It is nearly ten years since the ailing Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as the head of the Russian Government. This coincided with the start of a spurt of the national economy which was leaving the 1998 crisis behind it and enjoyed the benefits of extraordinarily high energy prices. Although now it is Dmitry Medvedev and not Vladimir Putin who attends international summits and hobnobs with world leaders, they undoubtedly feel that Vladimir Putin is still Russia's real leader.
The country's entire political elite, including the incumbent President, owe their position solely to Vladimir Putin. There is not a single person in Russia's elite who got in there over opposition from Mr Putin or when he was looking the other way or through some parallel political mechanisms such as independent elections or internal party struggle. Everybody who is in power today owes it to Putin. Even the leaders of parliamentary opposition perform that role only within set limits. There is not a single person in the top echelon of Russian politics who does not understand it and does not feel personally indebted to Mr Putin. They all became members of the Russian elite because of their "connection" with Mr Putin. This is true of Dmitry Medvedev.
If Boris Yeltsin had not picked Mr Putin as his successor in August 1999 most of them would never have got into the Kremlin or the Government, the State Duma and the Government ministries. The top political class in Russia today has been cherry-picked by Mr Putin. Today's Russia is not a democratic or an authoritarian country, as political scientists argue. It is not a parliamentary or a presidential republic, which is an occasional topic of arguments among lawyers. It is Vladimir Putin's country with all his pluses and minuses, successes and problems, hang-ups and fantasies.
Over the centuries being at the top of the power hierarchy in Russia did not automatically confer legitimacy on the new leader, certainly not in the eyes of the national elite. In order to be fully and firmly established he needed, for further legitimisation, to be seen to be destroying the foundations of the previous regime, replacing the elite, removing key figures and openly or subtly denouncing his predecessor. In the absence of an effective political mechanism only such destruction assured real power. Russian history offers no successful examples of a different political behaviour. Yeltsin destroyed the system that was being created by Gorbachev who had destroyed what he had inherited from Brezhnev and Andropov. Leonid Brezhnev, in turn, had waged a prolonged struggle against the people and the system of Nikita Khrushchev who had done the same with regard to Stalin and his people, who in his time had destroyed the power system that had been created by Lenin and liquidated almost all his supporters. Examples can be traced into the depths of Russian history to Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible. A ruler's success in Russia depended to a large degree on the discrediting of the previous period. Russia's history is all about the fight of a leader unsure of himself against the legacy of his predecessor. Mr Putin, too, followed that path and reached the peak of his legitimacy and power only after exposing the "criminal" 1990s and accusing the previous leadership of corruption and of mismanaging the economy and the state.
The result is a vicious circle. The discreteness of Russian power, the lack of a civilized mechanism of transition of power through real elections, coupled with massive contempt of law as such, in the first place in the establishment, as well as the feebleness of representative institutions, has resulted in a situation in Russia when every new leader cannot but have contempt for the national elite while the latter is afraid of him and shamelessly cow-tows to him until a credible successor comes along. Then the elite enjoys dancing on the dead body of the fallen little idol in order to earn the favour of the new one. And of course lately, this has invariably been accompanied by a redistribution of property. Russian mutinies, which the advocates of "stability" use as bogeys to scare us all, are far less frequent than the ferocious and bitter internal settling of accounts within the elite. These squabbles change the country's direction much more frequently and dramatically than popular unrest and are mainly responsible for the fact that in the eyes of the world Russia's most predictable feature has become its unpredictability.
The historian Vasily Klyuchevsky wrote that "in order to defend the country from its enemies Peter I devastated it more than any of its enemies could". It was only later that Stalin's "Brief History" turned Peter into a great statesman, for understandable reasons. The fight for the stability of the regime cannot be a political end in itself because it makes for strategic instability of the entire political system. Any driver knows that in order to drive straight one has to move the steering-wheel all the time.
The answer to the question what kind of president Mr Medvedev will make today depends not only on him, but to a large extent on Vladimir Putin's behaviour. Will Mr Medvedev acquire presidential legitimacy in the eyes of the elite, his people and the world, or will somebody in the foreseeable future start smearing Vladimir Putin and his "triumphant decade" only to bolster his own "insufficiently legitimate" power in the land which will continue to alienate all others by its political unpredictability because an unpredictable friend in this world is far more dangerous than a predictable enemy?
The author is director of Russian and Asian programmes, World Security Institute, Washington, USA.
Nikolai Zlobin