You can say this much for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s manipulation of his public image: it’s not subtle.
The appearance of official photos of the fit and muscular Russian leader strutting around topless in some wilderness locale has become an annual summer event—broken up for variety last year by footage of Putin stalking a Siberian tiger and allegedly saving a television crew from being mauled by shooting the beast with a tranquilizer dart.
In a country where most men don’t live past the age of 60, and where that grim statistic can be explained in large part by rampant alcoholism, Putin’s apparent strength, sobriety, and stability strike a popular chord with Russians. As he celebrates 10 years in the Kremlin this summer—first as prime minister, then as president for eight years, and now as prime minister once again—a poll carried out by the Levada Centre shows that 63 per cent of Russians think it is good for the country that power is concentrated in Putin’s increasingly autocratic hands.
The problem is, regardless of how Russians feel about Putin, it’s not in his hands that power is supposed to be concentrated. Though it’s easy to forget, Putin is no longer Russia’s president and head of state. Officially, he should be subordinate to his one-time protege, Dmitry Medvedev, who succeeded Putin as president last May. Russia’s 1993 constitution forbade Putin from running for a third consecutive term as president, so he endorsed Medvedev, his one-time chief of staff who had never before held elected office. This guaranteed victory for Medvedev, who obligingly appointed Putin as his prime minister.
According to Russia’s constitution, it is the president—Medvedev, not Putin—who shall, among other things, “approve military doctrine” and “determine the guidelines of the internal and foreign policies of the state.” Why, then, during last summer’s brief and bloody war between Russia and its neighbour (and American ally) Georgia, was it Putin who said he twice asked then-U.S. President George W. Bush to intervene? Why does Russian state television still give Putin blanket coverage? Why, for that matter, if Putin’s political career has peaked, does he bother burnishing his public image by posing on horseback with his shirt off?
The answer, in a nutshell, is that the former president is still the most powerful man in Russia, and he intends to stay that way. “It is Putin who is really calling the shots,” says Aurel Braun, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Toronto who has published extensively on Russia and the Soviet Union.
That Putin has managed to remain dominant says a lot about how he controlled the levers of power in Russia while president. Putin spent most of his career in the KGB and its main successor agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB). His loyalty was unwavering. Once, when asked what he thought of a memoir written by a Russian spy who had defected, he replied: “I don’t read books written by traitors.” In 1998, then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin head of the FSB, putting him in charge of Russia’s largest and most powerful spy agency. Putin officially left this position when he became prime minister the following August. But as Putin himself said during his 2000 presidential campaign, in Russia, there is really no such thing as a former spy.
Putin looked after his secret service roots when he became president. Under his guidance, current and former members of the KGB and FSB flooded into leading positions in the country’s political and business elite. Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Center for the Study of Elites in Moscow, researched the official biographies of more than 1,000 leading political figures and found that 26 per cent reported service in the KGB or a successor agency. When she included factors such as unexplained gaps in resumés or work in agencies affiliated with the KGB, the possible number of former spies tripled. Former spies are also dominant among Russia’s business elite. Even those without past employment in Russia’s secret service often owe their success to Putin and his allies. The Russian state is heavily involved in industry, meaning there are few truly independent tycoons. This has resulted in a parallel power structure in Russia that didn’t disappear when Putin stepped down.
“They remain powerful and see Putin as the one who will protect their interests,” says Jeffrey Mankoff, associate director for international security studies at Yale University: “Medvedev does not have that background, and that acts as a constraint on Medvedev.”
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