I’m just back from the newly renamed “Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies”:http://www.aseees.org/* “annual conference”:http://www.aseees.org/convention.html. While there, I had the pleasure of chairing a roundtable on current Russian politics that featured presentations from “Timothy Colton”:http://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/people/bio_colton.html, “Henry Hale”:http://elliott.gwu.edu/faculty/hale.cfm, “Steven Fish”:http://polisci.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/person_detail.php?person=236, and “Kathryn Stoner-Weiss”:http://cddrl.stanford.edu/people/kathrynstonerweiss/.
At the conclusion of the panel, the topic turned to the coming Russian presidential elections. What makes the 2012 presidential elections in Russia interesting is that there actually is quite a lot of uncertainty about who will be elected president that year, for a now rather imposing “six year term”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Russia. Bucking the general “anti-incumbency trend”:http://www.princeton.edu/~gpop/Transition%20Fatigue%20AAASS%202004.pdf in Eastern Europe, we know that the next president of Russia will either be the current Russian President “Dmitry Medvedev”:http://www.russiaprofile.org/resources/whoiswho/alphabet/m/medvedev.wbp or the previous Russian President and current Russian Prime Minister “Vladimir Putin”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin. We just don’t know “which one it will be”:http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/fray-between-putin-and-medvedev-to-get-uglier/421473.html. We do, however, know, that the election itself will _not_ be used to settle this question. Only one of these two men will be on the ballot, and he will win the election.
The consensus on the panel was that most serious analysts believe it will be Putin. When I raised the point that we really don’t have many good examples of sitting presidents who are not term limited simply giving up power because someone else wants it – and that Medvedev legally has the power to fire Putin as Prime Minister – the point was repeatedly made that although Medvedev seems like he does want to stay on as president, he doesn’t seem to have done anything that implies he could take the necessary steps to actually outmaneuver Putin in a power struggle.**
So here’s the question I want to throw out to readers. Say Medvedev was really planning to try to stay on as Russian president: what actions would we expect (or even could we observe) to know that this was the case. Let me throw out two suggestions, which are interesting because they kind of point to opposite empirical observations.
The one “sign” that Medvedev was not in it for the long hall that was pointed out at the panel was that Medvedev does not seem to be replacing enough Putin people with Medvedev people (although “he has removed”:http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/78009/the-firing-moscow-mayor-yuri-luzhkov quite a few old powerful governors). If he was serious, so goes the argument, he’d have put more of his people into place by now. But let’s suppose Medvedev is quietly gathering dirt on Putin ( _kompromat_ as the Russians call it) and plans to at some point use it to “suggest” to Putin that he not run for president in 2012. (Far fetched? Probably, but the man is “rumored to be worth $40 billion”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/21/russia.topstories3, which suggests he has some source of income beyond his government salary…) If this were the case, then we would expect Medvedev to keep a low profile (in terms of competition with Putin), and thus _not_ replacing lots of Putin appointees would probably be a good place to start.
But the basic question remains: how would we know if Medvedev was planning to make a serious play for the 2012 presidency? I look forward to comments and responses.
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_*_ Wondering why you would give an organization the catchy acronym of ASEEES? Well, it’s actually a step up from the acronym of the previous name of the organization, AAASS. And that was pronounced “triple A double S’, not, well, the other way you could pronounce it….
** I often find myself thinking about how this would actually take place. So Putin walks into Medvedev’s office and says “bad news, Dima. I’ve decided to be president again.” Medvedev (kind of morphing into Donald Trump in my mind) replies, “bad news, Vladimir, your fired.” Then there’s a scene of Putin riding in the back of that taxi from “The Apprentice”:http://www.nbc.com/the-apprentice/, muttering about how could he have forgotten the formal powers of the Russian president. Silly yes, but seriously, how does this conversation actually play out? What if Medvedev says no? You can’t really shoot the sitting Russian president, can you? So what happens?