Are the wheels falling off the Putin-Medvedev tandemocracy?
President Dmitri Medvedev’s supporters are urging him to create a parallel power structure to bypass Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s corrupt siloviki and promote Russia’s modernization, Paul Goble reports. The Moscow Institute of Contemporary Development has recommended that he create an alternative power vertical.
“It is impossible to realize the plans for the modernization of the country under the conditions of the rule of the Putin elite”, the Medvedev-linked think-tank suggests in a new report. “The way out” of the current impasse is “the creation of a parallel power vertical.”
Russia’s status quo will survive “unless the talk of competition between Putin and Medvedev has some real heft,” write Dimitri K. Simes and Paul J. Saunders in a report we highlighted yesterday. In that case, they argue, a “genuine struggle could tear both the corrupt elite and the power vertical apart, with unpredictable consequences.”
Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the pro-Putin political technologists, described the proposal as “comic” and “banal,” an “old Russian idea” that will only multiply the size of the bureaucracy.
But others suggest that, with Putin likely to stand for the presidency again in 2012, Medvedev may already be a lame duck, even as he tamely laments Russia’s isolationism, fragile economy and “negative democratic tendencies”.
Cynics woudl argue that the story is simply Russia’s version of Groundhog Day.
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