Happy Birthday, You're Fired

What the downfall of Moscow's colorful mayor really says about the Kremlin.

BY JULIA IOFFE | SEPTEMBER 28, 2010

The King of Moscow: A look back at Yuri Luzhkov’s controversial career.

MOSCOW — The deathwatch for this city's immortal mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, had been on for weeks. Since early September, Luzhkov has been the focus of a vicious Kremlin smear campaign intended to irritate him into resigning quietly, something the Kremlin is usually able to accomplish with ease. This time, however, it met with unexpected resistance. Last week, Luzhkov went on vacation to Austria, a trip insiders said had been the product of an ultimatum: Take a week to think over the terms, Luzhkov was told; resign when you come back. All of Moscow waited for his resignation, which Kremlin sources told the papers would come on Monday. But when Luzhkov returned Sunday night, he was defiant. This was all "delirium," he told the Interfax news agency on Monday morning. "I do not plan to resign of my own volition," he said, and went on with his work.

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The King of Moscow:
A look back at Yuri Luzhkov’s controversial career

On Tuesday, however, Moscow awoke to find that the man who was appointed to rule it in 1992, who had been able to hold on to the seat ever since through chaotic political change and economic cataclysms, had not survived the night. He had been brutally, cruelly fired all the way from China, where President Dmitry Medvedev was traveling on official presidential business. Shortly before 8 a.m., Medvedev's order to remove Luzhkov from his post hit the wires. The reason? Luzhkov had "exhausted the trust of the president of the Russian Federation." Then Medvedev got up on a podium and calmly delivered a speech to his audience in Shanghai on, of all things, the importance of cities. Back in Moscow, a joke went viral: Everything is made in China nowadays, even Luzhkov's termination.

Luzhkov, too, woke up to the news, which he learned through the press just like everyone else. He had just arrived at his office and all his colleagues had lined up with gifts and flowers to belatedly congratulate the mayor on his 74th birthday. Most of them did not yet know that the mayor was no longer the mayor. When they found out, many were stunned. "I haven't seen such faces in a long time," tweeted one Kremlin-affiliated blogger who stopped by the mayor's office that morning. "It feels as if the world has ended." "It shocked him, of course," one of the mayor's subordinates told me, adding that the choice of tactics was because "they wanted to hurt him more, to humiliate him." As if to rub salt into the wound, the president elaborated through a spokesman that he would not be meeting with Luzhkov.

Humiliation was precisely the point of this entire drama. As the initial shock of Luzhkov's firing wears off, the attention of Moscow's commentariat (as well as the opposition) has turned back to its favorite question: What does this mean for the Medvedev-Putin duumvirate? Most voices have been praising Medvedev for proving his independence from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the man thought to be the real decider in this town. The theory goes that Medvedev wanted Luzhkov out but Putin wanted him to stay, causing a split behind the scenes. The fact that Luzhkov was fired, according to this school of thought, indicated that Medvedev won and Putin lost. "[Medvedev] showed his political independence," says political analyst Alexei Makarkin. "Medvedev wants to be president, so he makes a decision that is associated with a president. This is an election campaign, a clear declaration that he wants to be president after 2012."

But that explanation makes little sense, as does any that treats the presidency as a real contest between Medvedev and Putin, or a perceived split between the two as something other than political theater. As any government operative here will tell you without blushing, those assumptions are both patently false. "It's clear how the system works," one high-ranking state banker told me. "Putin is the number one boss, and Medvedev is the place holder. There is no doubt about their roles."

Alexey SAZONOV/AFP/Getty Images

 SUBJECTS: RUSSIA
 

Julia Ioffe is Foreign Policy's correspondent in Moscow.

GEORGEKZ

12:57 AM ET

September 29, 2010

Julia Ioffe's postings are

Julia Ioffe's postings are all high-quality journalistic pieces where she manages to let her own views transpire as clearly and naturally as those of her interviewees. What I do not understand is why so much attention has been paid recently to the story of Luzhkov's ousting from power, as if there were nothng more important in Russia's daily politics than a traditional duel arising from the impossibility of sharing spheres of influence and long-time turfs. It is more than natural that when a person sits on the top for almost two decades, the volume of mistakes he has made in his tenure grows so much out of proportion with his previously good image that a dismissal becomes inevitable. Perhaps, Putin's decision not to run for a third term in 2008 was just that: he flaired that Russia might get tired of him as president and preferred to run the government, taking charge of domestic - and more visible and understandable - low-politics issues to gain credit, while Medvedev would be dealing with the presidency. In my view, a more neutral and far-sighted attitude is needed here, in order to, as Mr Putin once put it, "separate flies from meat-balls".

 

CARMICHAEL

11:21 AM ET

September 29, 2010

Luzhkov vs Chubais

"Even the usually cautious politician Anatoly Chubais struggled with the stampede to renounce all ties with Luzhkov, with whom he worked to implement political reforms after the fall of the Soviet Union."

Julia Ioffe clearly does have much of a clue about the 1990s. Chubais and Luzhkov were the most bitter of enemies in the 1990s, and Luzhkov, who largely exempted Moscow from Chubais' privatisation campaign, never lost an opportunity to put the populist boot into Chubais. Which explains Chubais' gleeful reference to the 'former' politician.

Luzhkov, it should be remembered, was seen as largely responsible for ousting Putin and Medvedev's mentor Anatoly Sobchak from his position as mayor of Petersburg in 1996, by providing massive financial support to Sobchak's opponent. As a result of which Sobchak was forced to leave the country, only returning when Putin became head of the FSB in 1998.

Luzhkov was thus always out of step with the Putin / Medvedev thinking, and was in fact initially openly opposed to Putin. But after reconcilliation he proved useful for pulling in votes and consolidating power, and too dangerous to leave out of government. But his days were clearly numbered since Medvedev had said governors left over from the 1990s would be replaced, and had already ousted a number of such dinosoars in Tatarstan, Bashkiria Kalmykia, and Sverdlovsk. The surprise was that Luzhkov did not see the writing on the wall, and lost the chance to negotiate a successor. My guess is that Valentina Matvienko will now move from Petersburg to Moscow.