Putin hunted for scapegoats and found Medvedev

When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a radical overhaul of Russia’s governance system this week, he also ended the Medvedev era. Dmitry Medvedev was, at least formally, Mr Putin’s closest sidekick, the politician with whom the strongman was most willing to share formal power. Whether or not it’s time for Mr Medvedev’s political obit, his stint near the top of Russia’s so-called power vertical will serve as an example of how the Putin system’s inertia can suffocate the best modernising intentions.

Mr Medvedev abruptly resigned as prime minister on Wednesday, without giving advance notice to members of his government, who also had to tender their resignations. “We as the government must give our country’s president the opportunity to make all the necessary decisions,” Mr Medvedev said, though it wasn’t clear how his continued occupancy of the top cabinet post could get in the way of Mr Putin’s reform.

Mr Putin expressed rather tepid gratitude for the prime minister’s service. “Not everything has worked out, but then things never work out completely,” he said. Mr Putin has always avoided firing close associates, but as prime minister since 2012, Mr Medvedev presided over Russia’s longest run of declining real incomes during Mr Putin’s 20-year rule. The government’s US$400 billion (about 12.16 trillion baht) “national projects”, designed to rectify things, hasn’t gotten off to a great start.

The new job Mr Putin has offered Mr Medvedev didn’t even exist before — deputy chairman of the Security Council, an advisory body that includes Russia’s mighty security chiefs. It’s formally headed by Mr Putin but run by its secretary, former secret police chief Nikolai Patrushev. The council has been described, including by Kremlin propaganda outlets, as the closest Russia has to the Soviet Union’s ruling Politburo. So the newly created post, with Mr Putin as the direct supervisor, can be enormously influential — but perhaps not when filled by Mr Medvedev, who has never really commanded the respect of the security bosses in the way Mr Putin does, with his KGB record and training.

Mr Medvedev’s move means he isn’t likely to be Mr Putin’s successor as president when the latter’s term ends in 2024. Nor will he return to the prime ministerial post, now handed to a supremely skilful technocrat, former tax chief Mikhail Mishustin. His career has been launched on a downward trajectory — something he probably expected. For years, he has appeared bored and morose at official functions, time and again photographed with his eyes closed and seemingly asleep. Opposition politician and anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny posted one such photo taken as Mr Putin delivered his Wednesday address, tweeting, “Only one thing in Russia is really stable and unshakable — Dmitry Medvedev, asleep during the president’s state of the nation speech”.

During a recent award ceremony, Mr Medvedev’s New Year’s greetings included this quotation from Anton Chekhov: “The newer the year, the closer you are to death, the wider your bald spot, the twistier your wrinkles, the older your wife, the more kids you have and the less money.” Some of the incredulous listeners couldn’t help but recall Mr Medvedev’s most famous quote, his answer to a woman in Russian-annexed Crimea in 2016 who complained that her pension was too low: “There’s just no money now. When we find the money, we’ll raise pensions. You hang on in there, stay cheerful and healthy.”

Mr Medvedev may have been fatigued and depressed lately as his government failed to deliver on Mr Putin’s promises of a tangible improvement in living standards, but money isn’t something he’s lacked himself. During this snowless winter, the vast land plot around his residence in Central Russia is covered with artificial snow. Mr Medvedev has never given a substantive answer to a long video produced by Navalny’s team and watched more than 33 million times on YouTube, in which he was accused of accumulating vast wealth while working for the government.

Mr Medvedev’s approval rating never recovered from that video’s release, languishing below 40% in recent months, while Mr Putin’s remains close to 70%. Government spending cuts that began in 2015 and lasted through 2018 didn’t help, and the government’s decision in June 2018 to raise the retirement age — made by Mr Putin, but often ascribed to Mr Medvedev because of his perceived insensitivity — dealt his popularity an especially crippling blow.

