Most Russian and western observers see the man who has just been elected Russia's new president as at best a relatively liberal figure, if not a faceless opportunist. Some think Dmitri Medvedev will be merely a second Putin, whose election just means more of what we have seen during the last eight years. But Medvedev's early political biography, as well as more recent statements of his on such issues as multi-party competition, freedom of the press and Russia's relations to the west, point in a different direction. Should the Russian presidential administration come under the lasting and full control of Medvedev, the Kremlin will become a focal point of pro-democratic tendencies in Moscow. This development could lead to something not dissimilar to a second perestroika.
Medvedev's CV differs in important respects from Putin's. Both the outgoing and new Russian presidents were law students who grew up and studied in St Petersburg. Yet Medvedev, 13 years younger than his predecessor, has no known KGB background, and had already started to be active in politics during the heyday of Gorbachev's glasnost, while Putin was still serving the KGB in Dresden. In early 1989, studying for an advanced law degree at Leningrad State University, Medvedev worked as an election campaigner for his professor Anatoly Sobchak—then a prominent leader of Russia's emerging democratic movement running for a seat in the USSR parliament. This was, to be sure, only a brief episode in Medvedev's biography. His subsequent political career followed a relatively straightforward trajectory: posts within St Petersburg city council and then inside Russian presidential administrations, and later chairman of the huge gas monopoly Gazprom, before his appointment by Putin as deputy prime minister. Yet Medvedev's brief involvement in the Russian democratic movement is still significant. Back in 1989, it was not clear whether the Soviet system was coming to an end, and becoming an anti-communist activist still held a real risk.
Moreover, this rarely noted aspect of Medvedev's biography correlates with those political announcements that have been shaping his public profile for the last years. The phrase the Kremlin usually deploys in defence of anti-western foreign and illiberal domestic policies—"sovereign democracy"—was rejected by Medvedev in an interview for the popular journal Ekspert in July 2006 as "a far from ideal term… when qualifying additions are made to the word 'democracy,' this leaves one with a strange aftertaste." In an earlier interview, Medvedev had stated that, "I certainly do not see Russia's role as that of an opponent of America," and that, "it is obvious for me that Russia should position herself as a part of Europe." Other quotes show that Medvedev seems to believe sincerely that Russia would benefit from competition among large parties, a strong civil society, active civic disobedience, an articulate opposition, multiple channels of information, an independent judiciary and a transfer of power by democratic means. While defending Putin's strengthening of the state, Medvedev, in an interview for Moskovskii Komsomolets in September 2006, also said that this process should "in no way make… basic human rights and freedoms a victim of an increase of order." He made clear that "to think that Russia has a special path and faces a specific set of challenges is absolutely naive." Contrast this positioning with that of Putin in the last days of the Yeltsin regime in 1999: he created an image of himself as a non-nonsense security service officer: a tough leader not afraid to use force in order to bring "stability" to the north Caucasus and to fight Chechen terrorism.
Medvedev's rise—especially his patronage by Putin since the early 1990s—certainly contains episodes of opportunism and hypocrisy. Yet Medvedev would not be the first Russian reformer to have a conflicted background. Before initiating a period of relative cultural liberalisation in the late 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev was a staunch Stalinist whose biography contained no indications that he might one day dismantle key components of Stalin's system. Russia's most radical democratic reformer so far, Mikhail Gorbachev, climbed up the Soviet career ladder from local Komsomol functionary to full Politburo member before becoming Soviet leader in 1985. But before this date, political scientists like Oxford's Archie Brown had noted encouraging peculiarities in this party functionary's biography and recommended paying him special attention. They pointed to examples like the fact that Gorbachev had, as a student, been friendly with a Czechoslovak communist who was later involved in the Prague spring of 1968. Perhaps most importantly, Gorbachev gave a speech in December 1984 in which he outlined much of what he would start doing two years later when he had more or less consolidated his position, and launched perestroika.
Gorbachev's experiences as a young man, his political rhetoric before becoming the Soviet Union's leader and his democratic reforms correspond with each other. We might expect a similar fit between rhetoric and action in Medvedev's further rise, should the office of the president retain at least some of its prerogatives. Unless the Russian president becomes a mere figurehead, along the lines of the German presidency, Medvedev will acquire substantial powers within the coming weeks and months. If he is able to consolidate his position in the next couple of years, we should expect to see him attempt to change Russia's political system in a direction similar to that in which Gorbachev tried to stir the Soviet Union's. Such a move will encounter stiff opposition by many of Moscow's dominant elite groups. Whatever the eventual outcome of such attempts, one thing is for sure: the period of relative macropolitical stability in post-Soviet Russia will soon be over.
In view of these prospects, why did Putin anoint Medvedev? Medvedev is one of the youngest members of Putin's closer entourage. It has been said that Putin sees Medvedev, whose entire rise happened under his shadow, as his political son. Seeing himself as a statesman with a modern worldview, Putin might be purposefully intending to transfer power to a younger generation of politicians. And of course, there is the power of patronage: more than any other senior Russian politician, Medvedev owes his position to Putin alone.
Nevertheless, sooner or later Medvedev's liberal and democratic views will come to the fore. The political outlook of Putin's foster-son will eventually come into conflict with Putin's legacy of "managed democracy"—a paradox reminiscent, in some ways, of Gorbachev's turn against the Soviet system that his predecessor Andropov clearly wanted to preserve. Something else we might expect is that anti-western nationalists in Russian politics, culture, journalism and academia will unite against Medvedev, as they did in the late 1980s against Gorbachev. Back then, Russia's nascent liberal democratic movement was able to stop the rising tide of anti-American obscurantism, and to lead Russia on the path to a first attempt to seriously democratise. Whether the coming conflict between pro and anti-western tendencies in Russia will lead to a sustained second attempt to make Russia democratic, and how Putin (in whatever role) will behave if confronted with such a situation are, however, issues one can only speculate about.
