Strongman (41 page)

13

A bicycle built for two

Ever since Medvedev became president, and Putin his prime minister, Russians and foreigners alike have searched for signs of differences between the two halves of what has
become known as the ruling ‘tandem’. Perhaps it is done more in hope than expectation, for the dissimilarities are more of style than substance. So elusive is the search that it has
given rise to the modern equivalent of Kremlinology, analysing pictures and parsing sentences in the hope of discerning what is going on in the dark recesses of the Kremlin (or of Putin’s and
Medvedev’s minds). It might be called ‘tandemology’.

The differences between the two men are often played down because of the lack of real change since Medvedev became president – but, of course, lack of results does not in itself mean that
change was not desired. I would argue that while in foreign policy, as we have seen, there was scarcely any discernible difference between the two men, the evidence suggests that they did have
differing views on the economy and on human rights – even though actual progress in these areas was negligible. The differences, moreover, grew more pronounced in the second half of
Medvedev’s presidency, as a certain rivalry grew between them, and both appeared to be manoeuvring to become the ‘establishment’ candidate for president in the 2012 election. What
is certain is that the two men developed separate constituencies of supporters, something that would not have happened if their views were identical. They could, in fact, have become the nuclei of
separate political parties, offering alternative solutions for Russia’s future. The reason this did not happen is because Putin had a firm grip on the handlebars, and rarely turned round to
hear Medvedev’s protests that they might want to take a different path, or get a better bike. The evidence suggests that Medvedev grew increasingly frustrated on the back seat, and was
determined to stand for a second term as president. But the two agreed early on that they would not run against each other, and Medvedev knew that if Putin decided to return to the Kremlin, he
would do it. This time, the prize was bigger than ever: at the end of 2008 Medvedev had extended the presidential term from four to six years.

Medvedev’s most symbolic early act of defiance was to receive the editor of the opposition newspaper
Novaya gazeta
in January 2009, ten days after one of its journalists was shot by
a contract killer. To feel the significance of this, you would have to hear – as I have done – members of Putin’s team fulminating against the newspaper, which they consider
beyond the pale. This is the paper that used to publish Anna Politkovskaya’s full-blooded attacks on the Putin system. I have heard the prime minister’s men use obscene language about
it, and they told me Putin feels the same way. Owned by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and the proprietor of the London
Evening Standard
and
Independent
newspapers,
Alexander Lebedev,
Novaya gazeta
is a small but strident campaigner against corruption and authoritarian rule. One of its young reporters, Anastasia Baburova, was walking down a Moscow
street with a human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, when they were both shot dead. Markelov, who defended victims of Russian atrocities in Chechnya and anti-fascist activists, worked closely
with the newspaper. He was thought to have been the gunman’s main target, while Baburova was killed as a witness.

After the shooting – in a move that contrasted vividly with Putin’s brush-off of Politkovskaya’s death – President Medvedev called Dmitry Muratov, the newspaper’s
editor. Muratov recalls: ‘He invited Gorbachev and myself to the Kremlin to discuss the situation. I didn’t expect that. At the meeting he expressed his condolences, and even mentioned
Anastasia’s parents’ names without looking at any notes.’ Muratov says he found Medvedev totally sincere, and reminded me: ‘When Anna Politkovskaya was killed, Putin said
that her death did more harm to the country than her life!’ Muratov points out that, in contrast to Politkovskaya’s killers, the murderers of Baburova and Markelov – members of a
neo-Nazi group – were tracked down and sent to jail for life.
¹

When Muratov admitted that the murders of four of his journalists since 2000 had made him wonder whether to close the paper down, Medvedev replied: ‘Thank God the newspaper exists.’
He even agreed to give his first ever Russian press interview as president to
Novaya gazeta
, Putin’s most hated newspaper, and told Muratov: ‘You know why? Because you never
sucked up to anybody.’ In the interview, carried out three months later, Medvedev openly distanced himself from the Putinite idea of a ‘social contract’, whereby the state offered
its citizens stability and a measure of prosperity in exchange for political docility. You could not counterpoise democracy and well-being, he said. He could offer Russia both freedom
and
prosperity.

