“Meet the new boss,” as The Who sang in Won’t Get Fooled Again, “Same as the old boss.” Because as Russians have just discovered, the new Vladimir Putin, former President of Russia and at present serving four years as the country’s token Prime Minister, turns out to be . . . the old Vladimir Putin.
Mr Putin, looking tautly rejuvenated at the weekend with eerily unbaggy eyes, has announced that he will be swapping jobs in elections next March with President Medvedev, the puppet who has been keeping his seat warm for the past four years. It would, Mr Putin told the congress of his United Russia party with as much humility as a bare-chested horseman and tiger tracker can muster, “a great honour” to take his old job back.
When Mr Putin is elected President once again (only the most innocent would think of saying “if”: even though the Kremlin will rustle up candidates to run against him for the sake of democratic decency, it will effectively be a one-horse race in the finest traditions of the sort of Soviet politics that perestroika and glasnost was supposed to have swept away), he could keep a grip on the post until 2024, when he will be 70. Nothing could more clearly signal the failure of democracy and the triumph of Kremlinology in postSoviet Russia. Putinism is the new Stalinism.
By explaining that the two men had sealed the deal many years ago — as if that might allay concerns as to its propriety — Mr Putin only underlined his cynicism, his contempt for democracy and an appetite for shamelessness that makes Silvio Berlusconi look coy. His matter-of-fact disclosure that this decision had been made “several years back” also confirmed to anyone who might still doubt it that the past four years in Moscow have been little more than a carefully orchestrated pantomime designed to hoodwink the world and to make a mockery of the so-called reset in relations between Washington and Moscow.
With Mr Putin’s popularity still dizzily high, with Russia’s national media cowed into obedience, with the country’s energy-reliant economy stabilised, with its international prestige slowly restored, and given the disenchantment with Boris Yeltsin’s brand of Western-style democracy in the 1990s which was marked by corruption, lawlessness and economic collapse, few Russians seem to mind Mr Putin’s monopolisation of power. His supporters see him as a saviour, a hero who has rescued his country from chaos.
It has been left to a handful of prominent critics to remind the world that Russia’s new selfconfidence on the world stage has been won at the expense of free speech, democracy and human rights; men such as the former President Mikhail Gorbachev, and the jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky whose oil company, Yukos, was broken up and sold off after he challenged Mr Putin’s authority. Mr Gorbachev has warned, despairingly, that Russia is returning to the era of Brezhnev, an era of economic and political stagnation.
Mr Putin is evidently alert to the threat of economic stagnation. One reason he decided to show his hand early was to end uncertainty over who would be Russia’s President come next March. Such uncertainty has been deterring investors from putting money into Russia. But what also worries them are the conditions for foreigners doing business in Russsia. Mr Putin may find that, unlike Russian voters, foreign investors may need greater assurances that they won’t get fooled again.
