MOSCOW — On Saturday afternoon, Vladimir Putin announced that he would finally sync reality with formality and become Russia's actual president yet again. Once the initial sting wore off -- Putin seems on track to rule as long as Stalin -- cooler heads began to prevail. This will bring clarity and end the schizophrenia of the tandem contradicting itself, the thinking went. Putin was talking like he understood reform was necessary -- and even doubters had to admit that he was the only person with the political capital to accomplish it.
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Just two days later, however, the ground shifted yet again. Dmitry Medvedev, coming off a couple of really bad days, very publicly fired the finance minister, Alexei Kudrin: perhaps the one person in the Russian government whom Western investors see as credible, the one who saved Russia when the bottom dropped out in 2008, the one holding the Russian government back by the scruff of the neck from total economic disaster. Kudrin's abrupt firing stunned everyone and completely destroyed the thesis that Putin's announcement would calm down Russia and its uneasy economy. Everyone knew there were power struggles going on behind the curtain, but rarely have there been so many elbows and knees jutting through, and, in recent weeks, actual people flying out.
What is going on? In short, no one really knows. But one thing is clear: Putin's return is not going to usher in a new reign of stability. If anything, the system is as unstable as it's ever been, and no one can tell when -- or into what form -- it will settle. And with the country's most competent economic official heading for the door while Russia stares down the barrel of another massive recession, it's probably not going to be anything good.
After Putin's surprise announcement on Saturday, everyone was asking: Why so soon? The substance of the announcement, of course, surprised almost no one. It's been clear for months that Putin was positioning himself, via motorcycle gangs and half-naked girls, for a comeback. But the timing was shocking. Going into the United Russia party congress, the conventional wisdom was that nothing about the presidency would be announced. It was too soon to hobble Medvedev, too soon to end the intrigue that only reinforces Putin's position as the country's arch arbiter. If you recall, last time around this announcement came in December; so why September, a full six months before the presidential elections? One explanation is the impatience of elites, evidenced by a growing unrest in the system that culminated with the implosion of the Right Cause project less than two weeks ago: Mikhail Prokhorov, the Kremlin-curated party's leader, bucked control and publicly slammed the very secretive curator of Russian politics, its eminence gris: Vladislav Surkov. It was a major, messy fail for the Kremlin, and it deepened the sense that the system has ossified to the point of inoperability.
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