by Paolo Valentino
When he replaced Putin in the Kremlin in 2009, he feigned a liberal turn in Russia. He has now taken off the mask. Here is the portrait of this powerful man who grew up in the shadow of the tsar
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
BERLIN On November 12, 2009, the President of Russia spoke about renewal and democratic values in St. George’s Hall in the Kremlin. He promised a society of free men with full access to information instead of an archaic society where the boss thinks and decides for everyone. And he will also ask foreign experts for help to modernize the archaic structures of the Russian economy. Dmitry Medvedev had been elected just over a year earlier to replace Vladimir Putin, who had been forced to resign due to the constitutional limitations on dual mandates. And his arrival in the Kremlin raised great hopes inside and outside of Russia: freedom is better than lack of freedom, he said during the election campaign. Accompanying the timid internal liberalization was the famous reset with the new Barack Obama administration, which created the illusion of a new era of dialogue, culminating in the signing of the New Start treaty, which drastically reduced the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the US . Smiling, almost shy, not at all aggressive in tone, a big fan of Deep Purple, Medvedev became the epitome of the new Russia for a while.
Let’s jump 13 years and find ours with the same youthful vibrancy. But it is his speeches that have radically changed. Not a trace of the liberal tones of that time. Today, Medvedev, 56, vice president of the National Security Council, is one of the Kremlin’s hawks and often even more menacing in his rhetoric than Putin’s. Very active and wordy on Telegram, he defends the war with the sword. calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty. She threatens Western companies to confiscate their assets. He accuses the United States of wanting to demean, downsize, divide and destroy Russia. But he warns that it has the power to annihilate all of its worst enemies who boast of its nuclear potential. He attributes the news of Bucha’s crimes, artfully fabricated by wellpaid media outlets, to false propaganda from the West and Ukraine. Talk about the Nazis and the beasts of Kyiv to be eliminated. And thanks to the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine, he dreams of an open Eurasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Last but not least, he did it yesterday, calling Zelensky a monster.
As sensational as it may seem, Medvedev’s transformation can be explained in a relatively simple way, with his relationship of absolute loyalty and submission to Vladimir Putin, whom he met in 1990 while both were working for thenSan Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Since then they have never separated again. Eight years his senior, Putin has always been the dominant figure in a dynamic that hasn’t changed in thirty years. The definition coined by a former American ambassador to Russia, according to which Medvedev is to Putin what Robin is to Batman, is correct.
It was his unconditional loyalty that convinced Putin in 2008 to choose him as his temporary successor in the presidency and make him his prime minister. In those months, a cable from the American embassy in Moscow to Washington reported the joke circulating in the city: Instead of the driver, Medvedev was sitting in a brandnew car. Everything is there: the dashboard, the gearbox, the gas pedal, the brakes. The steering is missing. Then he turns to Putin, who is sitting in the back, and asks: Vladimir Vladimirovich, where is the steering? Putin takes a remote control out of his pocket and says: No problem, I’ll drive. The cruel anecdote. But it illustrates the point well: Medvedev never stepped out of his master’s shadow.
Still, the hopes raised among Russian liberals were real. Medvedev even gave an interview to Novaya Gazeta, the opposition newspaper now closed by the authorities. He is also said to have briefly nurtured the idea of a second term, pushed by more liberal collaborators like Gleb Pavlovsky. But in fact, despite the progressive speeches, little changes. And in the summer of 2011, after Putin’s meetings with the Crimean oligarchs, the illusion and recovery ended. Putin and Medvedev announced the famous Rokirovka, the exchange of positions: the first returned to the Kremlin, the other became its obedient prime minister, indeed its lightning rod. Until 2020, when Putin fired him, also because the allegations of corruption had meanwhile weakened him and made him one of the political opponents of the Russians. In a YouTube video seen by 40 million people, Alexei Navalny documents Medvedev’s illegal possessions: palaces, yachts, a winery in Italy, financial assets worth over a billion dollars.
Now Dmitry Medvedev has definitely thrown off the mask. He expresses himself as if he has always been, and perhaps always has been, an antiWestern ultranationalist, writes Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Rumors are circulating in Moscow that she could take over the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party, the farright nationalist formation orphan of its late leader and founder Vladimir Zhirinovsky, to revitalize the 2024 Duma elections, with BatmanPutin approval of course.
April 14, 2022 (Change April 14, 2022 | 07:07)
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