Dmitry Medvedev

Dmitry Medvedev is presented as the learner in a political succession designed to keep Vladimir Putin in control without violating the constitutional limit on consecutive presidential terms. Rather than developing Medvedev as an independent political character, the account uses his brief presidency to show how a formal transfer of office could preserve the authority of the man who had vacated it.

Identity and Political Role

Medvedev enters the narrative in its account of the 2008 presidential transition. Putin, unable to run for a third consecutive term, arranged for Medvedev to become the new president while Putin took the post of prime minister. The book gives little information about Medvedev beyond this role in the transfer of power; his significance lies in the relationship the arrangement established between the new president and his predecessor.

The succession had a background in the search by Russia’s oligarchs for a cooperative successor to Boris Yeltsin. Boris Berezovsky proposed Putin, then quietly heading the Federal Security Service, to the other powerful oligarchs as a reliably loyal candidate. That earlier calculation provides context for the later arrangement: the transfer of the presidency did not, in the book’s telling, necessarily mean a transfer of political mastery.

The Two-Driver Arrangement

The narrator compares the new governing partnership to a driving-school car with two driver’s seats. Medvedev occupies the learner’s seat as president; Putin sits in the teacher’s seat as prime minister. The metaphor makes the imbalance legible: Medvedev is allowed to drive, but Putin remains beside him as the experienced instructor, ready to intervene if anything goes wrong. Putin’s paternal nod when Medvedev handles himself well further casts the partnership as supervision rather than an encounter between equal centers of authority.

The arrangement is described as ingenious because it joined constitutional form to continuing personal influence. Putin respected the rule against serving three consecutive presidential terms, while the division of offices kept him close to the executive power he had relinquished. Medvedev’s place in the pairing made that solution possible, but the account does not establish him as its architect or describe an independent political program of his own.

Uncertainty and Outcome

At the time, the arrangement left open whether Putin would return to the presidency in 2012, when the constitution would permit him to do so, or whether Medvedev, having acquired a taste for power, might challenge his mentor. The narrator presents the second possibility as a reversal of the earlier pattern: a subordinate could conceivably turn against the person who had helped make him ruler. It remains a question, not a conflict shown to have occurred.

Looking back, the narrator supplies the answer. The 2012 election confirmed Putin’s return, while Medvedev did not confront or displace him. The book describes the result as eight more years under Putin. Medvedev’s decisive narrative function is therefore to embody a succession that changed the occupant of the presidency without producing a change in the dominant political relationship.