Strongman, The

from Putin for a while. The task for the next four years would be to keep Medvedev on a tight leash, and at least leave the door open for Putin’s own return to the presidency.
    We in the Kremlin’s hapless PR team saw another opportunity to impress the West evaporate. An election between two establishment candidates with different views on how to run the economy would have been the same as in most Western democracies. But the Russian people were not to be asked for their opinion. Putin’s choice was the only one that mattered, and as the head of the Central Election Commission, Vladimir Churov – a friend of Putin’s appointed less than a year earlier – stated, ‘Churov’s First Law is that Putin is always right.’
    State television gave Putin’s choice blanket coverage, and Medvedev was duly elected on 2 March 2008 with 70 per cent of the vote. The Communist Party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, won almost 18 per cent, and the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky 9.5 per cent. The former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the candidate for the ‘democratic’ opposition, was registered as a candidate but later disqualified on the grounds that too many of the signatures gathered in his support had allegedly been forged.
    When the result was announced Putin and Medvedev walked out together on to Red Square in leather jackets and jeans, Medvedev trying to ape Putin’s macho gait. Interrupting a rock concert in front of St Basil’s Cathedral, Medvedev made a short speech affirming that the course of the last eight years would be continued. When Putin took the microphone to praise his protégé, the crowd of supporters drowned him out, chanting, ‘Putin, Putin, Putin …’ Nobody chanted ‘Medvedev!’
    Even after the election, and for a month or so after Medvedev’s inauguration in May, the turmoil continued, as bureaucrats scrambled for what they thought would be the best seats. What I observed in the Kremlin press department was probably mirrored throughout the administration: officials were trying to work out where the real power would lie, in President Medvedev’s Kremlin or in Prime Minister Putin’s government, ten minutes away in the ‘White House’ on the Moskva river. In retrospect, the clever ones were those who moved to the White House, hoping to have a supervisory role over their counterparts in the Kremlin. Dmitry Peskov took us on a valedictory tour of the Kremlin in April, as Putin appointed him as his spokesman.
    ‘How will it feel to move away from here?’
    Peskov twisted his moustache: ‘Who knows? Who knows …?’
    Peskov’s move was part of a clever matrix of appointments designed to maintain Putin’s control over the new president. Peskov took with him to the White House his long-time deputy Alex Smirnov, who became head of the prime minister’s press service, an entity that had scarcely functioned under its predecessors. It was Peskov (rather than the president’s press secretary) who appointed a new, young team to the president’s press service, making it clear that they answered to him. Putin’s old spokesman and ally, Alexei Gromov, remained in the Kremlin, promoted to become President Medvedev’s deputy chief of staff, in a blatant attempt to maintain ‘ideological control’ over the president’s media operation. But there was a fly in the ointment. Medvedev retained Natalia Timakova, who had been his press adviser during the election campaign, as his spokeswoman. She was a rival rather than a protégé of Peskov’s, and soon began to co-opt the team Peskov had put in place in the presidential press service. She was fiercely devoted to the president, not the prime minister. Within a year, a clear split was developing: not surprisingly, Medvedev’s team soon felt they owed their allegiance to the president, not to the people who had appointed them. Over the next years I gained a strong impression that the two press offices grew rather far apart, to the extent that each no longer knew what the other was planning.
    I understand from well-connected sources that this situation was echoed in other departments too, so that by 2010–11 two competing bureaucracies existed, each knowing that their futures depended on their respective bosses, and each therefore dedicated to their own boss’s survival. This was not what Putin had intended.
    Putin took with him from the Kremlin to the White House his presidential chief of staff, Sergei Sobyanin, and also the influential