldiers. It was the nuts and bolts of governance, what the Russians had come to expect over years of watching him insist upon the right policy, the right decisions, on behalf of the people. He vowed to overcome the nagging hardships of the global economic crisis, the roots of which, he pointedly noted, again, “were not in Russia.” He barely mentioned Medvedev’s nomination to head the party list or his own return to the presidency, which in one sudden moment had become inexorable. “We have already entered a lengthy election cycle. The elections to the State Duma will take place on December 4, to be followed
by the formation of its committees and government bodies. The presidential election is scheduled for next spring. I’d like to thank you for your positive response to the proposal for me to stand for president. This is a great honor for me.” He spoke as if he had not decided everything himself.

The agreement was reached several years ago, Putin had explained. Medvedev suggested as much as well, though in fact it had not happened that way. Medvedev had nurtured the hope to return for a second term at least until the beginning of September, when his public demeanor started to suggest that it might not happen. He had only learned the details of Putin’s final decision the night before during a late-night meeting at Novo-Ogaryovo. When the printers printed the ballots for the delegates to use to elevate Medvedev to the head of the party, the space for his name had been left blank, filled in only after the announcement. According to one account, Putin would not even let Medvedev tell his wife until the decision had been made public.
⁸
If Putin had known all along that he intended to reclaim the presidency, no one else in the government or in his inner circle had been allowed to know, let alone influence the outcome of his deliberations. He made the most momentous decision of his political career with his own counsel alone. One of Medvedev’s loyalists, Arkady Dvorkovich, reacted with anguished sarcasm even as the events at the congress unfolded. In an interview the year before, Dvorkovich had acknowledged that Medvedev’s plans—and really his entire presidency—had faced opposition from “those who thrive on the old system, on budget inefficiency and a resource-based economy.”
⁹
He never named names, but he clearly referred to those arrayed around Putin. “Now,” he tweeted from the floor of the party’s congress, “it’s time to switch to the sports channel.”

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P
utin never bothered to explain his reasons for returning to the presidency, to the Kremlin. He could have remained the paramount leader, even with Medvedev serving another term as president. Perhaps there was no reason but the obvious one, though according to his most ardent supporters, he felt that his successor had not been a strong enough leader. In the days and months after the announcement, the same supporters set about demeaning Medvedev for the weaknesses he showed during the war in Georgia and failing to stop NATO’s war in Libya. Even the anecdote about keeping Medvedev from telling his wife was laced with the insinuation that he was hardly man enough to trust his wife not to insist
that he run again. These explanations sought to justify Putin’s move, but they did not explain his motive. He never felt he had to. The position was his if he wanted it, which was, in his mind apparently, explanation enough.

Suddenly the significance of the constitutional change to lengthen the presidential term dawned on those who rued a new Putin presidency. Instead of four more years, Putin would serve six, until 2018. If he ran for another term after that—a fourth—he could be Russia’s leader until 2024, surpassing Brezhnev in political longevity. Only Stalin, in power for thirty-one years, had remained in office longer. Putin’s critics, and even some supporters, began to count the years of their own lives, envisioning their ages when, under the “managed democracy” the Kremlin had imposed, another leader might conceivably emerge in Russia. Photographs enhanced to show the aging process became popular memes on the Internet. The opposition newspaper
Novaya Gazeta
published pencil caricatures of Putin at the presumed end of his political career, his face creased with age, his hairline even further receded, his suit festooned with a field marshal’s clusters of medals and ribbons. His senior aides were all there, too, those who had been with him from the beginning, looking like the hunched veterans of the Great Patriotic War, still revered and honored for deeds of a distant past.
¹⁰

Medvedev, having been the hope of the liberals and reformers, faced even more ridicule than Putin. The decision to switch positions became known by the Russian word for castling in chess,
rokirovka
, in which the king swaps position with the rook, most often to solidify the defense of the king. No one doubted now who had always held the power, even those who had hoped that Medvedev would one day establish himself as an independent leader. Theirs was the bitter anger of disappointment. Whether or not the decision was made in 2008 or in 2011, Medvedev proved to be nothing more than a pawn in Putin’s gambit to sidestep the letter of the law that limited a leader’s term. Russians derisively reckoned his greatest accomplishments to be the reduction of Russia’s eleven time zones to nine and the permanent shift to daylight saving time. A day after the announcement, a putative ally, the finance minister Aleksei Kudrin, publicly broke with Medvedev, saying he would refuse to remain in a cabinet with Medvedev as prime minister. Medvedev tried to explain “his” decision by saying that he and Putin had agreed to let opinion polls decide who would run—as if those in Russia were genuine reflections of voter sentiment—but he made matters worse by using the
hated United States as a standard of comparison. It was inconceivable, he said, to imagine that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, being from the same party, would ever compete against each other. “They’re both from the Democratic Party, so they made a decision based on who was capable of bringing the best result,” he said, less than a week after the congress. “We made the same kind of decision.” The fact that this ignored the heated Democratic primaries of 2008 only stoked the derision.
¹¹

