Awaiting Russian presidential vote, is Putin-Medvedev rift all part of the game?

Source: Washington Post

MOSCOW — Less than a year before the presidential election, with the country ruled in deep secrecy, political discourse has been reduced to parsing every remark by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev for signs of their intentions.

Neither has said whether he will run, but the exercise has produced a lively political horse race, with one sounding presidential and a certain candidate one week, only to fall victim to a barbed comment from the other and lag behind, out of the running, the next.

If only, lament those watching from the sidelines, it were true. “I believe there is no competition,” says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a member of Putin’s United Russia party and a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences who studies the decision-making elite. “Our politics are a theater. There are directors and a script. And for some reason they love it when the public says there are conflicts.”

Lilia Shevtsova, a mordant critic of the administration and a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, uses remarkably similar language in reaching a comparable conclusion. “There are no politics,” she says. “Politics exist where you have an independent media, attentive audience and unpredictable script. What’s interesting is that the Kremlin supports this story-telling.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/awaiting-russian-presidential-vote-is-putin-medvedev-rift-all-part-of-the-game/2011/04/29/AFgLDyBG_story.html?hpid=z3

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This phase probably is a game. That being said, I stand by my prediction that Medvedev just might surprise a lot of people. especially Putin.