Striding through the Kremlin’s gold-encrusted doors and applauded by the modern nobility, Vladimir Putin returns to the Russian presidency Monday in the throne room of the czars, now a dangerously weakened autocrat.
The protests of December have shaken his all-powerful countenance, setting off machinations by the powers behind him who are intent on preserving their authority and privilege despite demands for democracy and reform. That conflict portends difficult and uncertain days for Russia, with Putin pressured to display more muscle than compromise.
”œPutin needs to be strong,” said Vladimir Pastukhov, a Russian political scientist and visiting fellow at Oxford, ”œotherwise there will be 12,000 knives to his back the next day.”
Putin has ruled Russia since 2000, the last four years as prime minister, and until December the nation had traded the unpredictability of democracy for the certainty of a strong hand.
This article seems more like wishful thinking than reporting
Agence France-Presse
Saturday, May 5, 2012 6:45 EDT
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When the Kremlin door slams shut on Dmitry Medvedev after Vladimir Putin returns to the presidency on May 7, the sound reverberating off the ancient red-brick walls may be one of bitter failure.
Post-Soviet Russia is set to remember its only one-term president as a man whose biggest achievement was keeping the Kremlin seat warm for Putin when he was barred by the constitution from running for a third consecutive term.
Youthful, interested in technology and apparently open to the West, Medvedev’s promises to make Russia a freer, more democratic country created unprecedented hopes when he took office in 2008.
But his agreement at a congress of the ruling United Russia party last September to willingly renounce his claim to a second term and swap jobs with 59-year-old premier Putin earned him mockery not just from the opposition but also from many of his former supporters.
Incensed by the announcement and subsequent fraud-tainted parliamentary elections in December, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in protests on a scale unprecedented since the turbulent days of the early 1990s.
“Dmitry Anatoliyevich, we feel sorry for you,†prominent liberal television journalist Leonid Parfyonov, activist Ksenia Sobchak and singer Vasya Oblomov rapped in a song that went viral on the Internet.
“Someday they will write: ‘He was a good guy!’/ Russia’s president with a human face.’â€
“Sat for four years, did not make any decisions,/ Vacated the seat, taught at Skolkovo,†said the song referring to the innovation centre outside Moscow, Medvedev’s brainchild.
The cherubic-faced Kremlin chief, 46, repeatedly tried to break out of his mentor’s shadow and demonstrate that he was his own man. But most of those attempts were indecisive and even half-hearted.
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