Power ploy?

Everything Vladimir Putin does these days is perceived as a move to further consolidate his power. Certainly, he has no shortage of it, with a rubber-stamp Parliament in place and a certain landslide in the presidential election on March 14. But the real question is how he intends to use that power.

Fradkov, 53, has spent the last few years working on some of Russia’s toughest issues — as a foreign trade official, as chief tax collector, and most recently as envoy to the European Union. He’s been doing what Russia needs to do, reform the administration, get the books in order, combat corruption, halt capital flight and work on Russia’s international standing. True, Fradkov is a man with no evident charisma or political ambition, and thus poses a far lesser political threat to Putin than the fired prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov.

But most heads of government in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union

have been little-known technocrats who served at the pleasure of the president. Fradkov is also probably a

one-time KGB official, like his boss. But that is not necessarily why Putin picked him. Fradkov’s career suggests that he was on the trade and economic side of the Soviet intelligence octopus. What is more important is that Fradkov was not involved in the corrupt privatisation schemes under Boris Yeltsin. — International Herald Tribune