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P
utin, having in his mind observed and respected the letter of Russia’s Constitution, miscalculated the reaction to his return. He had grown increasingly isolated and detached from the popular sentiment he believed he understood intuitively. The successes he so often touted—stability and, despite the economic crisis, spreading affluence—were no longer sufficient to assuage a new generation that took them for granted. The chaos of the 1990s was a distant memory, and many of those who had benefited most from the Putin boom now expected a more modern, more open political culture as well. The Kremlin maintained its ironclad grip on the television narrative, but the “videocracy” at the center of its mystique had grown stale, subject to the satire that has been a feature of Russian literature since Gogol. Opposition to the
rokirovka
churned in the arena still largely beyond the Kremlin’s manipulations. Frustration and anger over Putin’s return filled social media and online networks—Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and its Russian clone, VKontakte—and the animosity turned into an uprising, though for now a virtual one. The architects of the rebellion were disproportionately from the educated class, those with money and technical savvy, those who swam easily in the media that obliterated traditional borders of communication. They were called “Internet hamsters,” and they produced a primal stream of denunciations and jeremiads, spoofs and mockery that freely ridiculed Putin, his antics, his evident cosmetic surgery, his humiliated sidekick, in ways that the official media had long ago stopped daring to do.

The discontent soon spread. When Putin appeared in the ring of an “ultimate fight” match at Olympic Stadium in Moscow in November, he was greeted by booing and whistling, though the Kremlin’s supporters tried unconvincingly to suggest the audience’s ire was directed at the loser of the bout, an American, or the long lines for the bathrooms. A heavily edited clip appeared on the evening news, with the booing muted, but the raw video spread online, picked up by Aleksei Navalny,
who gleefully pronounced Putin’s harsh reception from the fans as “the end of an era.”
¹²
Putin had faced angry constituents before, but in this case, the booing came from a crowd that would presumably include his most ardent supporters. Putin’s opponents took heart in the unseemly display, which challenged the myth that opposition to Putin existed only in the rarified elite, the intelligentsia, as they once were called, or the new generation who preferred a new adaptation from the West,
hipsteri
.

With the news of his return to the Kremlin, Putin’s popularity actually slipped to the lowest levels since 2000. The party his strategists had constructed slipped even further, dismissed by its growing legion of critics as a badly reconstituted Communist Party of the Soviet Union—only more corrupt. By the time the parliamentary elections were held in December, it became clear that the foundation of Putin’s power had fractured. The models that had worked since 2000 were no longer enough. The Kremlin’s creation of a new pro-business “opposition” party called Right Cause, intended to inject a semblance of intrigue into the country’s politics, became a farce when its recruited leader, the billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, found his supporters barred from attending the party congress organized to nominate him. No one had given the party any chance of winning, but Medvedev had persuaded Prokhorov to take up politics, only to have the machinations of the Kremlin’s political mastermind, Vladislav Surkov, shoulder him aside.
¹³
Prokhorov, a businessman who bought the New Jersey (later Brooklyn) Nets of the National Basketball Association in 2010, had naïvely assumed that he might exercise political independence. He claimed that Putin’s power was not monolithic and that he had supporters inside its ranks, but his ouster made it clear they were losing out. “In Russia,” he said, “all fights are on the inside.”
¹⁴

The parliamentary elections thus unfolded like those before, with the same stunted, state-sanctioned parties that had become grizzled fixtures of the political status quo. They became known as the “system opposition,” nominally a check on power, but one wholly subservient to it: Zyuganov’s Communists, Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats, and the rebranded version of the nationalists, now called Just Russia and led by Sergei Mironov, the Putin acolyte who had “challenged” him in the 2004. Other smaller parties that might have posed a challenge, like Yabloko or Boris Nemtsov’s, were smothered by the electoral or legal bureaucracy, harassed or barred from registering at all. Even if they could have made it to the ballot, Putin’s genuine opponents were so diverse and diffuse, so adrift after more than a decade on the political margins, that
they failed to unite behind any one party or leader. Some had resigned themselves to boycott, but activists like Navalny urged them to vote anyway, for anyone but the “party of swindlers and thieves.” The goal now was not to win; it was to expose elections in Russia for the Potemkin artifice they had become.