:: Putin’s Team Relies on Familiar Faces

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of articles about the 10th anniversary of Vladimir Putin ascent to power.

Where were today’s political heavyweights on the day that Vladimir Putin skyrocketed to power a decade ago?

President Dmitry Medvedev taught law at St. Petersburg State University and worked for two timber companies.

Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who oversees the country’s energy sector, was serving as an adviser to the Kremlin’s chief of staff.

Vladislav Surkov, widely seen as the Kremlin’s chief ideologist and currently its first deputy chief of staff, held the No. 2 position at ORT television, which was then controlled by Boris Berezovsky.

A review of today’s top politicians reveals a motley group that appears to be held together by Putin’s will alone and would probably collapse if Medvedev’s and Putin’s paths ever diverged, analysts said.

Many officials appointed by Putin “occupy their posts exclusively by Putin’s grace and often to the detriment of professionalism,” said Alexei Mukhin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies.

Former President Boris Yeltsin used to fill senior posts with his “favorites,” and Putin became Yeltsin’s “assiduous disciple” on this practice, Mukhin said.

Putin himself was plucked from relative obscurity when Yeltsin named him as prime minister on Aug. 9, 1999. Putin, a former KGB spy who broke into politics as deputy St. Petersburg mayor, helmed the Federal Security Service for just one year and 15 days before Yeltsin made him prime minister and declared heir apparent. The State Duma confirmed Putin’s appointment on Aug. 16 in a 233-to-84 vote with 17 abstentions.

At the time, many of the future political heavyweights occupied state positions on the regional or federal level. A few shared common backgrounds.

Medvedev, Sechin, First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak had worked with Putin in St. Petersburg City Hall in the early 1990s. In addition, Putin, Medvedev, Sechin, Kudrin and Kozak were all graduates of Leningrad State University.

Some officials may also have links to Putin through the KGB, but the secretive nature of the security services makes it hard to confirm this.

Medvedev, however, is not known to have any connections to the security services and instead was a law professor, legal affairs director for Ilim Pulp and a board member with the Bratsk paper mill when Putin become prime minister in 1999. Putin hired him as deputy head of the government administration in November 1999 and moved him to the Kremlin as deputy chief of staff when he became acting president the next month.

Sechin, who is widely believed to have a KGB past, saw his star rise in parallel with Putin’s. Sechin served as Putin’s deputy in the presidential property department in 1996 and 1997 and as Putin’s deputy in the presidential Main Control Directorate in 1997 and 1998.

Upon becoming prime minister, Putin named Sechin as the head of his secretariat, charged with screening appointments and documents for signing. On Dec. 31 of that year the day Yeltsin resigned and Putin became acting president Putin made Sechin the Kremlin deputy chief of staff.

Yeltsin appointed Surkov as Kremlin deputy chief of staff the same month that Putin became prime minister. Surkov had worked as ORT’s first deputy general director for the previous year. Shortly after Putin became president, the state wrestled control of the channel away from Berezovsky and returned it to its Soviet-era name, Channel One.

Kozak, who is widely cited as one of Putin’s closest colleagues and has been charged with tackling some of the country’s most pressing tasks, headed the legal committee of the St. Petersburg administration from 1994 to 1999.

In August 1999, when Putin was appointed prime minister, Kozak was named Cabinet first deputy chief of staff. In June of 2000, Kozak was made deputy head of the presidential administration.

Putin later appointed Kozak as his envoy to the Southern Federal District shortly after the Beslan hostage crisis in 2004 in an effort to strengthen regional governments in the North Caucasus.

As envoy, Kozak played a crucial role in replacing the heads of North Ossetia, Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Dagestan, where ruling elites were criticized for corruption and nepotism.

Putin put his team together with a single task in mind: to build the top-down “power vertical” that he used to run the country, said Alexander Morozov, an independent political analyst. It has been accomplished, he said.

Putin’s group is an assorted bunch composed of “people of the past with their post-Soviet style” of thinking and “people of the future” who could step into the future together with Medvedev, Morozov said.

He said people of the past included Sechin, Federal Drug Control Agency head Viktor Ivanov and former United Shipbuilding Corporation president Yury Yarov, who did not suit Medvedev’s liberal approach to management.

The people of the future, he said, included Kudrin, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin, who are “strong specialists” that adhered to “a modern political style.”

Kudrin, a first deputy finance minister when Putin rose to power in 1999, was elevated to minister after he was sworn in for his first term as president in May 2000.

Shuvalov, who headed the Federal Property Fund in 1999, was appointed head of the government staff by Putin in May 2000, and Naryshkin, who headed the Leningrad region’s committee on foreign economic relations in 1999, was appointed deputy head of the Kremlin’s economics department in February 2004.

Ivanov, who served as Putin’s deputy at the FSB, was appointed as deputy head of the presidential staff in 2000. He was dispatched to the drug control agency when Medvedev became president.

Zubkov was deputy tax minister in 1999 and went on to head the Federal Financial Monitoring Service for six years before Putin named him as prime minister for a brief stint in 2007.

Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst who served as a spin doctor in Putin’s Kremlin, said Putin’s appointees could not be called a real team because they were “hostile to one another” and “did not solve common tasks.”

“Big money and corruption decide everything,” Belkovsky said. “This is the logic in which this system exists.”

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