Strongman, The

does not mean Putin has forfeited his powers of patronage to the new president, however. Kryshtanovskaya says that of 75 ‘key figures’, all but two remain ‘Putin’s men’. 3
    Significantly, the country’s biggest state-controlled company, Gazprom – with its web of political, business and media connections – turned out to be exempt from the new requirement for government ministers to leave their directorships (just as it survived the reformers’ attempts to demonopolise it a decade earlier). It was revealed at the end of August that first deputy prime minister Viktor Zubkov would remain chairman of Gazprom (though he had given up all his other directorships). Zubkov was Putin’s former financial crime-buster, and also a St Petersburg friend and trustee of his judo club. Dvorkovich explained that Gazprom directors had access to a great deal of ‘secret information’, which made the appointment of independent directors ‘complicated’. 4 The news seemed to confirm Gazprom’s untouchable status at the very hub of the Putin system, used to control the media, to exert pressure on foreign states and to fill the pockets of a network of cronies.
    Putin responded to Medvedev’s ‘manifesto speech’ in Magnitogorsk with his own long speech to the Duma on 20 April, in which he warned against ‘jerks or rash experiments based on liberalism’ in the economy. It was beginning to look as if Putin no longer entirely trusted his protégé to stick to the right path.
    For a while in the spring it looked as if Putin – and possibly Medvedev – were casting around for alternative political solutions. An official attempt was made to boost, and apparently co-opt, a small centre-right party called Right Cause, perhaps as an approved liberal ‘opposition’. The first deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov and the finance minister Alexei Kudrin were initially courted as potential leaders of the party, but after a week or so of intrigue both turned the offer down. Then one of the country’s richest men, the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, became leader. But he pledged to turn the party into a real alternative to United Russia, and began fiercely criticising the Kremlin. This was not at all the ‘loyal’ opposition that was intended, and at a farcical party conference in September Prokhorov was ousted. He accused the Kremlin’s ‘puppeteer’, Vladislav Surkov, of ‘privatising the political system’.
    Finally, on 6 May, came an announcement so redolent of the Soviet past that it seemed that all pretence at democracy had at last been dropped. Without any public consultation or prior discussion, Putin announced, during a speech in Volgograd, that he was setting up a new organisation, the All-Russia People’s Front. At its heart would be his United Russia Party, but ‘non-party supporters’ – organisations and individuals – were welcome to join. By the very next day the People’s Front already had a ‘Coordination Council’, which met at Putin’s dacha to plan its election campaign. Over the next weeks, thousands of individuals and organisations were recruited. Whole streets joined, as did factories and offices, youth groups and war veterans, associations of music producers and reindeer herders. Trade unions signed up – often without even consulting their members. Some refused to be corralled in this way. The Union of Architects later voted to overturn the decision taken on its behalf. Individual members of the Composers’ Union protested loudly, insisting they would not help Putin to stage ‘sham elections’. 5
    Ostensibly the People’s Front was formed to help United Russia fight the coming Duma election in December. The party’s poll ratings were collapsing so dramatically that this might be the only way to ensure victory. But Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, revealed its true purpose. The Front would ‘operate above the party, it’s not based on the party,’ he told reporters. ‘It would more likely be based around Putin, who came up with the idea.’
    Putin’s initiative seemed to make a mockery of Russia’s already emasculated party system. Instead of having normal political parties, representing different sectors of the political spectrum, Putin now envisaged United Russia as an amorphous mass organisation, representing all groups. It is worth recalling that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union also did not ‘fight’ elections alone but as part of ‘the indestructible bloc of