Strongman, The

leaders he reportedly appealed to them to support his economic policies, rather than his predecessor’s. And he told leaders of political parties that he wanted to roll back several of Putin’s political reforms: lowering the threshold to enter the Duma from 7 to 5 per cent, ‘decentralising’ power, and promising other, unspecified changes.
    Some commentators suggested that Medvedev and Putin were in fact still working in tandem: one out front pushing for reform, the other calling for caution to stop the process from spinning out of control. 7 But that ignored the one indisputable fact: that an election was approaching and only one of them would be the ruling elite’s candidate. Neither man was indifferent as to who that candidate would be.
    It seemed that Medvedev was approaching an ignominious moment, when he would – in the words of the veteran Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky – ‘tiptoe out of the Kremlin’, confirming to the entire world that he had only ever been a stand-in for Putin. His four years as president would look like a farce, designed to keep the constitution formally intact while actually entrenching Putin’s autocratic rule.
    In August, Putin went scuba-diving in the Black Sea, over an ancient archaeological site, and emerged from the water clutching two Grecian urns that were conveniently lying on the sea bed, having escaped the attentions of thousands of other divers over the centuries. There seemed to be no end to his wizardry. Returning to the presidency would surely be no harder for him.
    The announcement at a United Russia congress on 24 September that Putin would indeed run for president, and that Medvedev could become his prime minister, was therefore no real surprise – yet still, because of its implications, it came as a thudding shock. After all Medvedev’s talk of political and economic stagnation, and the need for reforms, Russia faced the possibility of another 12 years of Putin. The dreams of Medvedev’s ‘Go, Russia!’ article had vanished. The smile stretched across Medvedev’s face could not hide his humiliation. Most cynically, the two men revealed that all the talk for the past year of ‘taking a decision when the time was right’ was a charade: the job-switch had in fact been discussed years ago, when Putin handed over to Medvedev.
    With television and the electoral process controlled by the Kremlin, there was little doubt that Putin would be re-elected as president in March 2012. Russia’s future had been decided by two men, behind closed doors.

 
CONCLUSION
    The picture of Russia that has emerged from these pages is not the one I would have wished to paint, or that I imagined painting 20 years ago, when the country emerged from the destruction and humiliation of communism. 1
    After a hopeful start, when he wooed the West and took steps to stimulate the economy, Vladimir Putin presided over the smothering of media freedoms and democracy, and developed a personality cult that exploited all the modern means of communication. The economy remains almost entirely dependent on exports of raw materials, with no modern manufacturing base to speak of. Corruption is by the government’s own admission overwhelming and growing – the glue that holds together a mafia-like state, dominated by a clique of Putin’s friends and colleagues, from the KGB, St Petersburg and even his dacha cooperative. If Dmitry Medvedev truly wanted to reform all of that, he failed abysmally. Putin’s pledge to crack down on the oligarchs applied only to those who opposed him politically, while the country’s wealth was amassed in the hands of fabulously rich tycoons and state bureaucrats. A land of limitless human and natural resources, freed two decades ago from the grip of totalitarianism, failed to burst into bloom. Some 40 per cent of young people, according to a poll, would rather live somewhere else. 2
    It is not misplaced, therefore, to ask: why is Putin so popular? In fact, his ratings have been steadily falling. According to the Levada Centre, only 39 per cent of respondents in August 2011 said they would definitely vote for Putin, compared to a high point of 58 per cent three years earlier, during the war with Georgia. His ‘approval rating’ dropped over the same period from 83 per cent to 68 per cent. (Approval of Medvedev fell from 73 to 63 per cent, and only 20 per cent said they would ‘definitely’ vote for him.) It is also worth remembering that the atmosphere of