Sixteen years later, this gray mouse is set to take over from Vladimir Putin as his anointed successor to the presidency of Russia. [Read Anna Nemtsova’s story on Medvedev’s meeting with business leaders.] Medvedev will have no serious opponent in the March 2 vote—a striking testament to the efficiency of the “managed democracy” that Putin created by closing independent media and cracking down on opposition parties. And, on the surface at least, it seems that the dynamic of the two men’s political partnership hasn’t changed much since those days in St. Petersburg. Two days after Putin backed Medvedev for president, Medvedev returned the favor by promising to appoint Putin as his prime minister—and to keep “the efficient [Kremlin] team that the incumbent president has assembled.” Decoded, that seemed to be an assurance that Medvedev would be a loyal Putin 2.0, conducting business as usual. “Medvedev is absolutely dependent on Putin,” says Kremlin-connected analyst Stanislav Belkovsky. “It’s extremely important for Putin to have subordinates who cannot challenge or threaten him.”
Without doubt, Medvedev’s chief qualification for the post of president of Russia is his longstanding loyalty to his mentor. Even after nearly two decades of friendship, Medvedev still addresses his boss by the formal “vy”—the equivalent of calling him “Mr. Putin” in English. And he’s been careful never to utter a word of criticism. “The secret behind Medvedev’s fantastic career has been his sense of subordination, his understanding of how to obey the rules, of how to surround Putin with respect and attention,” says veteran human-rights activist Ruslan Linkov, who often dealt with the two men in the 1990s.
But a closer look highlights some very real generational and personality differences that suggest Medvedev could one day veer off from his mentor’s path. First, there are the superficial contrasts. Putin loves martial arts and seems to relish a good fight. He watches war movies and listens to patriotic Russian rock. On vacation last summer he posed for photographers shirtless with a hunting rifle. Medvedev, by contrast, is a slightly built, soft-spoken corporate lawyer who has written a slew of respected legal textbooks. His favorite sport is swimming, and possibly the toughest thing about him is his taste for Western heavy metal bands from the 1970s, like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.
There are also far deeper differences between the two men, in both tone and political emphasis. Putin, age 55, was brought up as one of the last believers in communism. As a young man he saw the Soviet Empire at the peak of its Brezhnev-era glory, power and prosperity. As president, he was openly nostalgic for those days, calling the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” Like many of his generation, his instinct is to measure national greatness in terms of hard power and militaristic might. Medvedev, by contrast, was born in 1965 and brought up in the world of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia. His years as a corporate lawyer and later as a businessman gave him a different perspective on Russia and its role in the world. While Putin loves to pose in naval uniform and throws vitriol at enemies, both real and perceived, Medvedev, with his tailored suits, likes to check economic statistics on his favorite new toy, an iPhone, and is more interested in preventing another of Russia’s economic collapses than adopting bellicose rhetoric. In Medvedev’s view, national greatness comes not from bullying neighbors but from creating “sustainable growth and normal lives for our citizens.”
There are already signs that Russia is looking for just such a change in style. With an approval rating of 79 percent, Medvedev is more popular than Putin, suggesting that even those who never cared for their authoritarian president are starting to see something to like in a potentially more liberal successor. There is also speculation that Medvedev will emerge into a powerful president in his own right, who will shape the office—and Russia—in a way that is in keeping with his own more liberal background. “We all said that Putin would be the puppet of the Yeltsin clan who put him in power. But he very quickly set his own course,” says a former Kremlin aide. “There has always been a magic to the office of tsar in Russia … Medvedev will surprise us all.”
Both Putin and Medvedev were raised in St. Petersburg, but the similarities in their upbringing end there. Putin grew up in a working-class suburb in a prefabricated apartment block without hot water. In his 2000 autobiography, “First Person,” Putin recalls leading gangs of kids to chase and kill rats in the stairwells, and dreaming of being a KGB agent after watching Soviet spy films. Medvedev was born into a very different world. His mother, Yulia, taught Russian and literature at the Herzen State Pedagogical University. His father, Anatoly, was a physics professor at the Leningrad State Polytechnical Institute. The young Medvedev dreamed of becoming a lawyer, a highly lucrative position even then. He came of age just as communism was beginning to unravel, and his early adult life was spent in the intellectual excitement of glasnost in Leningrad, the Soviet Union’s most liberal city. It was a time when students would pack auditoriums to listen to lectures on Stalinism by historians finally free to challenge Soviet orthodoxy, and queue to buy the latest recordings of poetry written by once-banned authors. Gorbachev’s glasnost was a revolution of the young—and the young, intelligent Medvedev was very much a part of it. While still in school, he took jobs as a construction worker and a street cleaner, saving his money to buy blue jeans and foreign records. He saved for months to buy Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.”
