Joe Biden is a “strange grandfather with dementia”. The EU leadership are “lunatics”. Russia will ensure that Ukraine “disappears from the map” in the near future.
Welcome to another week as seen through the eyes of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and prime minister, and currently the deputy head of the country’s security council.
Medvedev has been on quite a political journey in recent years. Back in 2008, when he became Russia’s president, he promised modernisation and liberalisation, and frequently spoke of his love for blogging and gadgets. He even visited Silicon Valley and received a new iPhone 4 from Steve Jobs.
Now, he is an enthusiastic participant in the macho posturing and genocidal rhetoric that have become the main currency of political discourse in wartime Moscow.
“I’m often asked why my Telegram posts are so harsh,” wrote Medvedev recently. “Well, I’ll answer: I hate them. They are bastards and degenerates. They want us, Russia, to die. And while I’m still alive, I will do everything to make them disappear.” He did not specify whether the “they” in question referred to Ukrainians, western politicians, or both.
Medvedev’s physical transformation is as extraordinary as his ideological shift: a decade ago he was boyish, nerdy and seemed almost charmingly awkward wearing a suit and conducting the business of state. Now he looks jaded and puffy-faced, his eyes glazed over as he launches tirades against the west.
Medvedev’s rebooted persona is an apparent attempt to retain political relevance in a climate that has darkened significantly in the decade since he left the presidency.
“He’s trying to save himself from political oblivion by out-Heroding Herod, and consequently posturing as a candidate in a Kremlin Apprentice show,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Maria Pevchikh, an associate of the imprisoned Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, interpreted Medvedev’s shift in more personal terms: “When you feel you are a pointless and pathetic person, like Dmitry Medvedev, you try to reinvent yourself from time to time. He could have shaved his head, or gone to the gym … but instead he decided to reinvent himself as a hawk,” she said, in a video discussion devoted to Medvedev’s strange behaviour in May.
While Medvedev’s reincarnation has largely been treated as cringeworthy, it is also symbolic of the dashed hopes of a decade ago, when some people believed the system constructed under Vladimir Putin might be capable of carrying out some kind of liberalisation.
In 2008 Putin stepped aside, because the constitution at that point only allowed two four-year terms. He moved out of the Kremlin to become prime minister, and personally chose Medvedev, with whom he had worked since 2000, as his successor.
“Someone with ideas would probably have got rid of Putin pretty quickly, and Putin didn’t want to risk that. Medvedev fit the bill as a dependent person. He tried to fit in with consensus, just as he is trying to fit in now,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, who spent more than a decade as a Kremlin adviser.
But although Medvedev was clearly subordinate to Putin, he cut a very different figure to the former KGB man. He talked of his love for rock music and excitedly spoke about the possibilities of the internet, actively tweeting and blogging. Putin, in contrast, does not know how to use the internet. Medvedev also bemoaned the lack of judicial independence in Russia and made several sweeping statements that suggested he backed real reform.
“It was clear that he really, seriously liked the liberal part of the country, and it wasn’t just a political strategy; he really wanted to be the president of a normal, civilised country,” said Natalia Sindeyeva, the founder of TV Rain, Russia’s main independent television channel, which began broadcasting during Medvedev’s presidency and received his backing when he visited the studio in 2011.
Russian liberals were divided on whether Medvedev had a chance of becoming a real politician with his own agenda. “It may turn out that he’s no better than Putin. But if we do nothing, we’ll just end up with Putin anyway,” said the veteran human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva at the time.
In time, Medvedev also won a constituency among part of the Kremlin elite, who hoped they could ensure him a second presidential term in which he would slowly reduce the influence of the hardline former KGB agents in government.
Medvedev became fixated on the idea of a second term, those who knew him say. On occasion he even clashed with Putin in public, notably when Medvedev authorised a Russian abstention on a UN vote over intervention in Libya.
He flirted with the idea of setting up a new political party, and many around Medvedev, including Vladislav Surkov, one of the most important Kremlin advisers, urged him to push for a second term.
“Of course, there was huge hope and there was a feeling of political thaw, and the thought that if he went for a second term we would become more open to the world,” said Sindeeva.
But when Putin summoned Medvedev to a fishing trip in summer 2011 and told his protege he would be returning to the presidency, Medvedev meekly accepted it.
“When it came down to it, Medvedev just wasn’t able to take the risk. He wasn’t up to it,” said Pavlovsky. As part of the deal, Medvedev asked that he should remain prime minister, and seems to have genuinely hoped he would become president again after four years.
But Putin had other ideas, sidelining many of Medvedev’s associates and giving the new prime minister the poisoned chalice of running the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, essentially acting as a lightning rod for criticism while Putin played the “good tsar”, above the political fray.
“The paradox was that exactly after Medvedev did what Putin wanted, Putin stopped trusting him, and that turned Medvedev’s life into misery,” said Pavlovsky.
In Medvedev’s subsequent public appearances, he already looked a broken man. He was frequently caught on camera napping at official events, including at the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. A video investigation by Navalny linked a network of palaces and vineyards to Medvedev. He denied the allegations, but there followed a wave of street protests from those who felt Medvedev had turned out to be just as venal as others in the Russian elite.
As time went on, rumours swirled in Moscow political circles about Medvedev’s increasing alcohol consumption. In 2020, Putin told him to resign as prime minister but gave him a token job as deputy chair of the security council.
“There’s a lot of things going on inside his head, of course, but I think a big part of his current behaviour is a sense of personal anger and resentment at Russian liberals, who in the end did not accept him,” said one source who knows Medvedev.
In the decade after Medvedev left the presidency, hopes for any kind of genuine liberalisation in Russia faded. In 2014, Putin decided on the annexation of Crimea, and since then the system has only grown more authoritarian.
TV Rain, the television station promoted by Medvedev, was taken off air in 2014. In 2021 it was branded a “foreign agent” and its online output was effectively outlawed soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It recently started broadcasting again from outside Russia.
Twitter, once so beloved by Medvedev, was banned in Russia earlier this year. And now, instead of talking about copying innovative economic ideas from the US, Medvedev talks about nuclear war.
According to Pavlovsky, the increasing authoritarianism of the Putin regime, and even the invasion of Ukraine, can be traced back to the failed attempts to manage a transition.
“Medvedev lost it a bit when he wasn’t able to keep the presidency, and I think Putin lost it a bit too when he realised there was no way to make a transition of power work. The system had no mechanisms to do it … and it’s partly because of that failure of transition that we have ended up where we are today.”