The visibly bored, defeated Medvedev at the end of his prime ministership was a far cry from the hopeful, cheerful moderniser who started a four-year presidency in 2008 and charmed US President Barack Obama and his aides into trying a reset of US-Russia relations. Though many Putin opponents — myself included — never believed Mr Medvedev could pursue an independent policy, socalled system liberals, believers in changing the system from within, vested serious hopes in the younger, more polished leader. They believed he could shake off Mr Putin’s conservative influence if he ran for a second term in 2012, and that Russia would then gradually become freer both economically and politically.

Mr Medvedev tried some promising things. He set up a large innovation centre at Skolkovo near Moscow, trying to lure investors and entrepreneurs into a Russian version of Silicon Valley. He started reforms in the self-serving, thoroughly rotten law-enforcement agencies, and he modernised Russia’s obsolete armed forces, starting an ambitious reorganisation and rearmament. He removed some of the most entrenched, hidebound regional leaders, breaking up the corrupt monopolies that had sprung up around them.

But the system liberals’ hopes were probably dashed in March 2011, when Mr Medvedev ordered the Russian representative in the United Nations Security Council to abstain on a resolution authorising the US and its allies to use force against the regime of Muammar Gadhafi in Libya. Mr Putin publicly criticised his protege for not ordering a “no” vote, likening the Western intervention in Libya to a “medieval crusade.’ In his book, From Cold War to Hot Peace, Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and a believer in Mr Medvedev’s liberal intentions, wrote that “US military intervention in Libya, which helped topple Gadhafi, also inadvertently might have helped remove Medvedev from power in Russia”.

In September 2011, Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev announced they intended to switch jobs the following year, a development that bitterly disappointed the system liberals. Protests against a rigged parliamentary election, which broke out less than three months later, only served to convince Mr Putin that the West was trying to undermine him and empower Mr Medvedev instead. But, perhaps out of a sense of loyalty toward his temporary successor who hadn’t tried to cling to power, Mr Putin made no attempt to replace Mr Medvedev as prime minister.

The latter never really raised his head again. He avoided making major decisions or advocating big reforms; the cabinet ministers learned they needed Mr Putin’s approval for anything remotely controversial. In a way, that helped Russia build a protective economic wall after Mr Putin annexed Crimea and, simultaneously, the oil price crashed in 2014. Amid Western sanctions and a tightening hold of Mr Putin’s cronies and enforcers on the economy, Russia’s generally competent economic managers could only cut spending to insulate the budget from external shocks — and accumulate international reserves every time the price of oil edged up. Mr Medvedev’s tenure ended with these reserves at $554 billion, near the 2008 historic high of $569 billion.

Mr Putin’s patience was sorely tested. Busy with geopolitical chess and with finding ways to retain power after 2024, he clearly wanted his hands free from domestic economic management. He wanted to set goals and let someone else get to them. Time after time, he told Mr Medvedev that he wanted “results”. They failed to materialise.

Meanwhile, Mr Medvedev’s work as the formal leader of the Kremlin’s loyalist party, United Russia, also proved insufficient. The party’s support melted away and its legislative majorities and governorships have had to be obtained with increasing rigging efforts and administrative pressure. In December, only 29% of Russians were willing to cast a vote for United Russia in a national election, a threat to its parliamentary majority even in an unfair system. Mr Putin needs a stronger party behind him post-2024, and an effort to build one on the basis of his broad support network, the United People’s Front — or to reform United Russia — is to be expected.

Mr Putin’s legendary personal loyalty stretched far enough not to send Mr Medvedev, who is only 54, into retirement. But then, it was Mr Putin himself who backpedalled in 2011 instead of letting Mr Medvedev pursue his cautiously reformist course. It was Mr Putin who created a system that paralysed any kind of economic liberalisation and who launched Russia on military adventures that limited its ability to develop trade. Mr Putin, who gave Mr Medvedev the exhilarating hope of building a more modern Russia, then quickly took it away, leaving his former successor with little except the luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by the Russian elite.

It was Mr Putin’s country to give and to take back.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist.