Only Politics

As a schoolboy he worked on construction sites and did washing jobs to earn money so that he could buy jeans and foreign records. His favourites then were Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. He is Dmitri Medvedev, likely to be the next president of Russia. He will be sitting in the presidential chair because the Russian constitution does not alllow Putin to run for a third time. Medvedev is a staunch loyal Putin man and has been so since he met the latter while he was working in the mayor of Moscow’s office. He will owe the presidency entirely to Putin. His aims are similar to Putin’s; the chief of them being removal of corruption and improving healthcare. But there is no doubt that Medvedev is more open-minded and will have more cordial relations with the west; upto a point. He will not be able to go beyond the point when Putin starts frowning. It is to be seen how popular Medvedev turns out to be. If he becomes highly popular, tensions will rise between him and his ‘master.’ This could be catastrophic for Russia as the country does not have strong institutions. But this is looking too much into the future. For the near future, he will remain what western diplomats and media is calling him, ‘Putin’s poodle.’Right now he has hardly any strong identity, besides being Putin’s man. His only claim to fame (besides, of course, of having a name that Hillary Clinton cannot pronounce) is as the man who turned Gazprom, the Russian gas company, from a $670 million baby in 1996 into a giant today which gives Russia $25 billion in profits every year.