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'Puppet-master' Putin advisor is shown the Kremlin door

Vladislav Surkov was once one of the president's most influential and deft advisers. His forced resignation suggests the Kremlin may be pursuing blunter ways of manipulating the political landscape.

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Even critics were often admiring of Surkov's deft behind-the-scenes manipulation of Russian politics, which produced massive pro-Putin majorities in several elections and generally eschewed the application of crude police methods and – until the 2011 Duma polls – blatant mass electoral fraud.

Fred Weir

Correspondent

Fred Weir has been the Monitor's Moscow correspondent, covering Russia and the former Soviet Union, since 1998.

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The curtain dropped briefly on Surkov's almost spider-like role in September 2011, when tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov angrily quit as head of the pro-Kremlin Right Cause Party, and publicly accused Surkov of acting like a "puppet-master" and trying to micromanage all his key decisions, including party program and candidate lists.

Analysts say Surkov's fall from Kremlin grace was largely propelled by his failure to prevent or even predict the emergence of the street protest movement. When it first appeared, he made the mistake of describing the mainly-youthful, educated, and middle-class demonstrators as "the best part of society."

Many analysts say Surkov has since moved into the camp of former president and current prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, who appears to be under increasingly furious attack from Russia's pro-Putin conservatives, because he is perceived as the head of the more liberal, pro-Western wing of Russia's bureaucracy and business community.

In recent weeks Surkov had been engaged in a war of words with the powerful head of the Kremlin's Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin. Mr. Bastrykin's agency, the most powerful police body in Russia, has been investigating the alleged misappropriation of funds at Skolkovo, a futuristic Kremlin-funded technopark near Moscow that was championed by then-President Medvedev. Surkov is a supervisory board member.

"The energy with which the investigative committee publishes their suppositions evokes the feeling among normal people that a crime took place," Surkov said in a public speech in Britain last week.

"But it is just the investigative committee’s style. It is their energy. Let them prove it," he said.

It seems fairly apparent that it is no longer Surkov, but the more blunt-edged Mr. Bastrikin who is tasked with managing Russia's political outcomes these days.

Over the past year there has been a major crackdown on foreign-funded NGOs and a wave of arrests of protest leaders, who are charged with participating in elaborate, foreign-backed conspiracies aimed at fomenting violent revolution in Russia.

"Surkov is no longer needed to regulate the system in his way, because Putin has switched to much tougher measures," says Nikolai Petrov, a political science professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

"His departure bespeaks tectonic shifts in the foundations of Russia's political system. It was probably triggered by something more immediate, such as the Skolkovo business, but it is a sign that we are going down a very different road from the past," he adds.

As for Surkov's future intentions, he told the Russky Pioner magazine this week that he might write a novel.

"I have a plot for a political comedy based on real events," he said.