By 1989 Medvedev had become enchanted with Western ideas about free markets and democracy. That year, Anatoly Sobchak, his old law professor at Leningrad State University, decided to stand for the Soviet Parliament, which was quickly becoming a testing ground for Gorbachev’s experiment in democracy. Sobchak picked Medvedev as one of a small team of protégés to run his campaign. It was a risky move for the young Medvedev, because Sobchak’s heretical ideas about introducing free markets and ending the Communist Party’s monopoly on power pushed perestroika to its limits, and well beyond. But when one set of campaign leaflets was designated too politically racy by the KGB and confiscated by the Leningrad City Council, Medvedev was among a group of activists who stayed up to print another set on an old mimeograph machine. “Dima [Medvedev] told me afterwards that he felt like Lenin after printing [the Communist underground newspaper] Iskra all night,” recalls Sobchak’s widow, Lyudmila Narusova. “Despite all the risks for their future career, these young people helped their professor with his campaign.” Medvedev’s gamble paid off. Sobchak was elected to the Supreme Soviet by a landslide, and soon became mayor of St. Petersburg.
While Medvedev’s career took off, the man who would one day become his chief benefactor, Putin, toiled in relative obscurity as a mid-level KGB man in Dresden, East Germany, watching the inexorable collapse of communism. In 1990 he was laid off by the KGB, and given a sinecure as vice rector of Leningrad University. Soon after he was hired by Sobchak to “bridge the gap between the former dissidents who were now in office and their old persecutors [in the KGB],” according to a former senior Kremlin aide. Putin became particularly adept at selling off the city’s property to all comers. Medvedev was his loyal executor, handling the nitty-gritty of the contract work behind the deals. But the line between bureaucrats and businessmen quickly blurred as former Party functionaries sold off chunks of state property. In the judicial vacuum of post-Soviet Leningrad, it was hard to say if these deals were legal. Sobchak was an academic lawyer who also happened to run the city, so “legal was more or less what Sobchak and his advisers said it was,” says one St. Petersburg businessman who had dealings with the city council at the time.
Indeed the transition to democracy and the free market was proving to be rougher than any of the idealistic glasnost-era reformers had expected. Medvedev found that the Russian versions of both democracy and the free market were deeply imperfect. By 1994, in addition to advising Putin on legal affairs, he began working as a lawyer for Ilim Pulp, a Russian-Swedish paper processing company of which he was a part owner. He defended the company against a hostile takeover by recruiting former KGB and military intelligence officers to the cause, and roping in old classmates who were in government. It was a perfect lesson in capitalism, Russian style: property rights can only be defended by having friends in the government. During the same period, Medvedev taught civil law at Leningrad State University, and in academic papers argued for what law professor Yury Tolstoy describes as “a golden mean” between privatization and nationalization. “On one hand the owner does not forget to pay his dues to the State,” recalls Tolstoy of Medvedev’s ideas. “On the other hand the State has to provide the owner with security.”
For his part, Putin’s work in St. Petersburg led him to a position at the Kremlin’s property-management department helping manage the Kremlin’s property portfolio and private business interests—originally the wealth of the old Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Putin become one of the few members of the tight-knit Yeltsin “family,” party to the details of the Kremlin’s murky, multimillion-dollar business empire. Under the patronage of key Yeltsin courtiers, Putin rose to become the director of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, and then, in 1999, to prime minister and heir apparent to the ailing Boris Yeltsin. Like Medvedev in his turn, Putin’s chief qualification for the job was absolute loyalty to the outgoing president. Putin’s people—many of them Leningrad Law grads—quickly became known as the St. Petersburg clan and were installed in the security services, Kremlin and government. Medvedev, as one of Putin’s oldest and most trusted allies, landed the key post of deputy head of the presidential administration and head of Gazprom, the giant state gas company.
