Who Now Doubts That Russian Prime Minister Means Autocrat?
Yury Ushakov, former Russian ambassador to the United States, was appointed deputy chief of Government staff on May 31. This means that Vladimir Putin's staff will include a strong foreign political department. More than that, it will, to all appearances, have direct links with the US Administration. Prime Minister Putin continued to strengthen his foreign political positions at the start of June, before his visit to France. A commission for admittance of overseas investors to strategic fields of the Russian economy will be established. Mr Putin ordered it to be drawn up in an address to a Cabinet meeting.
The bill on foreign investment in strategic industries-one of the last he signed as President-was designed for him as Prime Minister. It envisages the one stop principle for major foreign investors interested in the key and most lucrative sectors of the semi-capitalist Russian economy.
A Sure Hand Grips the Key
The innovation not merely transfers the levers of key economic relations from the presidential staff to the governmental, but also allows Putin to regain the foreign political say-so in his new office, because strategic investors are the strongest lobbyists in their countries.
There was another landmark event in the foreign political reshuffle-Igor Sechin, the new deputy prime minister for industry, met with Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European Commissioner for External Relations. Putin had certainly taken part in arranging it. Sechin, until recently the Kremlin's Grey Eminence and now Cabinet supervisor of the fuel-and-energy complex, and the commissioner discussed prospects of energy partnership, which is Moscow's trump in its relations with the European Union and the key to the entire system of Russian-European partnership. Now, that key is in Sechin's firm hand.
Putin is gaining with Sechin's advance-unlike Dmitry Medvedev. His presidency came as a setback for Sechin, but now the diehard machine politician has a chance to regain influence as industry and energy supervisor, while the President can hardly contact him while bypassing the Prime Minister.
Super Prime Minister
After he had dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's in foreign political priorities, Putin went on his first visit abroad as prime minister. France met him almost according to the presidential protocol. He used the occasion to show that he was more than an ordinary head of government. He is the one to discuss foreign politics with heads of other states on his own behalf, not at the bidding of the head of his own state. Seeing that French journalists were taken aback with the situation, Putin explained that he was not only a prime minister but also the president of the parliamentary majority party-meaning that his duties should legally overstep constitutional limits and, more than that, he was not Medvedev's subordinate, whatever the constitution might say.
His independence is evident in foreign policy and domestic bureaucratic reshuffles. Indicatively, he has abolished the prime-ministerial executive office. Its presidential analogue had the say-so in appointing the prime-ministerial chief of staff for the last ten years, so the chief was a kind of presidential supervisor to the prime minister and the Kremlin's hand in the Cabinet. Conversely, the prime-ministerial executive office was oriented firmly with the prime minister, to balance out the government staff. Putin does not need an executive office-he has a staff led by Sergei Sobyanin that works for him alone and is no longer subordinate to the Kremlin. On the contrary, it is superior to the Kremlin in many respects.
Bizarre Privatisation Paper Comes Up
Government superiority became especially evident in bizarre developments round a resolution on the transfer of state industrial assets to the State Corporation Rostekhnologii (Russian Technologies). The document, not approved to this day, is legally vulnerable as it boils down to free privatisation of federal property. Putin was expected to approve it during his presidency. He did not, so analysts assumed corporation chief Sergei Chemezov was losing ground. As I see it, the controversy started not with clashing government lobbies but with a bureaucratic gamble.
Drafted by Chemezov, the resolution aroused strong government objections, as could only be expected. It naturally stays suspended, though it has been passed to the new presidential executive office. Amazingly, its chief Sergei Naryshkin informed the Cabinet last week that the Kremlin had no objections to it-which meant that the presidential executive office approved a document it had never seen in a final version, while Prime Minister Putin has his hands free to settle the fate of Rostekhnologii, and determine what assets it will take over. Paradoxically, none other than Medvedev will have to sign one of the most bizarre papers in the history of Russian privatisation.
Never Mind the Constitution!
The story of the "Chemezov paper" is of crucial importance-in particular because it shows to all concerned who of the new bureaucracy will make final decisions on redistribution of property. The way things are in present-day Russia, real power belongs to property redistributors.
As we learned from Kremlin sources shortly before the exchange of office between Putin and Medvedev, the new power arrangement with the stronger prime minister does not demand constitutional amendments. Why not? After all, censorship has been introduced de facto, political activists are persecuted, and gubernatorial elections have been cancelled-all that without such amendments.
The eight years of Putin's presidency watered down constitutional procedures and institutions while control and monitoring passed to behind-the-scenes bureaucratic deals and informal agreements-which means that the constitution has become a redundant appendage.
Author: Kirill ROGOV