World

Has President Medvedev shown his true colours?

September 28, 2010
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For many in Russia President Dmitri Medvedev’s dismissal of a powerful political rival simply underlines his firm grip on power. But the unsavoury way Medvedev snuffed out his opponent will alarm those who see Russia’s current president as a liberal counterpoint to Putin.

The dispute between Medvedev and Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor for the past 18 years, once considered Russia’s second most powerful politician, was as brief as it was acrimonious. At the beginning of this month the mayor wrote an ill-advised article describing the mood in Russian society as “difficult”. The response from the Kremlin was unequivocal. The warning sign came at a political forum in the city of Yaroslavl later that week, when Medvedev suggested that “officials should either participate in building institutions or join the opposition.”

What followed was a smear campaign that would have made the Soviet Union’s agitprop department blush. There soon appeared a particularly unflattering television documentary entitled “The Cap Affair”, which accused Luzhkov of embezzling funds and securing lucrative property contracts for his wife, Yelena Baturina. State-owned news programmes also sniped at Luzhkov, criticising him for amassing a huge fortune through his wife’s property business, and even claiming the mayor had been busy rescuing his bees whilst intense forest fires raged around Moscow this summer.

As broadcasters filled the airwaves with slanderous tales of corruption and ineptitude, unnamed Kremlin sources embarked on a campaign of leaked briefings against the 74-year-old mayor. Even the opposition suggested that Medvedev would become a “laughingstock” if he failed to deal with Luzhkov’s “impudent behaviour”.

Throughout all this the mayor remained unrepentant, even threatening to sue the channels that were broadcasting accusations against him. But the writing was already on the wall for the man many had expected to succeed Boris Yeltsin when Russia’s first president stepped down at the end of 1999.

So does the Luzhkov affair give the lie to the notion that Russia’s president is the fluffier half of the Medvedev/Putin partnership? Not necessarily.

After all, Luzhkov felt so securely nestled in the bosom of the establishment that his treatment of Medvedev was less like that of an elected mayor of Moscow and more like a duke confronting an interloper in his fiefdom. And after 18 years of unchallenged authority, perhaps it was time for a new face to meet the sizeable challenges facing a capital city that is attempting to become one of the world’s financial centres but remains riddled with corruption and gridlocked on the roads.

Nonetheless, the anti-Luzhkov campaign revealed the extent of the Kremlin’s control of the media, and the president’s willingness to use it to his political advantage. This is nothing new, of course—Russian commentators have long bemoaned the systematic dismantling of the country’s independent press. But the Luzhkov affair shows that the problem is no less acute under Medvedev than it was under Putin.

If Medvedev is going to push his reform agenda on the world stage, the abuses of power from the Kremlin must cease. In the same forum in Yaroslavl where he rebuked Luzhkov, the president said that he “categorically [disagreed] with those who say that Russia isn't a democracy and that authoritarian tendencies reign”. Perhaps he could spare a bit of time from his speech writing to start proving his points in practice.