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2 Russia's new premier has
bite By John Helmer
MOSCOW - Russia's new Prime Minister
Victor Zubkov has moved from obscurity to
presidential status in half a day, showing
character not seen in Moscow for 25 years.
The man, whose name in Russian means
"tooth", shows he has mettle and bite - confidence
in himself, pride in what he has done, and
toughness toward what he must do, characteristics
last on display in Moscow when Yuri Andropov took
charge. That was in
November 1982, when the
Soviet Union was still going strong, and Andropov,
head of the KGB, took over the country two days
after the death of Leonid Brezhnev.
In
Asia, the most likely reactions to Zubkov are a
sigh of relief in Beijing and renewed frustration
in Tokyo. If the Andropov model forecasts
anything, applied to Russia's future as energy,
minerals and metals supplier to the factories of
northern Asia, it means more certainty for China,
less for Japan.
Both for President
Vladimir Putin, who appointed Zubkov in a surprise
move on Wednesday, and for Sergei Ivanov, the
deputy prime minister expected, until now, to be
Putin's successor in presidential elections next
March, Andropov was a personal model and career
godfather, when they commenced their
intelligence-agency service in the mid-1970s.
Andropov was 68 in 1982 when he took over
as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party
and de facto head of government. Zubkov is 66, a
decade older than Putin and Ivanov, and the same
age as the two ex-KGB officers ranking highest on
Putin's staff, Victor Sechin and Victor Ivanov.
But Zubkov is not a KGB man.
Zubkov's
background is that of a farm manager, with
agronomy training to start and an early career
running collective farms in the Leningrad region.
From there he rose to deputy chairman of the
Leningrad region Communist Party. After the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he moved on
to the senior staff of St Petersburg mayor Anatoly
Sobchak. It was there that Zubkov began working
with Putin. From 1994 to 1999 he was the chief tax
inspector of St Petersburg, the man who knew where
all the skeletons, and the treasure, were buried
in what was the most criminalized of all Russian
cities.
When Putin became prime minister,
and then president in 2000, Zubkov was brought to
Moscow as overseer of tax evasion and
money-laundering. From 2004 until now he headed
the Federal Financial Monitoring Service of the
Finance Ministry. At the same time, his
son-in-law, Anatoly Serdyukov, was head of the
Federal Tax Service. In February, Putin appointed
Serdyukov defense minister, replacing Sergei
Ivanov, who moved up to deputy prime minister, and
president-in-waiting.
In retrospect, that
appointment appears to have been the first sign of
Putin's confidence in Zubkov. Unnoticed until now,
it was Zubkov and Serdyukov, acting as Putin's
overseers of the cash flow of the country, who
assisted in Putin's most decisive political and
economic move - the arrest in 2003 of oligarch
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the subsequent breakup
of the Yukos oil company group.
That
campaign, attributed by political analysts to
Putin's chief aide Sechin, continues to dismantle
the great oil, metal and mining fortunes amassed
during the years of the late president Boris
Yeltsin by a dozen men known as the oligarchs. To
combat the power of their money, Putin turned to
his old network of KGB colleagues, creating a
faction in government known as the siloviki
("the power men").
Just as the US
government once brought down Chicago gangster Al
Capone with an indictment for tax evasion, Putin's
choice of Zubkov means that the future Russian
government, and its economy, will be run by people
who intend to threaten the oligarchs, and control
them in the same fashion. Zubkov is backed by the
siloviki. His appointment is also a clear
signal that the US-favored candidate for
president, St Petersburg lawyer Dmitry Medvedev -
also deputy prime minister until now, and Ivanov's
rival - will not be promoted to govern the
country.
The new Russia is beginning to
look very much like the old one. But with oil at
US$80 per barrel, it is a magnitude more potent
than the economy Andropov took charge of in his
brief 15 months in office, before his death in
1984.
Commenting on Zubkov, one of the
sharpest of Kremlin observers said Putin "has a
level of trust in this man that he does not in
others. There are power centers around the others,
and Putin decided to pull the rug from under their
feet. Putin owes nothing to the present cabinet
and coterie, and the stability of the past eight
years has run its course. He has been constructing
a new team all this while, and bringing a man from
finance and tax is very significant in terms of
what could come next."
Gleb Pavlovsky, a
well-known political public relations man in
Moscow, with a penchant for spotting, and staying,
on the winning side, announced after Zubkov's
nomination as prime minister: "Doubtless, the new
prime minister will be this candidate [for
president], but one should take into account one
important nuance." According to Pavlovsky, if
parliamentary elections scheduled for December do
not go the way the Kremlin wants, and there is an
eruption of unplanned protest from voters, Zubkov
could become Putin's scapegoat, and he may be
dropped from the succession plan.
"The
government structure is not very effective, so
changes are imminent," Zubkov told the press after
he went to the State Duma [parliament] to meet
parliamentary factions. "If I get something done
here, in this post of prime minister, then I do
not exclude that," he added, referring to the
presidency.
In his first public
appearances, Zubkov, who is a short man (like
Putin), demonstrated unsmiling stature. He speaks
without the stumbling, hesitation or grammatical
error of his immediate predecessor, Mikhail
Fradkov, or Yeltsin's longest-serving prime
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