MOSCOW – Back in December 2007, with his second presidential term running out, Vladimir Putin decided not to violate the letter of the Russian constitution. Instead, he chose to step down, become prime minister, and nominate one of his old St. Petersburg buddies, an aide named Dmitry Medvedev, for president. Back then, a good joke started to make the rounds: Russia, 2023. Putin and Medvedev are sitting in one of their kitchens, drinking and shooting the breeze. "Listen," slurs Putin. "I've lost track again. Which one of us is prime minister, and which is president?"
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"You're the president now, I think," slurs Medvedev.
"Well," slurs Putin, "then it's your turn to go and get more beer."
It was a prophetic joke, and one that turned out to be all too accurate Saturday, when Medvedev announced the latest switch: Putin will return to the presidency in next year's election and Medvedev will take up the prime minister's post. And yet the joke was somehow lost on us over the last four years as we (rightly) let other debates get in the way, from the long silly distraction of wondering who was actually in charge (answer: Putin, of course) to the disputes over whether to believe Medvedev's talk of modernization. Even despite these last few months, when it became clear that Putin would come back, we managed to be surprised all over again when it actually happened.
"It was the most obvious and therefore the least probable move of the ones I could have predicted," said Andrei Kolesnikov, the Kommersant journalist who, in his intimate chronicles of Putin, has become the man's hagiographer. We were standing in the press section of the grandstands at the convention for the United Russia ruling party, looking down on the swarm of thousands of delegates filing their paper ballots in unanimous support of Putin's party platform.
"We all waited for this moment for a long time, and still this is a surprise precisely because it's so obvious," he said. "It'd be nice to have some actual surprises because the situation is just so stable" -- Putin's watchword -- "that when they made the announcement, I got really sleepy. Really. Because this is for keeps."
While Kolesnikov drifted off, the Twittering masses of Russia were either euphoric or in despair, depending on their political leanings. The despairing liberals, a dwindling crowd after two decades of dashed post-Soviet hopes, were utterly winded and deflated. Why does God hate Russia, one asked. And then everyone started doing the math: How old would we be when Putin finally leaves office in 2024 (a date that supposes he serves two more consecutive terms, which were extended to six years back in 2008)? Russia's digital airwaves quickly filled with a younger generation bemoaning their lost youth: Many of them will be pushing 40 by then, and they've already spent their last 12 years under his watch.
"When Putin finishes his second six-year term, I'll already be 58," one older blogger wrote. "Almost my entire life will have been spent with him." He punctuated this with a frown.
But Kolesnikov, at least, was still seeing a glimmer of opportunity in this latest Kremlin machination. "I hope we'll see a new Putin, this is my only hope," he told me, "because the earlier iterations have exhausted themselves."
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