MOSCOW: Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov, once one of Russia’s most influential men and the creator of Vladimir Putin’s tightly controlled political system, was ousted yesterday in a power struggle between the Kremlin and the government.
The Kremlin said President Putin had accepted the resignation of the man who for a decade wielded immense power as the grey cardinal behind the scenes under the former KGB spy but later moved over to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s camp.
His departure is a blow for Medvedev, who is under growing pressure a year after swapping jobs with Putin for failing to halt Russia’s slide towards recession.
“It’s of his own volition,” presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, dismissing suggestions Surkov, 48, had been pushed. “It’s to do with the fact that decrees were not carried out.”
But such decisions are almost always choreographed by Putin who, sitting at the head of a table with cabinet ministers on either side, glared straight at Surkov as he scolded them at a meeting on Tuesday for not carrying out his orders and decrees. Russian media and political analysts have long said a rift has opened up between Putin and Medvedev, his long-time ally and a former president, although both deny it.
“Of course it’s a strike against Medvedev,” said Dmitry Oreshkin, an opposition-minded political analyst. “It turns out he was simply devoured. It will take some time and the prime minister will also be devoured.”
Surkov is best known inside Russia for shaping the Kremlin’s mindset under Putin - confident, ruthlessly commercial, anti-Western and authoritarian despite his pet phrase, “sovereign democracy,” under which Putin and his United Russia party dominate the political scene.
As Putin’s top political adviser, Surkov became known as the Kremlin’s puppet master, Russia’s answer to France’s Cardinal Richelieu, and was loathed by opponents whom he often targeted with his acerbic wit.
One author wrote that he was “absolutely unnoticeable as a living person” in the role of grey cardinal. But he came to be seen as Russia’s third-most-powerful political figure, after Putin and Medvedev, and kept a portrait of Argentine-born revolutionary Che Guevara in his Kremlin office.
He quit the Kremlin in December 2011 after street protests threatened Putin’s grip on power and attacked the very system he helped create, undermining what had appeared his peerless mastery of the political scene. He had also made a mistake by calling the protesters “the best part of society” in Russia.
In government, Surkov had been responsible for overseeing implementation of presidential decrees and innovation projects. Reuters
