Dmitri Medvedev, Putin’s chain dog – and successor?

Person of the week: Medvedev
Putin’s chain dog – and successor?

By Wolfram Weimer
07/19/2022, 09:40 am

Once a beacon of liberal hope, the ex-Russian president now regularly shocks the world public with martial threats. Above all, the verbal attacks are aimed at consolidating his own position of power in Russia.

He threatens nuclear war and the “disappearance of Ukraine from the map.” If Ukraine tries to reconquer the Crimean peninsula, the “Last Judgment” will immediately fall on all Ukrainians, “very quickly and severely”. Dmitry Medvedev shocks the world public with martial threats on a weekly basis. Ironically, the former beacon of hope for liberal reforms turns out to be a brutal warmonger and Great Russian imperialist during the war. Domestically, he is threatening to reintroduce the death penalty if everything doesn’t remain “calm” in Russia. In terms of foreign policy, he sharpened a language of hatred – especially against the United States and Great Britain. He posted on Telegram: “I’m often asked why my Telegram posts are so harsh. The answer is: Because I hate them. They are bastards and scum. They want our deaths, the deaths of Russia. And as long as I live, I will do everything to make them go away.”

Medvedev’s tone is so shrill, as if a marginal troll were on the move in Siberian basement forums. In fact, however, the nationalist agitator embodies an absolute center of power in Russia. He has been the leader of Putin’s United Russia party since 2012 and Deputy Head of the Security Council of the Russian Federation since 2020. He is considered one of Putin’s closest confidants and was President of Russia from 2008 to 2012 and then Prime Minister of the Russian Federation until 2020. Only him did Putin trust so much that he was able to exchange the presidency. Now rumors are circulating in Moscow that Medvedev is taking a political stand with his demonstrative radicalization. On the one hand, he is demonstrating his total loyalty to Putin and wants to servilely return to the Kremlin’s inner circle of power. Second, he signals to the world that he – and no one else – can set the headlines and tone of the new empire.

Medvedev rants that he’ll be happy if the world is afraid of Russia again. Russia is being taken seriously again. “We are now seriously reckoning with Russia. As with the Soviet Union. And in some respects even more seriously, judging by the sanctions package,” he rants.

The nerd is going hard

With his chain dog role, Medvedev deliberately corrects his double image as a liberal and a nerd. The 56-year-old is the son of a professor, holds a doctorate in law and likes to wear designer suits. The old KGB cronies see him as a model boy and acolyte for Putin. He now obviously wants to discard the Brave through particularly brutal rhetoric. Likewise the liberal. In the public mind, Medvedev was seen as a potential reformer for many years. Liberals in Russia and the West pinned their hopes on the lithe man who seemed so much more conciliatory and outspoken than Putin. Legendary are the photos of how he apparently made friends with Barack Obama in a burger restaurant and dared to restart Russian-American relations, including the START disarmament agreement. Michael McFaul, the US ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, writes in his memoirs about Medvedev: “He spoke a more cultivated Russian than Putin and seemed more oriented towards Western ideas, or at least familiar with them.” In a September 2009 article setting out his political vision, Medvedev described Russian democracy as “fragile” and something that “must be protected”. He called for dialogue with civil society and referred to the changes he had made to improve competition in elections. McFaul thought: “Putin would never have said it that way.”

Today there is nothing left of the supple reformer. “Medvedev is determined to correct his public image. The war offers him the perfect opportunity to do so,” explains an EU diplomat from Moscow.

clown with duck

Medvedev is particularly fond of the investigative documentary film by regime critic Alexei Navalny, in which the ex-president’s secret life of luxury is revealed for 50 minutes. The video has now been viewed 45.5 million times and meticulously documents Medvedev’s corrupt business network, which is said to have earned him luxury villas, yachts and vineyards in Tuscany. In one of Medvedev’s summer residences, the ducks are said to have lived like kings – in their own duck house. Since then, the rubber duck has been used in Russia as a symbol of the corruption of the Putin clique. A large, publicly displayed rubber duck could also lead to an arrest in 2018. Medvedev’s loss of reputation even meant that in 2021 he – although party leader – was no longer nominated as a top candidate in the Duma election. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov took his place.

If Medvedev now threatens to use nuclear weapons, he wants to make people forget the rubber duck affair. Positioning himself as a strongman, the former nerd, model boy and luxury corrupt hopes for a new image. However, an analysis of “Novaya Gazeta” comes to the conclusion that Medvedev’s attempts to raise his profile were in vain, he had passed the zenith. He is even become a kind of media clown. But in Putin’s Russia, a snarling media clown can still become very powerful – if Putin wants it.