(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It’s hard not to link the arrest of Mikhail Abyzov, a former government minister in Russia, with the political fate of his ex-boss, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
Five years before President Vladimir Putin has to hand over power to a successor, or make some kind of play to keep it, the country’s powerful security apparatus is already in the game.
Abyzov, 46, was an unlikely figure in the government. A math prodigy, he dropped out of Moscow University in his sophomore year to go into business in the stormy 1990s. As an energy investor, he quickly became known for his doggedness and ability to think on his feet. By the age of 27, he was a key member of political reformer Anatoly Chubais’s team, which was then overhauling Russia’s troubled power grid. Abyzov is credited with eliminating non-payments and barter, which had long plagued the industry.
His own business projects first grew and then crashed. But by the time his business building power plants went bankrupt in 2014, Abyzov was a member of Medvedev’s government. In 2012, he joined it as minister for open government — that is, for transparency, digitalization and outreach to experts and society. He wasn’t a particularly close associate of Medvedev, but he was close to people who were, and open government was a pet project of the prime minister’s which the deeply conservative Putin never liked. The program was closed last year.
Medvedev’s team of technocrats has regularly come under attack in recent years. In November 2016, Economy Minister Alexey Ulyukayev was arrested after key Putin ally Igor Sechin, chief executive officer of state-controlled oil company Rosneft, personally set up a sting operation, handing over a large bribe. Ulyukayev, who argued it was a set-up, was sentenced to eight years in a prison camp in 2017. Then, last year, Ziyavudin Magomedov, who had become a billionaire during Medvedev’s four-year presidency, was arrested for embezzlement.
Medvedev was powerless to protect these allies. Now, Abyzov’s turn has come. While Putin, according to his press secretary, knew about the arrest in advance, Medvedev’s spokesman made it clear that the prime minister only learned about it after the fact.
There are two reasons why Abyzov’s arrest is likely to be part of an attempt to undermine Medvedev rather than an isolated incident. One is that the ex-minister, who has lived in Italy lately, was lured to Moscow by people who told him it would be safe to attend the birthday party of Arkady Dvorkovich, one of Medvedev’s closest allies and his former deputy prime minister.
The other reason is the charges themselves. Abyzov is accused of selling energy assets to a state company for an inflated price of 4 billion rubles ($61.6 million). Deals of this size involving government-owned firms need ministerial approval, and that should add to Medvedev’s discomfort.
Kremlin politics are byzantine, and it’s been years since it was possible to get accurate information about the leadership’s inner workings, even on deep background. It’s impossible to say with any certainty whether Abyzov’s arrest is part of a coordinated attempt to undermine Medvedev. That would stand to reason, though.
Medvedev technocrats such as Ulyukayev and Abyzov are easy targets for corruption investigations. While their managerial skill equals that of their Western counterparts, their taste for the good life is rooted in the post-Soviet system which often compensates public servants in non-transparent ways. Abyzov’s Italian villa was the target of an investigation by anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny, who accused an Abyzov-owned utility in Novosibirsk of inflating residents’ bills to fund his lavish lifestyle. Navalny has also published a bombshell investigation into Medvedev himself, watched almost 29 million times on YouTube.
It’s easy, therefore, for Russian law enforcers to pull on one loose thread after another to take out Medvedev allies, weakening the prime minister’s position and chipping away at his greatest asset: Putin’s personal trust.
When Putin refused to change the Russian constitution to give himself a third consecutive term as president in 2008, it was Medvedev, an old associate since both worked for the mayor of Saint Petersburg in the early 1990s, who did him the ultimate favor: He served as president for four years while allowing Putin to keep de facto power as prime minister, and he left peacefully when Putin claimed the Kremlin back afterwards.
Putin knows Medvedev can be trusted and that his ambitions don’t stretch to ousting him as national leader. So the president must be considering installing him once again in the top job in 2024 — along with a takeover of Belarus to form a new state, or a constitutional reform like the one Nursultan Nazarbayev has pulled off in Kazakhstan.
Medvedev and his people, however, are inconvenient for law enforcement and military hawks: They lean toward more liberal domestic and more open foreign policies than the hardliners are willing to allow. The latter want Putin to rely on them when he has to relinquish the presidency. As that time nears, we’ll see more signs of under-the-rug tussling. But, in Russia, it’s never too early to start weakening a rival and to narrow Putin’s choices.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
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