The first serious sign of a split within the Kremlin arose a week ago, when President Dmitry Medvedev fired a key aide, Mikhail Lesin. The media adviser and former minister became the most senior person to exit from the administration, fanning increasingly heated speculation that the president may be breaking away from his mentor and predecessor, prime minister and former president Vladimir Putin, with whom Lesin was closely linked.
The sacking of a Kremlin insider wouldn’t, on its own, have raised eyebrows. Lately, however, Medvedev has been going out of his way to distance himself from the harsher elements of the Putin era: its authoritarian politics, isolationist bent, and “seriously distorted” perception of human rights. He has bemoaned the “backwardness” of the governing party, United Russia, the country’s “shamefully low” competitiveness, and rampant corruption (currently, an estimated one-third of Russian gross domestic product goes to paying bribes). This fall, Medvedev, who is nearing the halfway point of his term, bundled these themes into “Forward, Russia!”, a manifesto that reads like a platform for a liberal reformer, leading to whispered musings about Mevedev the modernizer, the Obama of Russia.
It’s a convincing narrative—“until you look at the facts,” says London-based Russia-watcher Edward Lucas, author of The New Cold War. Under Medvedev, media has not become any freer, free speech has been increasingly stifled, and the number of murders and attacks on journalists and human-rights activists has actually increased. Indeed, “the discrepancy between Medvedev’s ideas of dynamicism and democratic transparency,” the Financial Times Deutschland wrote in an editorial last week, “are so far from reality as to sound grotesque.”
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