Julia Ioffe: Vladimir the Eternal

Julia Ioffe is Foreign Policy's Moscow correspondent.

Back in December 2007, with his second presidential term running out, Vladimir Putin decided not to violate the letter of the Russian constitution. Instead, he chose to step down, become prime minister, and nominate one of his old St. Petersburg buddies, an aide named Dmitry Medvedev, for president. Back then, a good joke started to make the rounds: Russia, 2023. Putin and Medvedev are sitting in one of their kitchens, drinking and shooting the breeze. "Listen," slurs Putin. "I've lost track again. Which one of us is prime minister, and which is president?"

"You're the president now, I think," slurs Medvedev.

"Well," slurs Putin, "then it's your turn to go and get more beer."

It was a prophetic joke, and one that turned out to be all too accurate Saturday, when Medvedev announced the latest switch: Putin will return to the presidency in next year's election and Medvedev will take up the prime minister's post. And yet the joke was somehow lost on us over the last four years as we (rightly) let other debates get in the way, from the long silly distraction of wondering who was actually in charge (answer: Putin, of course) to the disputes over whether to believe Medvedev's talk of modernization. Even despite these last few months, when it became clear that Putin would come back, we managed to be surprised all over again when it actually happened...