Speculation in Russia is rampant about who may succeed Vladimir Putin as president next year.
Mr. Putin has said that he will make his own choice known during the presidential campaign in early 2008. The two names most often mentioned in Russia and abroad are two of his closest colleagues, first deputy prime ministers Sergei Ivanov and Dmitri Medvedev.
But Timothy Colton, director of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasion Studies, said recently that all kinds of Kremlin names are being bandied about and that the eventual successor may come out of the blue.
“All this is keeping in mind that in 1999 [former president Boris] Yeltsin surprised us by picking Putin as his successor, and so there is the precedent, and he's certainly going to have a very good chance of imposing whomever he wants,” Mr. Colton said in an interview with the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.
Russian deputy prime ministers Sergei Ivanov, left, and Dmitri Medvedev, are both potential candidates to succeed President Vladimir Putin. (Misha Japaridze/AP)
“He simply hasn't tipped his hand yet.”
One of the few declared candidates is Viktor Gerashchenko, a 69-year-old former central banker and former chairman of Yukos oil company, who has set himself up as compromise candidate of Russia's fracture opposition.
Without unity “the opposition will have no possibility of making some shift in the direction of democratic change,” Mr. Gerashchenko said recently.
Most early media attention has focused on Mr. Ivanov, touted earlier this month as the front-runner by Konstantin Remchukov, owner and editor-in-chief of the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, citing “three very serious sources in the Kremlin.”
Mr. Ivanov, 54, oversees Russia's military-industrial complex. Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Ivanov is a former KGB official and moved to the Kremlin on his advice. Mr. Medvedev, 41, is like Mr. Putin in another way. He is a lawyer by training, and they worked together in the St. Petersburg municipal government in the early 1990s. As well as being a first deputy prime minister, Mr. Medvedev is also chairman of the energy giant Gazprom.
Other names bandied about as possible Putin successors include:
* Prime Minister Mikhail Fradov
* former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov
* Vladimir Yakunin, head of the Russian railway system
* Sergei Sobyanin, Mr. Putin's chief of staff
