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Personnel Choice for Medvedev
// Experts name people who may be on the team of the would-be president
Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev within a couple of days will start to shape the team to work with in his possible new capacity of the head of the state. The presidential hopeful has his own people but it is still unclear how free he is in promoting them.
There is still no discussion of Dmitry Medvedev’s people occupying the key positions. A Kommersant source close to the Kremlin says that after the presidential election First Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Ivanov will be appointed prime minister and “in terms of power he will rather be a vice-president”. But the issue of shaping the new government after the successor has been name is not on the agenda now. The next step is to pick somebody to take over from Dmitry Medvedev as chair of the board of Gazprom which may happen before February.
The person tapped to head the administration of would-be President Medvedev is Vladislav Surkov who is now acting as the administration’s deputy head. Vladislav Surkov and Dmitry Medvedev are considered close allies and have repeatedly underscored they have similar political views. In early February 2007 Messrs. Medvedev and Surkov met youth organizations. One of the activists wondered why Mr. Medvedev “opposed Surkov in the issue of democracy”. Mr. Medvedev had early doubted the term “sovereign democracy” coined by Mr. Surkov. The two officials said that they have the shared view on democracy in Russia. Mr. Medvedev said that it was “a friends’ chat on how to describe political things”. “On the whole, we have similar ideas, and terms are not the issue,” Mr. Surkov agreed.
A high-placed source in the Kremlin told Kommersant that the closest people to Dmitry Medvedev are the president’s economy advisor Igor Shuvalov, chief of the expert department Arkady Dvorkovich and head of the president’s press service Natalya Timakova who has been in charge of the successor project for the past two years in relation to Mr. Medvedev.
Minister who work with national projects are also considered to be part of Dmitry Medvedev’s team. These are Economic Development and Trade Minister Elvira Nabiullina (who worked as his advisor on national projects and was nominated for minister by Mr. Medvedev), Agriculture Minister Alexey Gordeev, Education and Science Minister Andrey Fursenko and Health Care and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova. The Kommersant source also mentioned Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Kudrin. Evgeny Badovsky of the Institute of Social Systems, a think tank, said that “recent promotions of Elvira Nabiullina, Tatyana Golikova and Alexandra Levitskaya [Deputy Economic Development Minister] who are close to Mr. Medvedev may mean that the government has been shaped for the new president.”
The Kremlin source also named Regional Development Minister Dmitry Kozak as part of Dmitry Medvedev’s team. The minister’s allies confirm it saying that even if there have been difficulties between the two they were easy to overcome. However, general director of the Center of the Current Political Situation Mikhail Vinogradov said that “Kozak is good for the role of a modernization impulse but cannot be considered part of Medvedev’s team”.
A Kommersant source in Parliament mentioned among Dmitry Medvedev’s ally the chair of the Duma legislation committee Pavel Krasheninnikov who served as Justice Minister between 1998 and 1999, was elected to Parliament with the Union of Right Forces but defected to United Russia in 2003. Thanks to Mr. Medvedev’s help Mr. Krasheninnikov was elected in January to chair the board of the newly established Russian Lawyers Association. The association’s deputy chair Dmitry Shumkov, another person close Dmitry Medvedev, said then that the organization was set up to help Mr. Medvedev in the election campaign if he decides to run.
President of think tank Panorama Vladimir Pribylovsky said in an interview with Kommersant that Dmitry Medvedev “will be promoting his friends to his team not right now, but later and gradually”. Among his friends are his fellow students from Leningrad State University, Chairman of the Supreme Court of Arbitration Anton Ivanov and member of Gazprom’s board Konstantin Chuichenko. Mr. Medvedev also studied with Gazprombank’s deputy chair of board Ilya Eliseev and head of the Federal Bailiff Service Nikolay Vinnichenko. Mr. Pribylovsky also named the representative of the presidential administration in the Constitutional Court Mikhail Krotov, the presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District Alexander Konovalov and chair of the Russian Federal Property Fund Yuri Petrov.
Mr. Pribylovsky said that Dmitry Medvedev may also invite to his team Vladimir Putin’s fellow student Nikolay Egorov, co-founder of law firm Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasyev & Partners, which was responsible for the return of Russian intelligence officers from Qatar who were found guilty with murder of Chechen rebel leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiev. Mr. Egorov, Dmitry Medvedev and now pro-rector of St. Petersburg State University Nikolay Kropachev were in the election staff for Anatoly Sobchak in Soviet Parliament election back in 1989. As for other St. Petersburg-natives, analysts mention the first deputy of the Supreme Court of Arbitration Elena Valyavina who worked with Messrs. Medvedev, Krotov and Ivanov at the civil law department of Leningrad University’s Law School. There are other student fellows of his – Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Gutsan and his wife Natalya Gutsan, chairperson of the Charter Court of St. Petersburg.
However, analysts believe that Mr. Medvedev is going to be restricted in his right to choose associates. Head of the Foundation for Effective Politics Gleb Pavlovsky believes that after the presidential election “the team will have a new captain but the manager will be the same”. Head of the International Institute for Political Expertise Evgeny Minchenko agrees: “Dmitry Medvedev’s team is going to be shaped by Putin. It can’t exist as a separate thing. After Medvedev is elected president, the country will be managed by a group, some sort of Politburo with informal leader Vladimir Putin.”
Kommersant Current Affairs
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 11, 2007
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