If only, lament those watching from the sidelines, it were true.
“I believe there is no competition,” says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a member of Putin’s United Russia party and a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences who studies the decision-making elite. “Our politics are a theater. There are directors and a script. And for some reason they love it when the public says there are conflicts.”
Lilia Shevtsova, a mordant critic of the administration and a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, uses remarkably similar language in reaching a comparable conclusion. “There are no politics,” she says. “Politics exist where you have an independent media, attentive audience and unpredictable script. What’s interesting is that the Kremlin supports this story-telling.”
In the Soviet era, outsiders divined the workings of the Politburo by studying Red Square parades to see who was standing next to whom on top of Lenin’s tomb. This approach turned out to have limitations when the internal weakness, and then collapse, of the Soviet system took much of the world by surprise.
Today’s Kremlinologists rely on public comments that may eventually prove just as misleading.
“I think it’s almost the same as in Soviet times,” says Kryshtanovskaya, who still watches who sits in which government seats. She says that Medvedev only replaced two of the 75 officials he inherited from Putin, a comment on his lack of power and Putin’s reach. “He’s a general without an army,” she says.
Shevtsova also sees a resemblance between the Kremlinology of the Leonid Brezhnev years — Brezhnev was head of the Soviet Union from 1964 until he died in 1982 — and now. “We have personalized power now, as we did then,” she says, “and we all have to remain guessers. We still are wondering who is behind the curtain.”
Putin served two terms as president, from 2000 to 2008, when he was prevented by term limitations from running again. He picked Medvedev, once his chief of staff, to run for president, and Medvedev not only succeeded him but appointed Putin as prime minister. Ever since there have been two big questions. Could Medvedev emerge as a politician with a mind of his own and the power to make decisions? With Putin again eligible, who would run for president in 2012?
Neither has said who will run, creating much back and forth about whether Medvedev has accrued any power or not since he assumed the presidency and whether there are signs of a rift between him and his mentor, which would indicate a new assertiveness.
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