WILL TWO YOUNG PRESIDENTS FACE OFF IN 2009?

He is four years younger than Barack Obama but like him he is a lawyer and a cool customer. He is also married to his childhood sweetheart and places a lot of emphasis on his family. But that is perhaps where many of the similarities end between Russian president, Dimtri Medvedev and America’s new president-elect.
Before Barack Obama could savor the joy of his election victory, Medvedev left him no doubt that when he enters the White House he will be dealing with a tough opponent in the Kremlin. In a public display of anger, Medvedev issued his strongest condemnation of the United States, threatening to place missiles close to the Polish border and to make a U.S. missile shield unworkable if it was placed in Poland. He also blamed America for a global economic meltdown and only grudgingly offered Barack Obama congratulations.
The Russian leader has probably been well briefed about Barack Obama and some of the information he is likely to have received may have been obtained illegally. According to the FBI, the computer systems of the Mc Cain and Obama campaigns were hacked by a foreign power, or powers, and over a sustained period the strategy plans of the campaigns were uploaded and transferred to foreign sites. While the Bureau refuses to point an accusing finger at Russia or China the likelihood is that they were the culprits. Over the past decade, China and Russia have authorized major intrusions into Pentagon and U.S. military and naval computer networks. If Russia was involved, its aim may have been to find out as much as possible about the dueling candidates for president, knowing Medvedev would have to negotiate with one of them come January.
Barack Obama will no doubt want to be fully briefed about his opposite number because relations between Russia and the U.S. have not only cooled but have become hostile in the latter stages of the Bush presidency. While a President Obama will learn all the secrets the CIA and NSA have amassed about Medvedev there is still a fair amount of information about him in the public domain.
For example, he was born in 1965 and grew up in a 430- sq ft. flat on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. It is a fact he likes to emphasize to indicate he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. By his own admission, he was a good student in his teens but he secretly developed a love of Western hard rock music that was banned at the time by the communist authorities. Using the black market, he bought lots of vinyl recordings of his favorite band, Deep Purple to the extent that today he has a huge collection of old vinyl discs, including many with songs by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. In his youth, it was a hobby he shared with his childhood sweetheart, Svetlana Vladimirovna, with whom he spent most of his time. The moment they left Secondary School they were married. He was 17 and she was 16. They later attended St. Petersburg University where he graduated with a PhD in law and she was awarded a Masters in economics. When he was 23, he took the unusual step of getting baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church. He has since said it was a personal decision that signaled a new beginning to his life. Part of the new beginning was working as an assistant law professor but before long he drifted into political life in St. Petersburg and met Vladimir Putin, a rising political star. When Putin became prime minister under Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, he sent word to Medvedev to join him in Moscow. Medvedev accepted and Putin appointed him deputy chief of the Kremlin staff. It was thestart of a meteoric rise for the young lawyer and it was clear Putin, the old KGB officer, was grooming his young friend for something bigger. In 2005, after Putin had been president for four years, he appointed Medvedev deputy prime minister. Later he made him head of Gazprom, the world largest gas corporation. It was a central plank in Russia’s economic revitalization, as well as a core element in its strategy of using energy as a political weapon.
For some of the old communist guard, Medvedev was too liberal for their liking. He advocated private property ownership, lower taxes, an independent judiciary and economic deregulation. Within communist party circles in Moscow he was accused of promoting policies that smacked of Western capitalism. None of that appeared to worry his mentor, Vladimir Putin. He was busy imposing his will on the machinery of power, leaving members of the Bush administration somewhat perplexed. They still wanted to believe President Bush that he had looked into Putin’s soul and found a fellow traveler. That was a poor reading of Putin’s persona and ambitions.
By 2007, political insiders in Russia were made aware Putin had no intention of relinquishing power when his second term as president elapsed in 2008.In fact he had a plan to retain power, thereby demonstrating that all along he had been a manipulative KGB “fox.” He announced he was willing to step down as president but would remain as prime minister. That would not, he insisted, erode the power of the next president. At the same time, he endorsed Medvedev as his successor with the words: “I have known him for 17 years and have worked closely with him during those years.”
In March 2008, Medvedev was elected president in a landslide victory and within months had established a set of principles to reshape the Russian Federation’s foreign policy. He made it clear he was committed to international law but at the heart of his policy was his conviction the world was multi polar. His use of the polarity terminology can best be explained like this.
During the Cold War there were two superpowers, creating a bi-polar world but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the dominant power, thereby making international relations uni-polar.
Medvedev now sees a multi-polar world, implying that the U.S. is in decline as a superpower and there is therefore no single, dominant force in the world. Instead, the U.S., Russia and the emerging powers such as India and China are economically interdependent. As a consequence, diplomacy and not military might should be the guiding feature of international relations. While some may argue that the placing of missiles along the Polish border and his threat to jam a US missile shield is hardly in keeping with Medvedev’s multi-polar philosophy, he will argue that his threats were related to another part of his foreign policy, namely his determination to defend Russia at any cost. Like Putin, he argues that a U.S. missile shield so close to Russian territory represents a threat because it will neutralize Russia’s military potential.
When Medvedev is not consumed by matters of state he spends as much time as he can with his wife and son. Like the president-elect of the United States, he also attends the gym every day and eats in his Moscow apartment. He has a cat and it is rumored he had it neutered because it fought constantly with a cat belonging to Mikhail Gorbachev, who lives in the same apartment building. He also has a tank of tropical fish and frequently listens to his collection of Western hard rock music. In February 2008, he attended a Deep Purple concert in Moscow.
In 2009, he may recognize in the new U.S. president many of his own intellectual qualities. However, he will discover he is dealing with a president who is his own man. That cannot be said about Medvedev while his mentor still sits at his shoulder, representing an old guard that never truly vanished from the scene after the fall of the Soviet empire. In putting the quiet, cool Petersburg lawyer into the top job, Putin attempted to put a pleasant face on Russian politics in an effort to obscure the fact that Cold War warriors like him are quietly tightening their grip on power. On the other hand, Medvedev is no slouch and may be waiting for the time when he can assert control over Russia’s future. There is the possibility he and Obama may find common ground on how to handle relations between their countries and how to defuse the tension that has built up over the Bush administration’s plans for installing a missile shield within sight of Russia’s borders.
There s one other scenario. Medvedev may step aside in 2009 and allow Putin to regain the presidency. That is not out of the question because the Russian parliament may be asked to change the constitution, allowing Putin to stand again for two terms of 6 years each in duration instead of the present 4.