Putin

The Russian Constitution provides that if the president resigns, is incapacitated, is impeached, or dies, his place will be taken by the prime minister. Elections have to be held within three months. There is no indication that Putin has groomed a successor. He would have considered that both premature and dangerous. It would mean both bringing someone too close to him while pushing others away and thereby turning them against him. Putin would of course have gathered or fabricated kompromat on all his potential successors. His main strength, however, has always been the loyalty he has demonstrated to others by keeping them in positions of power that bestow great wealth upon them. Still, among them all there is not one with whom Putin could strike the same power-for-immunity deal that Yeltsin struck with him. Putin needs his own Putin.

Whoever he is, Putin’s successor will have to possess a rare amalgam of qualities—he must be able to win the respect of the masses; to keep the oligarchs, the military, and the security forces in a dynamic balance; and to manage a complex foreign policy situation. He will also have to face the country’s two great unsolved problems—its dangerous dependency on gas and oil, and its failure to create a new sense of national purpose and identity.

It’s possible that Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose life has been marked by superlatives—Russia’s richest man, Russia’s most famous political prisoner—would return from his European exile in the event of Putin’s sudden removal or demise. More than once he has indicated that he would not be averse to running the country. He gained considerable moral authority by standing up to ten years of prison, which also focused and clarified his vision for Russia. Before his imprisonment Khodorkovsky had demonstrated that he was capable of transforming himself from a looter to a leader in business as well as transforming his company, Yukos, into a modern organization, transparent, efficient, highly profitable. At the same time he also displayed the ruthless streak that he would need to stay alive in the jungle of Russian politics. Adept at transformation, he may be just the man to transform Russia.

The other obvious candidate from the opposition side is lawyer and anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny. Born in 1976, he has enthusiastically indicated his willingness to run and is in the opinion of some prominent pundits the only electable member of the opposition. Navalny has Russian good looks, projects confidence, and has a gift for turning a phrase. He branded Putin’s United Russia Party “the party of crooks and thieves,” and it stuck.

He has several advantages over Khodorkovsky—he is young, he belongs to the generation that is absolutely at home on the Internet, but he also has a feel for the street. Not limited to the predictable positions of the human rights intelligentsia, he has a strong streak of anti-immigrant Russian nationalism and knows how to appeal to it in others, an increasingly valuable political skill in a global era of fast-moving rightward currents. A self-described nationalist democrat, he has, according to a New York Times story, “Rousing Russia with a Phrase,” “appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, ‘I recommend a pistol.’” But the violent language is not reserved for non-Russians. To those who call him a network hamster, he replies: “I am a network hamster and I will slit the throats of these cattle!” At the same time he is not above posing in various high-end brand-name clothes for the Russian GQ while giving the magazine a hard-hitting interview. This would win him points with other “network hamsters” but would alienate the sort of Russians who would see this, like his time at Yale as a World Fellow in 2010, as proof of his treacherous otherness.

Though disapproving of Putin’s methods, Navalny is already on record as saying that Crimea is now an inalienable part of Russia. Like Khodorkovsky, he too has been singled out for persecution, but, so far at least, it has been more serial harassment than the hard blow of prison. Currently, Navalny, who won 27 percent in the 2013 Moscow mayoral elections, is barred from politics by a felony conviction specifically imposed for that purpose. Under different conditions that conviction could of course be overturned. Also, unlike Khodorkovsky, he does not have the experience of running a vast and complex organization. Perhaps the two of them working together in a new party could prove a formidable force in the event of a suddenly Putin-free Russia.