President Vladimir Putin accepted Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov's resignation on Wednesday, immediately naming the obscure Viktor Zubkov to take his place in a surprise move that set off a new round of guessing games on who would succeed President Putin in 2008.
In a televised meeting with the President Wednesday, Fradkov submitted his resignation in order to facilitate the process of forming a new government for the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections. Putin commended him for an outstanding job in office and went on to agree with his decision to resign. According to the Russian constitution, Putin had two weeks to choose a new prime minister who would then be approved by parliament. But Putin's choice was made just hours after the resignation.
"It's better to make certain cadre decisions now, to take certain steps in modernizing the government system to avoid faults connected to major changes," RIA Novosti quoted Putin as saying on Thursday, "but also to show the development vector, the structure of administrational and executive power in the period after the elections." Although his candidacy has yet to be approved at a Duma session Friday, Zubkov has already announced plans. "The government structure is not very effective," he told journalists Thursday. "That is why structural changes are inevitable."
In initial reports, politicians and experts agreed that whoever headed the new cabinet was the likeliest figure to succeed the President. In this context, Putin was expected to name first vice Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, who has long stood out as one of the likely successors, to the post of Prime Minister.
Not So Obscure, Not So Surprising?
But the choice of Viktor Zubkov, a former chief of the obscure Committee for Financial Monitoring, baffled pundits and officials alike. Acting Finance Minister Alexei Kurdin told journalists on Wednesday that while there were plans to dismiss the government, Zubkov as a candidate for prime minister was completely unexpected. Indeed, experts immediately pointed to Putin's penchant for surprises, recalling how the president kept everyone in the dark prior to his naming of Fradkov, who was immediately labeled a "technocrat."
But while Zubkov, like Fradkov, was virtually unknown to election watchers, Putin's choice for him is not quite an accident.
In the first major pre-election cabinet reshuffle in January last year, Putin promoted Sergei Ivanov to first vice prime minister. This was followed by another "surprise move" when the virtually unknown financial officer, Anatoly Serdyukov, was appointed head of the Defense Ministry in Ivanov's stead. Wednesday's move to name Zubkov echoed this move.
Though little known, both men were close to Putin during his tenure in the St. Petersburg government. Between 1991 and 1993, Zubkov was deputy head of the St. Petersburg city council external affairs committee. The head of the committee was Putin. In 2001, Serdyukov became the deputy chief of the St. Petersburg directorate of the Tax Ministry. In 2004, he went on to become the deputy head of the Tax Ministry, where Zubkov was a senior official throughout the 1990s. More interesting still is that Serdyukov is Zubkov's son-in-law.
Reaction
Putin's choice as candidate dismantled the scenario that pundits had grown accustomed to in the months since the last reshuffle: that whoever headed the cabinet would become the next president. The scenario followed the one that brought Putin to power: President Boris Yeltsin had named Putin as the Prime Minister prior to making him an acting president on the eve of 2000.
But this does not mean that Zubkov could not become president himself. In fact, talking to journalists on Thursday, the likely prime minister did not rule out that he might run for president. "I would never like to agree to something without having done anything," RIA Novosti quoted him as saying. "If I do anything on this post as prime minister, then I don't rule out that variant [of running for president]."
Earlier, experts indicated that it was unlikely that Zubkov could become presidential material. "I will risk making a prognosis that Zubkov is not Russia's future president, that he is not the main candidate for presidency," RIA Novosti quoted Vitaly Tretyakov, a political expert and editor of Moskovskie Novosti, as saying. He added that he continued to believe that the likeliest candidate for president was vice prime minister Sergei Ivanov. He called Zubkov a "technical" government manager.
Boris Kagarlitsky, an expert with the Institute for Globalization Studies, agreed. "The Russian government has a technical rather than a political structure, and this is another technical appointment," he told The Moscow News. This technical rather than political nature of the government, he explained, was the optimal method for running the kind of capitalism that Russia has adopted.
Others were skeptical that his new candidacy was as meaningful as some made it out to be. Vladimir Zhirinovksy, head of the ultra-nationalist LDPR party, said that it was useless to guess who would become president.
"I am completely certain that the Kremlin's candidate will be a completely unexpected candidate," he told journalists Thursday after a meeting in the State Duma with Zubkov. Zhirinovsky and his party plan to back Zubkov at Friday's voting session. The Communist Party has said it will vote against Zubkov.
The U.S. reacted with skepticism. "This is a matter for the people of Russia to decide their future leaders," White House National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said Wednesday."
"The upcoming elections, we hope they'll take place in a climate that is free, fair and transparent," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said at a Wednesday briefing in Washington. "That means not just on election day, but in the run-up to election day. But I don't detect that today's events will affect that one way or
the other."
By Anna Arutunyan
Poll: Whom will President Putin name as his successor?