On the same day as the interview was published, 15 April, Medvedev held an extraordinary session of the Presidential Council on Human Rights. The meeting lasted for many hours, but as it began
Medvedev ordered his staff to start publishing the proceedings in instalments on his website – an unprecedented idea that ensured full publicity for his own words and whatever the human
rights activists wished to say.

He criticised officials who interfered with the right to demonstrate, or who persecuted NGOs, and admitted that ‘our government machine’ was ‘steeped in corruption’. Part
of the discussion concerned the official portrayal of Russian history, at a time when democrats were worried by a growing tendency to underplay the enormity of Stalinism. One speaker, Irina Yasina,
formerly vice-president of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia Foundation, was blunt about the communist legacy: ‘Our country has inherited a terrible legacy. Throughout the entire
twentieth century the value of human life was negated, and human rights were trampled underfoot, to put it mildly. And now we, the children and grandchildren of those who lived through that
century, must try to change this situation somehow.’

Medvedev replied: ‘I have to agree with Ms Yasina that the entire twentieth century was one of denial of the value of human life.’

Six months later, in a video-blog posted on Remembrance Day for the Victims of Political Repression, President Medvedev appeared to lay into the authors of new schoolbooks, which attempted to
whitewash Stalin. He said: ‘Let’s just think about it: millions of people died as a result of terror and false accusations – millions. They were deprived of all rights, even the
right to a decent human burial; for years their names were simply erased from history. But even today you can still hear voices claiming that those innumerable victims were justified for some
higher national purpose. I believe that no national progress, successes or ambitions can develop at the price of human misery and loss. Nothing can take precedence over the value of human life. And
there is no excuse for repression.’

Contrast that with Putin, who as president reinstated the old Soviet national anthem, called for the reintroduction of Soviet-era basic military training in schools and allowed the publication
of a manual for history teachers which described Stalin as an ‘efficient manager’. The book argued that one of the reasons for Stalin’s repressions, in which millions were
incarcerated or murdered, was ‘his goal of ensuring maximum efficiency of the management apparatus, while the Great Terror of the 1930s had achieved ‘the creation of a new management
class suited to the tasks of modernisation under the conditions of scarce resources’.

It was not just ‘liberal talk’ on Medvedev’s part. He also took small but real steps that gave heart to the democrats. In January 2009, for example, he quietly scuttled a draft
law backed by Putin, that would have expanded the definition of treason to include almost any criticism of the government or contact with foreigners, and said he had been influenced by the outcry
in the media and society against the proposed change.

He also took measures to defend the right to demonstrate. Since July opposition activists had begun holding unauthorised rallies on the last day of any month with 31 days, to draw attention to
Article 31 of the constitution, which guarantees the right of assembly. The rallies were invariably broken up within minutes by riot police, and protestors arrested. The Duma then passed a bill to
restrict street protests even further, but in November Medvedev vetoed it. Putin’s view of protests, by contrast, is that it is normal for police to ‘beat demonstrators about the head
with a baton if they’re in the wrong place’.

In June 2010 a Duma bill broadened the functions of the security services to ‘fight extremism’. The law would have allowed the FSB to issue warnings to people it believed were
‘about to’ commit a crime, and threaten, fine or even arrest them for up to 15 days for disobeying its orders. After his Human Rights Council complained that the bill ‘revived the
worst practices of the totalitarian state’, however, President Medvedev watered it down – and insisted: ‘I want you to know that this has been done on my personal
orders.’

Putin and Medvedev never, at this stage, openly contradicted each other. But a battle of ideas was being waged by their proxies. A liberal think-tank, the Institute of Contemporary Development
(INSOR), was set up just after Medvedev was elected president, and he became chairman of its Board of Trustees. The institute’s chairman, Igor Yurgens, says the president agrees with
‘some but not all’ of his views, but over the few years of its existence Medvedev has in fact veered more and more towards INSOR’s ideas. In February 2010 it published a long
report titled ‘Russia in the 21st Century: Vision for the Future’, which suggested undoing many of Putin’s political reforms. It envisaged a Western-style two-party system, a
media free of state interference, independent courts, directly elected regional governors and a scaled-back security service. The report was at once denounced by Putin’s spin doctor,
Vladislav Surkov, who declared: ‘You can’t create democracy in three days, you can’t turn a child into an adult just like that.’

