Strongman, The

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’.
    It took another fortnight for a new mayor to be appointed, however – a sign that Putin and Medvedev