Russia’s top duo fight to save reputation from flames

Be it dousing fires from a plane or sacking several officers in a single meeting, Russia’s ruling tandem is battling to ensure its hold on power does not go up in smoke in the wildfire crisis.

Image-making has emerged as significant a weapon in the crisis as hoses or water-bombing jets as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev seek to ensure their popularity survives the crisis intact.

With Russia emerging from the slowdown, the duo may have been congratulating themselves on deftly seeing off the economic crisis as they planned their summer holidays.

But then Russia found itself hit by a heat wave that wrecked 10 million hectares of land and triggered wildfires which have killed over 50 people and burned down entire villages.

Holidays – which last year saw a half-nude Mr Putin proudly posing on horseback and Mr Medvedev wading around in the Volga Delta in a wetsuit – have been swept off the agenda.

But image-making is very much on, amid a new climate of uncertainty.

With a pair of headphones clamped to his ears, Mr Putin on Tuesday took the controls of a plane to scoop up water from a lake in one of the worst affected regions and then dump it on the burning forests.

Taking a page from Mr Putin’s tough-guy handbook, Mr Med­vedev last week staged an extraordinary meeting over the damage caused by the fires to a naval logistics centre in which he personally sacked five officers in the space of 30 seconds.

“The two are in a very strong public relations drive,” Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Centre, one of Russia’s leading pollsters, said.

“Putin goes up in the plane, puts out fires, Medvedev sacks the little scapegoats, they hand out money and the public likes it,” he added.

The fires have struck at a crucial political moment, with speculation growing over the intentions of the two men ahead of the next presidential elections in 2012.

Mr Putin handed over the Presidency to Mr Medvedev in 2008 after serving a maximum of two consecutive four-year terms but has never ruled out returning to the Kremlin in 2012.

The crisis has also coincided with the anniversary of what was possibly the worst PR disaster of Mr Putin’s decade in power, the sinking of the Kursk submarine in August 2000 with the loss of 118 lives.

Then a relatively novice President, Mr Putin notoriously failed to break off his holiday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi as the full impact of the tragedy became clear.

“Ten years ago, Putin’s critics predicted that his career had sunk with the Kursk. But it is only now that the regime is losing itself in the catastrophe of this summer,” said the Gazeta.ru online newspaper.

This time, Mr Putin was relatively quick off the mark, dramatically pictured standing amid the smouldering wreckage of the village of Verkhnyaya Vereya in the Nizhny Novgorod region, although he later found himself heckled by residents.

He then came up with the idea of installing video cameras to monitor reconstruction efforts at the worst hit areas. These broadcast direct to the premier’s office and home and can also be viewed on the government website.

However, his latest stunt – dropping tonnes of water from a plane – was a step too far for some.

“This is a tunnel vision of the PR-makers who believe that a TV picture of Putin behind the wheel of something is an eternal panacea for a falling rating,” leading business daily Vedomosti commented bitterly.

Vedomosti acidly noted that Mr Medvedev earlier this week warned political opponents not to try and profit from the crisis by carrying out “political PR”.