Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 276 – 2,623 words
Columns :: Putin succession battle brings uncertainty to Russia too

MOSCOW, January 24, 2008 -- Comments:   Ratings:
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Russia's billion hangover
Perils in store for Putin/Medvedev?
Too many pesetas puts crunch on rent
No birthday for Zhorik
Still no Igor



MOSCOW, January 24, 2008 -- Russia’s 10-day New Year’s hibernation is over. The hangovers are cured, Russians are going back to work, and the pundits and Kremlin watchers are crawling out of their caves with some not very appealing visions of what may be in store for Russia – and hence for me -- over the next 12 months.




Note: Computer problems delayed publication of this chapter by a week. Please accept the Red Queen’s apologies.




One hangover that’s not cured is the $ 28.5 billion estimated loss – 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) -- to the nation’s economy of the annual 10-day New Year’s binge, says Vladimir Bragin, an economist at Russia’s Trust Bank.

These 10 days of “pure holidays,” Bragin told a TV audience, actually mean “20 days of stress and hangovers” that take an even larger toll on the economy.

Half of my private students, for example, still haven’t resumed their classes.

Even so, other Russian economists dismiss the economic consequences as simply a fact of Russian life. With or without holidays, they say, very little gets done in Russia the first ten days of the year, so the “loss” is probably not as great as it’s painted.


A post-holiday assessment of the Putin-Medvedev political marriage (Chapt. 273, A happy ending – just in time for Christmas) foresees some real problems looming for Russia in the aftermath of the March presidential election.

So my assessment that, given the barreling U.S. recession and the impacts of peak oil in the U.S., Russia may not be a bad place to hang out over the next 12 months (Chapt. 264, Craig: Scratch a homophobe and you’ll find…), may be burdened with some caveats of its own.

While the Putin-Medvedev match-up has been hailed as the “dream team” and “dynamic duo” of Russia’s future, some voices are now calling that into question. They assert that Putin may in fact have strapped a suicide bomb around himself by picking Dmitriy Medvedev, his old pal and surrogate son from St. Pete days, as his heir to the throne.

The most immediately obvious hitch, as was noted earlier (Chapt. 273), is that Medvedev was the one contender for tsar-in-waiting who had no ties whatever to the KGB>FSB clique that actually runs the country.

This may in fact be inviting a coup on the part of the KGB, or “Chekists,” or whatever you want to call this ominous and omnipotent band of behind-the-scenes string-pullers (from which, of course, former KGB spy Putin himself sprang) who have run this country since as far back as tsarist times.

They will not go quietly, suggests Anders Aslund, an astute analyst and senior fellow of the Peterson Inst. for International Economics. In fact, he says, they have in retaliation already started to leak some of the darker pages from Putin’s formerly sacrosanct past, including the allegation that he bilked St. Peterburg and Russia of millions of dollars while he was in charge of foreign trade affairs for the city of St. Peterburg in the early ’90s, a nest egg that has now grown into to a fortune of as much as $ 40 billion.

“Suddenly, the censorship of criticism of Putin has eased,” Aslund notes, and these new leaks of Putin’s past corruption and grand larceny, he says, have the unmistakable fingerprints of Putin’s own deputy head of administration, Igor Sechin, considered the grand leader of the rebellious Chekists.

In fact, this is one of the reasons Putin can’t retire from politics, Aslund contends. He must retain enough power and position to preserve his immunity from prosecution. (Although I see no reason why he can’t take a page from Yeltsin’s book and simply make his immunity from prosecution a condition of his anointment of Medvedev. In fact, I suspect he has already done that.)

The other reason he can’t get out of politics, Aslund says, is that he has painstakingly created a one-man government. So if he suddenly evaporated from politics, that system would collapse.

So by remaining as prime minister, he will keep his immunity and be able to continue to prop up the one-legged government structure.

The powerful Kremlin clique of former KGBers “have come to the fore because they were friends of Putin”; and nobody else, including Medvedev, is likely to reappoint them to their present exalted positions. By bypassing them all for Medvedev, Putin “has carried out a coup against his KGB friends, betraying them all,” Aslund contends.

And now not only do all of Putin’s Chekists “undoubtedly loathe Medvedev, who has outwitted them, but most of all they must hate their former friend Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin)…”

“The situation is quite simple,” he says. “Either the Chekists gang up against Medvedev and Putin while (the Chekists) still have power,” as the crumbling Soviet hardliners attempted to do against Gorbachev in 1991, “or they face being discarded into the dustbin of history….”

Furthermore, they stand to lose the fortunes they have amassed in their positions of power, because those fortunes directly “hinge on government positions….”

Thus Putin has set up what Aslund calls “a classical pre-coup situation: Will the armed old regime give up without violence or try to reassert its power? If Medvedev is to become president, Putin had better fire all these Chekists before the planned coronation in May….”

This view is partially echoed by the British newspaper, The Guardian, which says what Putin would really like to do is simply retire from government and enjoy spending his $ 40 billion on the world stage a la Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich; but for now he has to remain as prime minister to protect his protégé Medvedev from his former colleagues, the KGB jackals.

