Spare a thought for poor Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. It was US diplomats who back in November 2008 cruelly dubbed him Robin, to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Batman.
The phrase stuck. Over the past four years, Medvedev has done nothing to dispel the impression that he is anything other than a useful seatwarmer, his time in the Kremlin a legalistic blip in an epoch of endless Putin rule.
It wasn’t always like this. At the start of Medvedev’s presidential term, there were faint hopes he might preside over a partial liberalization of Russian society. The president himself spoke of ending “legal nihilism.” Commentators, meanwhile, scrambled to make sense of Russia’s historically anomalous ruling arrangement — the “tandem,” as it became known.
In the shadow world of Kremlin politics, it was hard to work out what was going on behind the scenes. Some looked in vain for signs of an intra-leadership struggle. Others speculated that Medvedev might eventually escape from Putin’s gravitational pull or even fire his mentor.
US President Barack Obama’s administration tried to reach out to Medvedev in the hope this would nudge Russia’s foreign policy away from its hawkish Putin vector toward a more constructive approach. By last year, however, US diplomats had concluded that Project Medvedev was hopeless. Medvedev’s position became one of humiliation.
Medvedev’s announcement on Saturday that he was stepping down to allow Putin a third presidency thus came as a surprise to no one. Medvedev’s only significant act as president was to extend the presidential term from four years to six, hardly a democratic step forward. This was seen, rightly, as teeing up the conditions for a triumphant comeback during elections in the spring next year: Putin’s.
The prospects for Russia are gloomy. The country now faces a long period of political and economic stagnation and single-party rule. Disenfranchised Russians are voting with their feet and moving abroad. In theory, Putin could go on until 2024, when he will be 72. Or longer.
Last week, however, blogger and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny predicted that Russia’s kleptocratic system would collapse well before that.
“People now realize it doesn’t work. It worked between 2000-2005. There was stability up until 2008,” he said. “But now it’s useless, even for the corrupt people who benefit from it.”
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