Russia’s former PM Mikhail Fradkov will head the Foreign Intelligence Service.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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Fradkov Summoned to Service
Russia’s former PM Mikhail Fradkov will head the Foreign Intelligence Service, President Putin announced in Dushanbe Saturday after the regular summit of CIS. This appointment could be viewed as a classic example of the so-called career-service squiggle of Putin, which main features are unpredictability, the lack of experience piled up by a new appointee in the given field and his perfect and complete belonging to the power vertical.
Mikhail Fradkov, who judging by official CV has never been a career intelligence officer, is likely to emerge as a political chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. The reasons that drove Putin to nominate ex-PM to this office are traditionally obscure; at least the analysts have arrived at two opposite conclusions.
Policymakers loyal to the Kremlin, Fed Council senators Viktor Ozerov and Yuri Sharandin, for instance, see nothing strange in the appointment, attributing their assumption to Fradkov’s experience in foreign relations and enforcement bodies and emphasizing his membership in the president’s team.
The opposition - Andrei Piontkovsky from Yabloko, for instance, - called this action of president “an absurd appointment” targeted at “de-sacralization of key political officers.” In reality, both parties have just singled out different sides of one and the same event, which, similar to the squiggles of Russia’s First President Boris Yeltsin could be called the squiggles of Putin.
The basic feature of Putin’s squiggles that started by resignation of PM Mikhail Kasyanov in March 2004 is not the ouster of some top-ranked bureaucrat but rather the impossibility to guess a successor. Besides, a new office of the appointee usually has no relation to his previous experience. And last by not least, the protagonists of Putin’s puzzles are always the people, whom Putin personally trusts or who are trusted by one of the closest mates of the president. In this respect, this turn in Fradkov’s career inspires optimism, as it will enable him to be close to power for another few years.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 08, 2007
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