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The congress of the “United Russia” party held this past weekend proved to be quite newsworthy, in that current president Dmitry Medvedev, from the rostrum, formally nominated his predecessor (and current prime minister) Vladimir Putin to be the party’s nominee for the 2012 elections.

This announcement, which was cast by both domestic and international media as Putin’s triumphant return to the presidency after a four-year Medvedev caretaker administration, in fact reveals some fundamental weaknesses in the post-Soviet Russian political order. First and foremost, it is a frank admission that there is no such thing as Putinism without Putin.