Putin of miracles

Four years ago, the game "Putin Chess" appeared on the Internet - something between chess and the Lines computer game. The meaning of this fun was to cross a hedgehog with a snake - to play by the new rules. Before the elections to the Duma, the game was posted on the quite serious website zaputina.ru, and its author also now admits that “I don’t feel like joking anymore” and that he is “with two hands for Dmitry Anatolyevich, but at the same time firmly - for the third term of Vladimir Putin.” And the joke itself in the outgoing year has ceased to be a joke at all: Putin composes the specific rules of Russian democracy literally on his knee, on the go. Nowhere and never before in history has an incumbent president run for deputy in order to later resign his mandate. Never before has a president become prime minister. On the contrary, it happened, but to go down a step - no.

Throughout the year, Newsweek has closely followed Russian politics. We traveled, wrote, analyzed - and often got into the top ten, almost guessing what would happen. Practically, but still not quite: every time Putin's thought, his actions and motives turned out to be more radical. Back in June, we wrote that instead of another “party of power” and “second leg”, A Just Russia would become an ordinary marginal participant in the elections. But we did not expect that the party of Sergei Mironov would barely pass the barrier, losing even to the Liberal Democratic Party, and in addition to a couple of insignificant Duma committees, receive the honorable right to support Putin's successor along with parties that did not get even three percent.

When it seemed to become clear that First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, as a successor, was about to head the list of United Russia, we wrote: Putin will not give up the party to anyone and will not allow successors to join it. But we did not think, of course, that the president would personally lead the detachment.

When Putin suddenly replaced the top three on the list, we immediately assumed that United Russia would be able to compete for 62-65% of the vote. But the extreme pressure on competitors and voters that the Kremlin has used to achieve this result came as a surprise to us. We wrote that opposition activists - who are truly against Putin - were actually outside the law. But they did not yet know that they would have to seriously study the experience of Soviet dissidents and get used to arrests, deportations, travel bans, and even psychiatric hospitals.

We wrote, finally, quite recently that Putin would appoint Dmitry Medvedev or Viktor Zubkov as the heir, but we did not predict - although Putin announced this directly, but then they did not believe him! - that the rules of the game will change again and the heir will still have to work in tandem with Prime Minister Putin.

Among the main results of the past 2006, we noted: Putin launched a special operation for his own nomination as the father of the nation. But it still did not occur to us that a special term “national leader” would be officially introduced in relation to Putin and that this is how he would be addressed at party meetings. We did not write in advance that President Putin will campaign for himself in the elections on TV without going on vacation, and this campaign will be presented as "answers to questions from the media and citizens." However, in conversations with journalists, Putin this year has ceased to be shy about praising himself. He willingly compared himself with the leaders of the past, pointed out his honesty and selflessness.

Everything happens for the first time. Putin began the year with the Munich speech, the kind of aggression from Russian leaders in the West that had never before been encountered. After Munich, Putin opened a new breath, the Kremlin official notes, he seemed to finally realize his strength, began to act more relaxed and free. And right there, in March, having promoted Sergei Ivanov and, on the contrary, slowed down Dmitry Medvedev, he started a new intrigue around his successor. Medvedev had just returned from his first international show in Davos, and at first he sank a little from such a turn, and Ivanov took the lead. But in September, with the unexpected appointment of Viktor Zubkov as prime minister, analysts got completely confused.

Putin deliberately confused everyone, otherwise he would not have ordered Zubkov, as we wrote, to declare presidential ambitions. And according to some sources, he directly pointed out to one of the members of his team in the summer - Ivanov. And another of his close associates from the rival camp was sure a couple of months ago that Putin would remain for a third term.

As a result, everyone was confused, not just analysts, and the losers and their entourage took the appointment of Medvedev all the more painfully - they seriously believed that they had a chance. As a result, Putin had a good reason to move to the premier and thus not leave: huge tension naturally formed in the Kremlin. Now Putin remains under the slogan of maintaining stability: in order to gradually and carefully, without spilling, transfer his power and his course to Medvedev, his closest collaborator.

So, Putin acted tougher and more decisively than we expected, but paradoxically, it turned out that practically not a single thing was completed to the end. On the contrary, instead of a dot, Putin put a question mark everywhere. He did not stay, as if for sure - but you can’t say that he took it and left. Rather, he stopped somewhere halfway - but in such a way that it was impossible to determine where he was moving from and where.

Mironov's party was destroyed, but preserved, having replaced anger with mercy at the last moment. "United Russia" at the October party congress was outwardly quite similar to the CPSU - except that the faces are younger and the TV picture is brighter - and then they literally crushed everyone in the elections, but the CPSU, that is, the decision-making corporation, did not become. On the contrary, Putin neglects his party and still reserves the role of extras for it, it's just that extras have grown.

And the border between the parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties has become obsolete: at least they all together, regardless of status, are nominating Putin's successor. Rather, parties and politicians have finally divided into loyal and disloyal: those who are for and those who are against, and those who are against, the future is in the fog. They began to actively persecute the mayors of cities - from Stavropol to Tomsk and Vladivostok - and even prepared amendments to cancel mayoral elections, but as a result they were not canceled.

“We have seized products from the common table. They explained this by the fact that I violate the regime. My question, why other prisoners should suffer, remained unanswered,” wrote Newsweek, who tried to run for president and joined the Social Revolutionaries in the fall, the mayor of Arkhangelsk, Alexander Donskoy, appearing on the mobile phones of his acquaintances as Donprez. He had already left A Just Russia, since it supported the candidate Medvedev, and Donskoy wanted to run for president himself. His letter from the local prison cell went to our editorial office for more than two months.

Mayor Donskoy in many ways, probably, became an oppositionist and prisoner by accident. That's how the circumstances came about. And he is not alone. The mayor of Stavropol, Socialist-Revolutionary Dmitry Kuzmin, also seriously aimed for governor, but as a result was put on the international wanted list. And what, if we ignore the views they declare today, is the future president Dmitry Medvedev so different from the persecuted non-systemic opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov - except for his age, relations with Putin and the city in which he lived and studied? Kasyanov, however, is taller.

We wrote that the FSB generals, dismissed last year by Putin's decree in connection with the Three Whales case, did not leave the Lubyanka, but remained to work. But we could not imagine that this was nothing but the first episode of a real war of special services.

In war as in war. Well-informed sources explained: the October arrest of FSKN General Alexander Bulbov, without illusions, for the Chekists is like the YUKOS case: there were no such demonstrative arrests of high-ranking generals, more like acts of intimidation, in the special services. And never before have some special services attacked others openly and through the press, and quite plausible reports of interrogations and torture in order to extract evidence against security officials from Putin's inner circle have been published on the Internet.

The year as a result turned out to be restless and somehow evil in every sense. First, because the plan has changed. By appointing Anatoly Serdyukov, a former tax official and former furniture store manager, as defense minister, Putin clearly had no intention of appointing his father-in-law, Viktor Zubkov, as prime minister. Meeting with youth activists in the summer and refusing them to create a special youth management center, I did not think that in less than two months he would approve a committee on youth affairs in the structure of the government. Turning on the green light for A Just Russia in the spring, I did not plan to switch it to red in the summer.

And secondly, observers believe, all the nervousness from Putin's unwillingness to become a "lame duck" at the end of the curtain and appear at least somewhat weak. Therefore, Vladimir Putin, regardless of the end of his legal powers, directly began to participate in the Duma and presidential elections, but did not dare to answer the central question of all eight years of his reign: who will govern the country after May 2008?