Russian leadership
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote this bit of analysis for Project Syndicate. He tries to make sense of the dual leadership in Russia.IT would be good to use this when reviewing Russia in a few months. I'd ask students to evaluate his analysis in light of events in the first part of 2010.
The Kremlin Two Step
Westerners often see Russian politics in terms of a high-level struggle between liberals and conservatives... They also view Russia in terms of a tradition whereby every new tsar partly repudiates the legacy of his predecessor, creating a political thaw at the beginning of a new reign...
Both methods were used to describe the Putin-Medvedev relationship – to understand its nature and dynamic, and what it portends for Russia. But observers remain puzzled.
To dismiss Medvedev as a mere Putin puppet, a constitutional bridge between Putin’s second and third presidential terms, would be both unfair and wrong. Russia’s third president has a broader role and a distinct function. Conversely, portraying Putin as “a man from the past,” and Medvedev as “a hope for the future,” exaggerates the differences between them and omits the more important factors that unite them. A better analytical model is needed...
The 75% of Russians who make up the Putin majority are essentially passive, and seek only the preservation of a paternalistic state. Putin can sit on their support, but cannot ride forward with it. The best and brightest are not there.
Enter Medvedev. His Internet-surfing, compassionate, and generally liberal image helps recruit a key constituency – those beyond the reach of Putin himself – to the Putin plan. Whether the plan succeeds is another matter.
Conservative modernization is a gamble. To modernize Russia, one must break the stranglehold of corruption, establish accountability, and free the media. At some point, Putin and Medvedev will have to decide. Either they give priority to the survival of the current system and accept Russia’s steady marginalization, or they start opening up the system, putting its survival at risk...
Putin’s governing pact with Medvedev, his trademark creation, is likely to remain in force. Both members need each other. So the real issue is not whether the noises that Putin and Medvedev make suggest real divergence, and a potential for rivalry, but whether there is daylight at the end of the tandem...
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Labels: leadership, politics, Russia
posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:19 AM
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