Pat Dollard | Young Americans

We’ll Always Have Putin
By Leon Aron

PRESIDENT BUSH said last week of his erstwhile “friend” Vladimir Putin, “I have no idea what he’s going to do.” Mr. Bush is not alone: no one but Mr. Putin knows whether the Russian president will relinquish power next year. Still, after Mr. Putin’s announcement that he would not be averse to becoming the next prime minister, the prevailing guess is that after the March 2 presidential election Mr. Putin will head the Russian government under a new president.

Yet before the Bush administration and the leading contenders for the White House begin to design a Russia policy based on this, its plausibility has to be examined. In the light of what we know about Mr. Putin and the political and economic system he has forged, he is more likely to find a way to continue in office as President Putin.

To begin, Vladimir Putin has done the opposite of what he publicly said he would do with regard to some major policy issues. In November 2003, he declared that “the state should not really seek to destroy” Yukos — at the time Russia’s largest, most modern and most transparent private company — and then methodically did just that through a palpably fraudulent prosecution.

He has repeatedly averred that Russia needs a robust party system — and then proceeded to make participation in parliamentary elections arduous and subject to unchallenged management by an election commission that is subservient to the Kremlin. No party may hope even to get on the ballot in Russia without the Kremlin’s approval.

The president has extolled democracy in virtually every one of his annual state-of-Russia addresses since 2000 — and then canceled the election of regional governors, who are now all but directly appointed by Moscow. He correctly identified independent mass media as the main weapon against corruption — and then brought under the Kremlin’s control practically all nationwide print, radio and television outlets.

For Mr. Putin, taking on the job of prime minister would be not just “stepping down” but wallowing in self-abnegation. The prime ministers under Mr. Putin have been appointed by the president and have served at his pleasure. They have been little more than figureheads who cannot even pick their own cabinets. This year, Mr. Putin deprived the prime minister of supervision over the so-called state corporations, into which the president’s administration had earlier merged some of Russia’s vital, and often most profitable, industrial enterprises — like missile production and nuclear power.

Of course, with Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, poised to take two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, its approval of constitutional amendments emaciating the presidency and fashioning a more powerful “executive” role for the prime minister is assured (as is the constitutionally mandated endorsement of the two-thirds of the regional legislatures now also firmly in the Kremlin’s hand).

Still, while Ukraine has profited from a similar devolution of presidential authority, Russia would have to go much further to make the job of prime minister palatable for Mr. Putin. In addition to giving the Parliament, and not the president, the right to form the government, the prime minister may have to be made commander-in-chief as well.

Yet power in Russia today grows not only from the barrel of a gun, but also from a barrel of oil. And here, too, everything has been done to ensure that the president’s administration, not the prime minister’s office, be in charge of the daily export of seven million barrels of crude oil and oil products (like fuel oil and diesel fuel). With natural gas, these fuel exports fetched $190 billion last year.

Never before in Russian history have so few exercised such tight control over a national wealth that is so vast and liquid, in more ways than one. The stakes of relinquishing power have grown commensurately for Mr. Putin. If he becomes prime minister, a vast network of informal arrangements that made the president and his entourage the managers of Russia’s most lucrative natural resources will have to be dismantled — redirected away from the Kremlin and toward the prime minister.

Full NYT article by Leon Aron here.