In Surprise Move, Putin Names New Prime Minister

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 12, 2007; 12:30 PM

MOSCOW, Sept. 12 -- President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday nominated a longtime associate who is a largely anonymous figure to be the country's new prime minister, scrambling predictions about who will be the Kremlin-backed candidate in next March's presidential election.

Viktor Zubkov, 65, was chosen by the president hours after Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov resigned. Zubkov, chairman of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service, a body that investigates money-laundering, must be approved by the lower house of parliament, or Duma, which invariably approves Kremlin initiatives.

Fradkov, a colorless technocrat who loyally followed Kremlin orders, said he was leaving his post so Putin would have a free hand to create a new government in the run-up to the presidential election, as well as parliamentary elections scheduled for December.

Putin, accepting Fradkov's resignation, sounded a similar note to explain the government reshuffle, and also hinted that Zubkov may be around for a while.

"We all need to think about how to build up the structure of power and governance so they are better suited to the pre-election period," said Putin in televised remarks from the Kremlin. He added that "we need to prepare the country for the time after the parliamentary election and after the presidential election."

Putin himself was first appointed prime minister in 1999 six months before President Boris Yeltsin resigned on New Year's Eve, catapulting his young charge into the Kremlin. Putin is required under the Russian constitution to step down after serving two consecutive terms but would be free to run again after a successor served as president.

Many analysts here had expected Putin to follow the same scenario as Yeltsin and appoint a premier who could burnish his presidential credentials in a compressed time frame that would give little opportunity for damaging political crises or blunders.

Zubkov, however, wasn't on anyone's radar.

For months now, Sergey Ivanov and Dmitry Medvedev, both first deputy prime ministers, have been seen as the two leading figures competing for Putin's nod for president. The Russian newspaper Vedomosti confidently reported Wednesday that Ivanov, a former minister of defense, would be appointed prime minister.

The appointment of Zubkov baffled analysts, and some found it hard to believe that he could eventually become president.

"Really, it's a very weird appointment," said Yevgeny Volk, head of the Heritage Foundation in Moscow, in a phone interview. "Zubkov doesn't seem like a candidate fit for the presidency. This may be to divert the public from the real candidate for the moment. But Kremlin-watchers now have a lot of food for thought."

Zubkov is a close ally of Kremlin officials Viktor Ivanov and Igor Sechin, who are among the leaders of former military and security services officials, known as the siloviki, who people the government and state-controlled companies, according to a report last March by the Center for Current Politics in Russia.

Viktor Ivanov and Sechin helped Zubkov move to Moscow from St. Petersburg, where in the early 1990s he had served under Putin on a foreign affairs committee in the mayor's office. In the 1990s, Zubkov and Putin were also neighbors in a community of country homes outside St. Petersburg where much of Putin's circle first coalesced.

The Center for Current Politics described Zubkov as a "henchman" of Viktor Ivanov's and a "prot?g?" of Sechin's. He has "preserved the reputation of a man from the president's private circle," it said in the report. The center noted that Zubkov has been invited to Putin's very exclusive birthday parties.

Zubkov's son-in-law Anatoly Serdyukov is Russia's minister of defense.

"They are all buddies," said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, head of the Department for the Study of Elites at the Institute of Sociology in Moscow, in a telephone interview.

Zubkov was born in the Sverdlovsk region of central Russia. A Communist Party functionary, he graduated from the Leningrad Agricultural Institute in 1965 before being named general-director of a group of collective farms.

In 1999, after Putin became prime minister, Zubkov became deputy minister of taxation for the Russian Federation. That same year, he ran for governor of the Leningrad region but only got 8 percent of the vote. He later became deputy minister of finance and chairman of the body in charge of stamping out money-laundering, a post where he largely avoided publicity.

"Sometimes the press sounds a note of disappointment because, they say, the Financial Monitoring Service cannot boast any high-profile cases," he said in a rare interview this year with the Russian weekly Argumenty I Fakty. "I am convinced that this is good. We don't even recommend using our documents in court or for investigation. Our purpose is to quietly force dishonest participants out of the market and make the financial sector more transparent."

Despite his closeness to Putin and his ties within governing circles, Zubkov had no political profile until Wednesday. In that, he may fit into a political scenario about which there has been endless speculation here: that a caretaker president would keep Putin's seat in the Kremlin warm until he returns in 2012 or sooner. The Russian constitution would allow Putin to run again in 2012, or earlier if the successor president resigned ahead of schedule.

"I believe Viktor Zubkov is an ideal candidate for the presidency," said Victor Ilyukhin, a communist deputy in parliament, speaking on Ekho Moskvy radio. "He is a very close friend of Putin. He is loyal, controls all financial flows, and he is not young. He will be 66 soon, so it looks like the Kremlin is implementing the scenario of Putin coming back in 2012. The fact that he is not young is very important: They have chosen somebody who definitely will not have any ambitions, whereas if there had been somebody younger he might say: 'Well, why can't I work for a second term?' "

With the Kremlin's ability to control the critical broadcast media and marginalize any opposition, Putin's choice for president is likely to coast to electoral victory next March --even if he is little-known now. The president's choice will also be able to exploit Putin's huge popularity, and Putin has said he will eventually let voters know whom he would like them to vote for.

"Perhaps he is the successor, but he doesn't look like a successor," said Boris Makarenko, a political analyst at the Center for Political Technologies, in a telephone interview.

He said Zubkov's term as prime minister could also be a sop for Viktor Ivanov and Sechin if Putin chooses someone outside their circle for the presidency, because they would be working with a prime minister who is in essence their man. Or, he said, Zubkov may indeed be the presidential place-holder, allowing Putin to return, which is reportedly the fervent wish of the siloviki.

"Until further notice, either scenario is possible," Makarenko said.