Strongman, The

could not agree on a candidate. The choice finally fell on Putin’s right-hand man, Sergei Sobyanin. He was Putin’s chief of staff and owed his entire career to him (and, incidentally, knew little about the capital he was about to run, having lived there for only five years – during which he had observed the notorious traffic jams only through the darkened windows of his government limousine as it sped down the special lane reserved for the elite). If Luzhkov was right to suspect that Medvedev had wanted to install one of his own supporters, then this was an important battle he had lost to Putin. He was about to lose more.
    Since the start of his presidency, Medvedev’s attempt to project a liberal image had been undermined by the continuing imprisonment of the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky. His jail sentence was due to end in 2011, but his enemies (Khodorkovsky specifically names deputy prime minister Igor Sechin) were determined to keep him behind bars for longer. They certainly did not want him released just before parliamentary and presidential elections. And so a second trial was launched in February 2009. The fresh case against him was implausible. The first trial had already found him guilty of fraud and tax evasion. This time the prosecutors wanted to prove that he and his co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, had embezzled the total amount of oil that Yukos produced from 1998 to 2003 – oil that prosecutors had previously argued Yukos had sold, while failing to pay the correct taxes. How could Khodorkovsky have ‘stolen’ the oil if it was previously accepted that he had ‘sold’ it?
    His defence appeared to gain a boost when the industry minister, Viktor Khristenko, and the former economics minister, German Gref, both appeared in court as witnesses, and cast doubt on the charges. If embezzlement had been discovered, I would have been made aware of it,’ said Gref. Khristenko admitted he was unaware of millions of barrels of oil having disappeared.
    Any hopes Khodorkovsky’s lawyers had were short-lived, however. The judge was due to deliver his verdict on 15 December, but reporters turning up at the courthouse that morning found a note pinned to the door announcing, without explanation, that it was postponed until the 27th. Perhaps there was an explanation: the next day, the 16th, the prime minister was due to take part in his annual television phone-in, and he would have surely faced questions about the trial. That might have been awkward – and certainly too late for Putin to influence the verdict. By having the verdict delayed, he was able to use the phone-in to interfere quite brazenly in the course of justice. Asked about the case, Putin said, ‘a thief should sit in jail’. It sounded like a direct order to Judge Danilkin, who was at that moment considering his options. Even President Medvedev took exception to such blatant interference. He said in a television interview: ‘No official has the right to express their position on a case before the court announces its verdict.’ It was the first time Medvedev had gone further than merely expressing views that differed a little from Putin’s; this was, in effect, a public reprimand.
    It made no difference to the outcome of the show trial, however. Judge Danilkin found Khodorkovsky guilty, as the siloviki desired, and sentenced him to 14 years behind bars, to run concurrently with his first sentence and backdated to his arrest in 2003. He would not be free until 2017.
    If 2009 and 2010 saw President Medvedev speaking a lot about democracy and human rights, and occasionally taking action to support them, his prime minister’s response became more and more bizarre. It was during this period that Vladimir Putin began to find more and more time in his busy schedule for publicity stunts – extravagant displays of virility that appeared designed to demonstrate that, despite being 13 years older than Medvedev, he was fitter and stronger.
    In August 2009 Putin bared his chest and swam butterfly stroke in an icy Siberian river. Kremlin cameras clicked furiously as he went fishing and horse-riding. In 2010 scarcely a month went by without a photo-shoot. He put a tracking collar on a polar bear. He rode a Harley Davidson at a bikers’ rally. He sprayed wildfires with water from an aeroplane. He fired a dart from a crossbow at a whale in a stormy sea. He drove a Formula One car at 240 kilometres an hour. In October the press was full of speculation