This scenario “could be extremely dangerous,” not only for Medvedev but for Putin himself, says Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite turned New York economist.

Wait a minute. Would they really assassinate Putin, the first tsar of post-communist Russia? Well, there are a few tsars who themselves are mute testimony to their vulnerability to murder despite their revered status.

Not only that, says Bayer, the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenkov may themselves have been veiled warnings to Putin not to turn his back on his old wolf-pack mates.


“To be honest, it would be better for both” Putin and Medvedev if their carefully crafted scheme to keep Putin running the country as prime minister didn’t come off, says Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute for Globalization Studies.

Even if the coup envisioned by Aslund doesn’t come off, Putin and Medvedev will “never amount to a dazzling duo,” he writes in a Moscow Times op-ed piece.

“An overly strong prime minister would only get in the president’s way, and a weak president would only paralyze the work of the prime minister.”

“….If Medvedev’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2007 is to be taken seriously,” Kagalitsky continues, “then Russia can expect a new rendition of perestroika. But it is most amusing that the task of actually carrying out all these measures that are doomed to fail would fall on the shoulders of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.”

Kagarlitsky suggests it would be like Gorbachev ordering Brezhnev to carry out perestroika. “The very idea is inconceivable.”

The choice facing Putin is simple, he concludes: “accept responsibility for carrying out new reforms, thereby turning from a ‘national leader’ to a ‘national scapegoat,’ or use his authority as prime minister to strangle the new president’s initiatives, stifle his fervor, and sabotage his political program.

“Put differently, Putin could provoke internal political conflicts from which he might very well come out the loser. No amount of popularity could ultimately protect him from being fired,” as Prime Minister Yevgeniy Primakov discovered when he was kicked out by Yeltsin back in the late ’90s.


“The lingering sense that the Putin system is not as stable as it seems hangs in the air,” adds Robert Coalson, Russia analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in another Moscow Times op-ed piece.

The battle between the KGB clans simply “adds to the impression of looming danger.”

Putin has created “a highly personalized political system that lacks institutions.”

Coalson cited political scientist Lilia Shevtsova in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy: Putin’s “quest for stability through political crackdown has created a situation in which neither he nor anyone else knows what will happen after March 2008.”

Russia’s “pseudo democracy” holds dangers over the medium term, she says: “Imitation democracies…only serve to discredit liberal democratic institutions and principles, and the citizens living within them at some point may actually prefer a real ‘iron hand.’”

He also cited Boris Bunin of the Center for Political Technologies who blamed Russia’s “imitation democracy” for Russia’s vulnerability to social unrest. Under the Putin system, he said, “there are no institutions, neither political nor legal, nor social, capable of ensuring stability and prosperity.”


So what does the post-Putin presidency hold for Russia – and for me? As Shevtsova succinctly pointed out, nobody knows. But as Bayer and Aslund and Kagarlitsky and Coalson articulate, the most obvious need is the very thing which Putin has been credited with bringing to Russia, but which ironically he has managed to eliminate completely: political and economic stability.

Of course, none of the analysts above have taken into account Putin’s penchant for the unexpected. And one remaining real possibility is that he will use the instability of a Medvedev presidency to resume the presidency himself. Or that Medvedev will remain a spineless, voiceless, and brainless puppet who simply continues to jerk when Putin and the Chekists pull the strings.

The one thing that seems assured is that 2008 may prove to be as shocking and unpredictable in Russia as it threatens to be in Bush country.

Ah well, There’s always Spain.


I spent a lot more money than I thought on my Spanish adventure – so much more that coming up with the rent this week has been the nippest-and-tuckest of all the nip-and-tuck dances I’ve performed during rent week in the past nearly eight years I’ve been living in this apartment.

To make a long story short, I thought I had 500 euros – about $ 700 -- more than I actually had. How could I be off by that much? Well, let’s face it, I teach English, not math!

Monday morning when I was ready to wire Zhorik some money for his birthday on Tuesday (Jan. 15), I decided to be on the safe side and check my bank balance.

Whoops!

If every one of my scheduled classes came off – that is, if there were no cancellations because of illness or final exams or prolonged vacations – and if Sergei paid back the 5,000 rubles ($ 200) I lent him last week, I would make it with a few rubles to spare.

As I write this, I’m still holding my breath.


But I had to SMS Zhorik that the grinches had stolen his birthday Santa Claus. It was really hard to do, because Russians, and especially Zhorik, cherish their birthdays – probably more to the point, their birthday celebrations.

But on his birthday I again expressed via SMS my deepest regret that I couldn’t send him anything, but reassured him that I loved him very much. He seemed to accept it stoically. But I know he is hurting inside.


Igor promised he would arrive Monday afternoon, but instead of Igor I got an SMS saying he hadn’t been able to buy a cheap ticket and would have to wait. Monday night I called him and he promised to be here “by this time next week.”

I’m beginning to feel like the jilted bride.


See also related pages:
Chapt. #277 - Remodels: The apartment and Sasha
Chapt. #275 - Spain offers new future – if I have one
Chapt. #264 - Craig: Scratch a homophobe and you’ll find…