But in November Medvedev himself turned his guns on Putin’s much vaunted ‘stability’. He used words reminiscent of Gorbachev’s, who branded the period of communist
government just before he came to power as years of ‘stagnation’. In a video blog Medvedev appeared to condemn the
de facto
one-party rule of Putin’s United Russia party:
‘It is no secret that for some time now signs of stagnation have begun to appear in our political life and stability has threatened to turn into stagnation. And such stagnation is equally
damaging for both the ruling party and opposition forces. If the opposition has no chance at all of winning a fair fight it degrades and becomes marginal. If the ruling party never loses a single
election, it is just coasting. Ultimately, it too degrades, like any living organism which remains static. For these reasons it has become necessary to raise the degree of political
competition.’

Despite Medvedev’s apparent encouragement to the media to take risks, the Kremlin maintained its total control of the central television channels. At the end of November the popular
presenter Vladimir Pozner had his closing remarks on his weekly show censored when he referred to the death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky. Another respected television journalist, Leonid Parfyonov,
used an award ceremony to launch a stinging attack on how television news was controlled – mostly by the very people sitting at the tables at the ceremony. He said news bulletins had come to
resemble Soviet propaganda, with no room for critical, sceptical or ironic commentary about the prime minister or president. ‘The correspondent is ... not a journalist but a bureaucrat,
following the service and logic of obedience,’ he said.

The irony was that Medvedev himself, as recently as September, had used his control over state television – resorting to black propaganda techniques straight from the Communist Party
handbook – to discredit and then oust the corrupt mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. Here, there was no hint of Medvedev’s democratic inclinations. Since Putin had abolished mayoral
elections, there was no question of getting rid of Luzhkov through the ballot box. It had to be done by presidential decree – but you couldn’t just do that, with no good reason,
certainly not with a mayor as powerful as Luzhkov. His corruptness was just about as blatant as it could possibly be: everyone knew his wife had become Russia’s richest woman principally by
securing the vast majority of Moscow’s most lucrative building contracts for her own company. But he was part of the Kremlin furniture, in office since Yeltsin’s days, and still
popular; he had transformed Moscow into a glittering showcase of post-communist revival; and he had Putin’s support. But Medvedev wanted rid of him, and the last straw was Luzhkov’s
public criticism of the president’s decision to halt construction of a controversial highway being built through an ancient forest north of Moscow. At a meeting with newspaper editors in St
Petersburg, Medvedev adopted Putin-like language when he accused Luzhkov of ‘rattling his balls’, a quaint Russian expression meaning to talk nonsense.

Medvedev cranked up the old propaganda machine, and the journalist ‘bureaucrats’ described by Parfyonov were asked to oblige their masters. All three main television channels aired
documentaries that blackened Luzhkov’s character. They criticised his policy of ‘reconstructing’ Moscow’s architectural heritage by allowing developers to retain only the
facades of eighteenth-century buildings, while demolishing everything within. They blamed him for the city’s traffic jams and described his wife’s fabulous wealth. And they derided
Luzhkov for spending the scorching summer of 2010, when Moscow was engulfed by poisonous smog from peat fires, on holiday abroad or tending to his bee-hives instead of helping Muscovites
survive.

On 17 September Luzhkov was summoned to the Kremlin and asked by Medvedev’s chief of staff to ‘go quietly’. But he didn’t go quietly. He went on holiday to Austria for a
week, and then, on 27 September, wrote a letter to Medvedev, in which he laid into Medvedev’s pretensions to be a democrat, accusing him of unleashing an ‘unprecedented defamation
campaign’, designed to get rid of a mayor who was ‘too independent and too awkward’. Luzhkov demanded that mayoral elections be reinstated. And he suggested that Medvedev’s
only motive for wanting rid of him was to move one of his own allies into the mayor’s seat to boost his own chances in a future presidential election. ‘You have two options,’
Luzhkov wrote: ‘fire me, if you have weighty reasons, or else publicly distance yourself from those who have done you this favour [the black propaganda campaign].’ The next morning,
Medvedev sacked the mayor, citing ‘loss of trust’.