Putin

The first post-Putin leader will, however, probably emerge from the inner circle of high government officials and military/security types. Dmitri Medvedev is one possibility, assuming that his years in power have made him tougher and wilier. The joke about Medvedev that began circulating as soon as he appeared on the political scene went like this: Putin and Medvedev go into a restaurant. The waiter asks Putin: “What will you have?” Putin says: “A steak.” And the waiter says: “And the vegetable?” Putin says: “The vegetable will have a steak too.”

Still, Medvedev ran Gazprom, a serious organization, before being chosen to replace Putin as president. Foreign leaders, especially Obama, felt comfortable with him as a twenty-first-century type, an aura Putin has never projected. Medvedev might be the right person to lead Russia out of its current political and economic impasse with the West, but most likely he would be a transitional figure, more figurehead than actual leader.

When Putin was deciding who would replace him as president while he served as prime minister to honor the letter of the Constitution, Medvedev’s main competition was Sergei Ivanov. Ivanov was, however, too much like Putin for Putin’s liking. Of the same generation, a fellow Leningrader and KGB officer, Ivanov, in his capacity as Putin’s chief of staff, could say that on many issues he and Putin “think more or less identically.” They served together in the Leningrad KGB in the seventies, and Ivanov would later be Putin’s deputy when Putin took charge of the FSB. Rumor has it that Putin envied Ivanov’s height, fluency in English, and success in the KGB—Ivanov reached the rank of general as opposed to Putin’s lieutenant colonel—and for those reasons chose the pliable and stubby Medvedev as his replacement. Though Ivanov insists that when it comes to being Putin’s successor, “I have never regarded myself as such,” others see that as a mere formal demurral. As political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky put it: “Ivanov wants the throne.”

To speculation there is no end, but one thing at least is sure—short of grave illness or death, Putin would never surrender his post as Russia’s leader without a fight. And his own personal army, the 400,000-strong National Guard, which includes the OMON teams that attacked the anti-Putin marchers on the day before his inauguration, will stand him in good stead if that fight takes a literal turn. Apart from that unlikely though not impossible eventuality, the National Guard is always a part of the pressure Putin can bring to bear on any internal political situation.

What Condoleezza Rice said of him in a WikiLeaked cable—that Putin fears “law enforcement investigations”—is no doubt true. He may well believe that he has to die in the Kremlin, in prison, or in sumptuous exile, perhaps living statelessly on the $35 million yacht the oligarch Roman Abramovich gave him as a present.

A new Russian leader almost always defines himself in stark opposition to his predecessor. Anyone replacing Putin would need to show that many of Putin’s actions were not only ill-considered, but criminal. Putin’s successor would look deeply into his affairs and no doubt find any number of crimes ranging from rank corruption to murder most foul.

Economic crimes are easier to trace than murder though their trail is often labyrinthine, shell company within shell company until half of Siberia disappears into a tiny Caribbean island.

The Panama Papers of early 2016 did not directly implicate Putin in any questionable dealings. However, they did reveal that symphony cellist Sergei Roldugin, the friend of his youth and later godfather to his daughter, controlled some $2 billion in offshore financial assets. Putin was pleased that no direct line could be traced between him and Roldugin, but he couldn’t have been happy that that particular cover was blown.

There is an almost Shakespearean profusion of corpses on the stage of Putin’s presidency—the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, gunned down just after entering her apartment building; former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko, wasting away from polonium poisoning in London; opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, shot dead in sight of the Kremlin. Still, there’s little chance of Putin ever being implicated in those crimes.