Russia’s new prime minister: Mr Da

Date: 06/03/04

Vladimir Putin opts for direct rule

“MIKHAIL WHO?” was the universal response when Vladimir Putin chose Mikhail Fradkov as prime minister this week. After the president's dismissal of Mikhail Kasyanov last week, six days of feverish speculation had thrown up the name of every conceivable successor. Mr Fradkov, it seemed, was inconceivable.

Observers had hoped that the appointment would offer clues to Mr Putin's priorities for his second presidential term, after his expected re-election on March 14th. A silovik with a military or security-services background would mean more state intervention; a liberal would push economic and administrative reforms.

Now Mr Putin seems to have picked the man most likely to keep everybody guessing. A 53-year-old of prototypical Soviet-bureaucrat appearance, Mr Fradkov was Russia's envoy to the European Union. In that job he rarely made a public comment, even during a row over a critical European Commission report on relations with Russia. Behind him stretches a humdrum career including stints as trade minister and head of the tax police. As far as anybody knows, he is not a silovik; but he also has no ties to business “oligarchs”, as Mr Kasyanov did, nor to any other power clan.

Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies the Russian elites, says Mr Fradkov fits Mr Putin's bill perfectly. He can, she says, be considered a “hidden silovik”, who came to (modest) prominence when the defence minister and arch-silovik, Sergei Ivanov, brought him into Russia's security council in 2000. Yet he has experience of economic issues and of working in the West (his biography says he speaks English and Spanish). Above all, he is “modest, unremarkable, not a challenger for power.” In short, a yes-man, chosen so that Mr Putin can set his own priorities. But what will Mr Fradkov say da to, and how well will he do it?

He may turn out to be the instrument for letting Mr Putin wield both his interventionist and his reformist instincts. Mr Fradkov's time in the tax police gives him the right shade of anti-oligarchism; he is said to have helped put together the tax-evasion case against Yukos, an oil company that has been under a barrage of investigation since last summer. (This week the tax ministry also accused Sibneft, which merged with Yukos in the autumn, of evading $1 billion in taxes for 2000-01.) One of Mr Putin's plans is to extract more revenues from the natural-resource firms owned by Russia's richest men.

Yet Mr Fradkov also gave a pro-reform signal by choosing (or agreeing to choose) Alexander Zhukov, an economist who heads parliament's budget committee and is seen as a liberal, as his deputy. He hinted that there might be only one other deputy prime minister, instead of five, and talked of restructuring ministries.

Five years ago, Mr Putin was himself plucked from relative obscurity to become prime minister, and later president. Boris Yeltsin chose him for his modesty, low profile, loyalty and lack of obvious ambition. Few expect Mr Fradkov to be the next Mr Putin. But Russia is full of surprises.