Vladimir Putin and the succession questions

Vladimir Radyuhin
The Hindu, 20 September

In retaining the freedom to manoeuvre the handover of power to his chosen successor, the Russian President has made sure that he will continue to be in control after retirement.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bombshell decision to appoint a political unknown as Prime Minister six months ahead of the presidential elections has thrown the main power groups in the country into disarray and strengthened his own positions in the succession struggle.

When Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov tendered his resignation to Mr. Putin on September 12, few eyebrows were raised. Mr. Putin, who under the Constitution cannot run for a third term in March 2008, was widely expected to replace Mr. Fradkov with a man he would then promote as his successor in next year’s presidential election. This would have been a re-enactment of Mr. Putin’s own ascent to the presidency when Boris Yeltsin made him Prime Minister months before the presidential election to give him a head-start in the race.

Of the two frontrunners — senior Deputy Prime Ministers Sergei Ivanov and Dmitry Medvedev — most analysts favoured Mr. Ivanov as the one who would step into the Prime Minister’s shoes. Mr. Putin’s choice took everybody by surprise. He picked Viktor Zubkov, who headed a federal financial crimes agency in the rank of Deputy Finance Minister. It baffled analysts. Political pundits have failed to predict any of the key appointments Mr. Putin has made during his seven-year-odd presidency.
Mr. Putin’s move has reconfigured the power equations for the post-2008 period.

By appointing Mr. Zubkov as Prime Minister, the President has weakened the power groups in the Kremlin on which he has relied so far — the liberal economists and the so-called “siloviki” (top security officers and senior Kremlin officials with a security service background). The fighting between them over the succession issue has recently become so intense that it threatened to undermine the political stability Mr. Putin had painstakingly built over the years. The “siloviki” group led by the Kremlin’s “grey cardinals” Igor Sechin and Viktor Ivanov, both with a KGB background, has been especially aggressive in strengthening their hand ahead of the presidential succession. To restore the power balance between rival clans, Mr. Putin last year removed Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov, a leading member of the “siloviki.”. However, the infighting continued.

Meeting foreign academics and journalists hours after Mr. Zubkov’s appointment was endorsed by Parliament, Mr. Putin said he wanted a team in the Kremlin that would “work like a Swiss watch,” and “a smooth, well-functioning mechanism” instead of jockeying for positions under his would-be successor.

New power centre

Mr. Putin has now pulled the rug from under the rival clans. Mr. Zubkov’s appointment signals the emergence of a new centre of power in the Kremlin. He is not linked to any of the Kremlin groups, but is a confidant of Mr. Putin. The two have been very close since the time they served together in the office of the Mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s. Later, Mr. Zubkov worked for the tax service in St. Petersburg. In 2001, Mr. Putin brought him to Moscow to head the newly-created anti-money-laundering body.

Presenting his programme in Parliament, Mr. Zubkov said the fight against corruption would be a priority for his Cabinet and proposed the setting up of a special body to fight the menace. “If something can ruin Russia it is a lack of professionalism and corruption,” he told deputies. “Corruption runs through our society and we need to take measures.”

A catastrophic rise in the levels of corruption in recent years has marked a serious failure in Mr. Putin’s otherwise highly successful eight-year presidency. The 2007 World Bank report on governance matters ranked Russia among the most corrupt countries, doing slightly better than Zambia but worse than Ecuador.

Corruption has a stranglehold on economic growth and Mr. Putin wants to address the problem before he hands over power. Last November, he called for an offensive against corruption, promising that the state would start scrutinising the income and property details of civil servants and their families.

Mr. Zubkov is well equipped to spearhead the anti-graft campaign. A year after he was tasked with setting up the Financial Monitoring Service, Russia was struck off the FATF money-laundering blacklist, and a year later was accepted as a full member in the 34-member financial watchdog. (India is an observer in FATF.) He is one of the few people in Russia who are privileged to know everything about everybody.

A Cabinet shake-up Mr. Zubkov has promised to undertake is bound to strengthen the new power group Mr. Putin is setting up to balance the Kremlin clans. The Russian leader indicated that he expected the new Cabinet to stay intact after his successor took over. Accepting Mr. Fradkov’s resignation, Mr. Putin said the time had come to “reconfigure the government structure to better prepare the country for the period after the parliamentary election [scheduled for December] and the presidential election in March 2008.”

Mr. Putin is clearly planning to enhance the role of the Cabinet in the power arrangement. The Constitution, adopted in 2003 in the wake of a violent confrontation between the Yeltsin government and the opposition-dominated Parliament, gave almost unlimited powers to the President at the expense of the government and Parliament. Under Mr. Putin, too, all power has been in the hands of the President and his Kremlin administration. The government has become largely a technical body implementing decisions taken in the Kremlin. However, while Mr. Yeltsin used the near-total concentration of power in his hands to crush opposition, Mr. Putin needed it to pull the country back from the brink of collapse where the Yeltsin rule had led it. Now that Mr. Putin has restored Russia’s integrity, rebuilt its economy, and reasserted its global stature, he is moving to decentralise power. With Parliament necessarily destined to play a largely rubberstamp role for some time till the party system takes root, Mr. Putin wants to strengthen the government, delegating to it some of the President’s powers. He is also likely to lend more authority to other centres of power, such as the Security Council.

Thus the President hopes to create a more balanced structure of power, guarantee the continuity of his policy course, and retain a strong influence on the Kremlin after he steps down. “I hope to be fit enough to play a role in Russia’s public life [after retirement] and I have the desire to do so,” the President told the foreign academics. “Any future President will have to reckon with that.”

Asked about his possible successor, Mr. Putin said the field was wide open with as many as five credible candidates already. He, however, would not give any names.

Mr. Zubkov as Prime Minister has certainly added a new name to the list of potential successors. At 66, he will make an ideal placeholder if Mr. Putin decides to seek another term in the Kremlin in the 2012 presidential election — or earlier, in case his successor retires for health reasons. In revealing remarks to the foreign academics, Mr. Putin left open the question whether he would run for President again. Asked whether he wanted to return, he replied: “I don’t know. Inside I have not decided. It is difficult to predict.”

As for his preferred choice of successor, Mr. Putin is understandably reluctant to reveal the name early and become a “lame duck” as members of his team switch their loyalty to the would-be President.

Apart from Mr. Zubkov and the two First Deputy Prime Ministers, Mr. Ivanov and Mr. Medvedev, Kremlin-watchers have named several more close allies Mr. Putin may promote as his successor. They include railways chief Vladimir Yakunin and the head of the Rosoboronexport arms export monopoly, Sergei Chemizov. However, Mr. Putin’s move to create a new power configuration in the Kremlin is an indication that his chosen successor may be someone who does not belong to any of the rival Kremlin groups. One such option could be Anatoly Serdyukov, who was appointed by Mr. Putin as Defence Minister in Febuary, but stepped down after Mr. Zubkov, his father-in-law, became the Prime Minister.

Opinion polls indicate that given Mr. Putin’s 80 per cent popularity, a majority of Russians are ready to vote for a presidential candidate Mr. Putin will support.

The government reshuffle undertaken by Mr. Putin shows that he has the situation firmly under control, has full freedom to manoeuvre in transferring power to a chosen successor, and may well become after retirement Russia’s Deng Xioping with one big difference: he may yet return to power.