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Medvedev: too liberal to go all the way?

Dmitry Medvedev is Putin’s choice for president. But he’s not a shoo-in, says john lloyd

Kremlinology, as an art, gets no easier. The consensus view on Vladimir Putin was that he was becoming more Stalin-like - or, at any rate, Brezhnev-like - by the week, showing a steady determination to crack down on democratic parties, on the media and on elections which might not favour his supporter parties in the state Duma.

The consensus view is not, I think, wrong: but it is not flexible enough. Even under Communism, there were extraordinary eruptions from what (in the Kremlinologists' view) should have happened. Khrushchev gave a secret speech denouncing Stalin and decreeing a thaw. Mikhail Gorbachev destroyed the Soviet empire and the Communist party from the top of the party.

Now, against the current run of analysis, Putin has endorsed Dmitry Medvedev, first deputy prime minister and chairman of the

If he does take power, Medvedev will have two sets of rivals

state gas behemoth Gasprom, as his choice to follow him as president in March. It is an unexpectedly liberal move by Putin. From a man who has presided over a substantial KGB-isation of Russia, and who has characterised much of the past 20 years as a disaster for Russia because of the destruction of the Soviet Union, a liberal act was not to be looked for.

But to see Putin as only an iron fist was always too simple. Whatever his private inclinations - and these are unknowable - he governs a Russia where new freedoms have been embedded and their cancellation barely thinkable. These include the ability to travel, to speak and to vote without (much) fear, to create a private enterprise, and to read relatively freely (especially on the internet).

Westerners take these freedoms for granted, and are rightly alive to the threats to them: but for any Russians over 30, they remain novel - as is the ability to shop in stores where a range of products is offered and the staff don't behave like prison guards. Medvedev is the putative president for