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Sestanovich: Behind the Scenes 'Warfare' As Russia Awaits Putin Successor

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Stephen Sestanovich, George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

February 26, 2008

Stephen Sestanovich, CFR’s top Russia expert and a former ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet states, says there is no doubt about who will succeed Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president, but adds that “a real drama playing itself out” behind the scenes. Sestanovich says: “there’s a kind-of under-the-carpet warfare that is underway in anticipation of a possible change in the balance of power when Dmitri Medvedev takes over the presidency and Putin becomes prime minister.”

Russia’s going to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president. First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev has been handpicked by President Vladimir Putin to be his successor and everyone expects this to be a farce of an election. Do you think that’s right? Or are there some real underlying issues here?

Well, the drama associated with this transition—if you can call it that—is not about what will happen when the voters go to the polls. That is just a formality. But there is a real drama playing itself out that involves factional politics and policies and I think the future of Russia. You can see this at a number of levels. One is the kind of factional jockeying that is underway amongst parts of Putin’s entourage, including branches of the old KGB. There has been a tug of war between the Russian Federal Drug Control Service [FSKN] and the Federal Security Service [FSB]—the main successor to the KGB—that got so bad that one of the old former heads of the KGB had to appeal in public for a cooling of the conflict.

What was the issue?

The issue is turf, and whether one agency would be biting into another’s livelihood. And you’ve seen this in other realms.

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Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.