Over the next several years, Medvedev whipped the gas company into shape, and Putin turned it into one of the most potent arms of an aggressive new foreign policy. Medvedev eased out the old management and tightened the company’s opaque and very leaky finances, regaining state control over various pieces of the company that the old regime had quietly sold off. Gazprom profits went from $670 million in 1998 to $25 billion in 2007, and the money flowed into the Kremlin’s coffers. A resurgent power, both domestically and abroad, the company soon became a handy tool for pushing one of Putin’s top priorities—to bring Russia’s media under Kremlin control. Gazprom Media, a subsidiary of the company not directly controlled by Medvedev, gobbled up NTV television, one of Russia’s most critical outlets. In 2006, Putin used Gazprom to punish former Soviet states like Ukraine and Georgia for defying Moscow’s will. Gazprom jacked up its prices and when Ukraine couldn’t pay, a brief gas cut-off reminded Kiev who was boss.
The question now is whether any of the idealistic liberal has survived in Medvedev. Medvedev certainly approves of the new, bold role that Putin has carved out for Russia through a mixture of diplomacy, bullying and military swagger. “Russia has reclaimed her proper place in the world community,” Medvedev said approvingly last month. “Russia has become a different country, stronger and more prosperous. People don’t try to educate us like schoolchildren; they respect us.” But there are signs Medvedev has refused to buy into some of the more noxious elements of the nationalist Russian narrative, which Putin’s ideologues created to justify the crackdown on democracy. Medvedev recently told an audience of businesspeople in the southern city of Krasnodar that the interests of Gazprom in Europe should be promoted “calmly, without hysterics”—a marked contrast to Putin’s tub-thumping brinkmanship. Rather than banging nationalist drums, Medvedev’s main pre-election message has been more about improving the Russian economy than using Russia’s resurgence to bully others. For instance, he has stressed the need to build small and medium-size businesses, and to slim down state involvement in private business. “Big business has big hopes that Medvedev will be more liberal, pro-Western, put the end to corruption and give business more freedom,” says Alexander Shokhin, head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.
Last month a correspondent at NEWSWEEK’S Russian edition viewed a hand-edited copy of a keynote speech Medvedev delivered to civic and cultural leaders. Tellingly, Medvedev had struck two passages out of text prepared by Kremlin speechwriters: the first was the suggestion that Putin’s new role as leader of the United Russia Party was a sign the “party system is growing stronger”; the second was a claim that the West is making efforts to arrange a democratic revolt in Russia akin to Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. In their place, Medvedev wrote in words that resonated with those who hope Russia can change from a kleptocracy to something more closely resembling a European democracy: “Russia is a country of legal nihilism,” he said. “No European country can boast such a universal disregard for the rule of law.”
Such a frank admission of Russia’s deepest systemic problem was a far cry from Putin’s smugness and casual disregard for others who level the same criticism. Yet if Medvedev is serious about making Russia a law-abiding country, he will have to defy Putin: one of the roots of Russia’s corruption is the formidable network of business ties that Putin’s cronies have built up over their years in power. Dismantling them will inevitably put him on a collision course with his old boss. “Medvedev will have to fight [deputy Kremlin chief of staff Igor] Sechin’s clan of former KGB men,” warns Kirill Kabanov, head of Russia’s National Anti-Corruption Committee. Moreover, says Kabanov, he’ll have to tackle the “outrageously corrupt machine” of the Federal Security Service or “the entire state political structure will collapse under the weight of graft.”
In the long term, there is the possibility that the one-time Leningrad liberal is willing to butt heads with his benefactor, even if he is the prime minister. “There are no two, three or five centers [of power],” he recently said. “The president is the ruler, and he can be only one, according to the Constitution.” But more immediately, Medvedev will need to rely on exactly those security services and incumbent corrupt bureaucrats to keep himself in power. With Putin staying on, Medvedev will have limited scope to push his predecessor’s pals out of their jobs. It seems for now, anyway, Putin is not going to let his young protégé forget exactly who elevated him from mouse to tsar.
