Who (Really) Rules the Kremlin?

Putin, according to Forbes, which has named the Russian Prime Minister the third most powerful man on Earth, towering not only above Oprah (45) and Google CEOs Brin and Page (5) but also, conspicuously, above his own president (Medvedev, 43).

Forbes goes on to declare Putin the ‘anti-Obama’, who ‘might as well be known as Czar, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russians’ and is ‘vastly more powerful than his handpicked head-of-state, President Dmitry Medvedev’.

While the magazine does note that ‘Medvedev [is] beginning to show chutzpah; recently went Jerry Maguire, writing liberal manifesto’, it put the Putin loyalist and deputy prime minister Igor Sechin one place ahead of the president.

According to the Moscow News, ‘the inclusion of Deputy PM Igor Sechin – seen as a hard-line Putin ally – one place ahead of the more liberal Medvedev on the global list gave a clear nod in the direction of the siloviki faction’ as against the liberal modernisers often associated with Medvedev.

But where is Igor Jurgens? Jurgens (sometimes spelt Yurgens), is a top economic liberal policymaker and also one of Medvedev’s closest economic advisors.

His think tank, the Institute for Contemporary Development, is regularly coming up with outspoken and sometimes downright heretic ideas, such as calling ‘for a “parallel power vertical” (led by Medvedev) alongside the “regular bureaucracy” (led by Putin) to modernize Russia, because — according to the think tank’s head, Igor Yurgens — modernization is “impossible under the supremacy of the Putin elite”’.

In fact, Yurgens is regularly allowed to travel around the world and berate the government, from an official position: According to Whitmore and Coalson, ‘Yurgens made waves back in February by suggesting that Russia’s implicit social contract, in which citizens sacrificed political freedoms in exchange for rising living standards, had been abrogated by the financial crisis. Political liberalization, Yurgens said at the time, was necessary if Russia was to emerge from the deepening recession’.

So are we seeing, as Forbes suggests, the hoary rift between the ‘Medvedev liberals’ and the ‘Putin siloviks’? No.

It’s much more complicated and clannish than that. One common fault with Western analyses of the Kremin situation has been precisely a focus on ideas rather than clans. But the ideas are muddled together with so many other interests and questions of money and power that ideology ought to be the last thing observers should focus on.

One model that can be borne in mind is the succession crisis between Brown and Blair in 2007. While many commentators remained fixated on the supposed ‘leftism’ of the Brownites and the ‘neoconservatism-Atlanticism’ of the Blairites, in reality, there was no fundamental different of politics between them; simply of style and political advantage.

Similarly in Russia today, where formerly arch-Putinite Surkov, the author of the ‘Sovereign Democracy’:

Is trying to make common cause with — or attempting to co-opt — key technocrats and economists close to Medvedev in order to enhance his own political position and weaken his opponents in the Kremlin’, according to Whitmore and Coalson. ‘Surkov has long been engaged in a low-intensity clan war with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the head of the siloviki clan of security-service veterans surrounding Putin…and is supporting economic reforms proposed by Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, Sperbank head German Gref, and Economy Minister Elvira Nabiullina as a means of weakening Sechin’s control over key sectors of the economy.

So there you have it: today, in the service of political manoeuvre, a ‘sovereign democrat’ makes a tactical alliance with the ‘liberal democrats’ against the ‘siloviki’. Who knows what reshuffles tomorrow may bring?

One thing appears certain: any talk of a schism, of two camps in the Kremlin, is overblown (or premature).