Strongman, The

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