Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov (Aslambek Andarbekovitch Dudayev) — Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration of Russia, aide to President Vladimir Putin. Previously an employee of major "oligarchs" Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Mikhail Fridman. Having joined the administration of President Boris Yeltsin in early 1999, Surkov subsequently worked on a number of major political projects aimed at strengthening the position of President Vladimir Putin — including the creation of the youth movements "Walking Together" (2000) and "Nashi" (2005), the creation of the electoral bloc "Rodina" (2003), and the "party of power" United Russia (2003), as well as a second "party of power" — "A Just Russia: Rodina / Pensioners / Life" (2006).
Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov, according to his official biography, was born on September 21, 1964, in the village of Solntsevo in Lipetsk Region. According to other sources, Surkov (Aslambek Dudayev) was born in 1962 in the village of Duba-Yurt in the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic. His mother, Surkova Zinaida Antonovna, and his father, Dudayev Andarbek Danilbekovich, were both teachers. In a 2005 interview with the German publication Spiegel, Surkov stated that his father was indeed Chechen and that he himself had spent the first five years of his life in Chechnya.
According to several media outlets, after school Surkov enrolled at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys, where he met Mikhail Fridman. Surkov did not complete his studies there.
From 1983 to 1985, according to his official biography, Surkov served in the Soviet Army, in one of the artillery units of the Southern Group of Forces in Hungary. However, on November 12, 2006, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, in an interview with the Vesti Nedeli program broadcast on the Rossiya television channel, said he was prepared to reveal a "secret" to viewers: Surkov, like presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District Dmitry Kozak, had completed his compulsory military service in the special forces of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU).
After the army, Surkov enrolled at the Moscow Institute of Culture, studying theatrical directing. He did not complete this degree either, leaving after his third year.
Several media outlets reported that after leaving the institute Surkov worked as a lathe operator, while other publications claimed he spent some time running an amateur theater.
In 1987, Surkov headed the advertising department of the Center for Intersectoral Scientific and Technical Programs (TsMNTP) — the Youth Initiative Fund under the Frunzensky District Committee of the Komsomol — which had been founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. According to some accounts, he started out as Khodorkovsky's bodyguard.
Several media outlets claimed that Surkov came to Khodorkovsky from the cooperative "Kamelopart," where he had been an account manager (the cooperative occupied a room in the same building as the TsMNTP). At the same time, it was reported that in 1988 Surkov set up a PR agency called "Metapress," and from there moved, at Khodorkovsky's invitation, to the state-cooperative association "Menatep," which had been established in 1987 on the basis of the TsMNTP. Some sources also indicated that the cooperative "Kamelopart" was founded in 1988, while the agency was established in 1991 (in practice, it was already a division of Menatep).
From 1991 to 1996, Surkov held the positions of head of client relations and head of the advertising department at the Union of Credit and Financial Enterprises "Menatep," and subsequently at Menatep Bank, headed by Khodorkovsky. According to several media outlets, from January to May 1992 Surkov was a member of the Menatep board. That same year, in 1992, he briefly headed the Russian Association of Advertisers.
From 1996 to 1997, Surkov was appointed Deputy Head and then Head of the Public Relations Department of the closed joint-stock company "Rosprom."
In February 1997, Surkov moved to Alfa-Bank, headed by Mikhail Fridman, where he became First Deputy Chairman of the bank's board. The reasons for his move are unknown, though several publications suggested that Surkov had "grown tired of being third" (after Khodorkovsky and Leonid Nevzlin). Another version was also put forward: Surkov is not a team player — by nature a lone operator — and perhaps he simply gets bored staying in one place for too long.
In the late 1990s, Surkov graduated from the International University with a Master's degree in economics.
From 1998 to 1999, Surkov served as First Deputy Director General and Director of Public Relations at the open joint-stock company "Obshchestvennoye Rossiyskoye Televideniye" (ORT). In May 1998 he was elected Executive Secretary of ORT's Open Supervisory Board. Media reports indicated that Surkov had been invited to ORT by the businessman Boris Berezovsky.
In the spring of 1999, Surkov became an aide to Alexander Voloshin, Head of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, and in August 1999 his deputy. In early December 1999, owing to Surkov's own patronage, his former subordinate Alexander Abramov was appointed to the same post. The media subsequently suggested that Surkov's entry into the Kremlin was made possible by his connections with Berezovsky, while also not ruling out the possibility that he had been recommended by Fridman or Alfa-Bank president Pyotr Aven.
In his new role, according to media reports, Surkov was engaged in the planning and implementation of major political projects in the Kremlin's interests. As early as the autumn of 1999, experts were describing Surkov as a "brilliant communicator" and a "creative PR consultant capable of anticipating many events." The media credited Surkov with the creation of the pre-election bloc "Unity," formed in 1999 as a counterweight to the rapidly growing "Fatherland — All Russia" bloc of Yevgeny Primakov and Yury Luzhkov. Reports indicated that the idea of creating a powerful bloc based on regional elites loyal to the Kremlin had originally belonged to former Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Sergei Zverev, who had not had time to implement it. According to the magazine Obozrevatel, Berezovsky had also attempted to bring the idea to fruition, but it had gone no further than talk, and it was Surkov who took it up and revived it. However, some publications — for example Novaya Gazeta — wrote that Surkov had had no involvement in "Unity" (which was supposedly the work of another Deputy Head of the Administration, Igor Shabdurasulov) and had instead participated in creating the parliamentary group "People's Deputy," to which many "Unity" members transferred after the elections. In 2001, "Unity," merging with "Fatherland" and two parliamentary groups — "Regions of Russia" and "People's Deputy" — formed the All-Russian Union "Unity and Fatherland," which was later joined by the "All Russia" movement. That same year, the union was transformed into the all-Russian party "Unity and Fatherland" — United Russia, whose co-chairs were elected as Sergei Shoigu, Yury Luzhkov, and Mintimer Shaimiev (in 2002, Boris Gryzlov became chairman of the party's supreme council, and in December 2003 the party was renamed United Russia). In this way, as Surkov noted when speaking at a meeting of "Fatherland" movement members in July 2001, the "historic mistake" had been overcome — the "split" between "Unity" and "Fatherland," which had previously been political adversaries. Surkov himself was named as one of the chief architects and ideologists of United Russia as a "party of power" and the "mastermind" behind its victory in the parliamentary elections of December 2003.
In March 2004, Surkov was appointed Deputy Head of the Administration — Aide to the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin. In this role, Surkov was responsible for the organizational and information-analytical support of the President's activities on matters of domestic policy as well as federal and interethnic relations. He oversaw the work of the Presidential Directorate for Domestic Policy, and ensured the President's interaction with the Federation Council, the State Duma, the Central Electoral Commission of Russia, and with political parties, civic and religious associations, and trade unions. Within his purview also fell coordination with the state authorities of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation and local self-government bodies, as well as relations with the mass media. Surkov was involved in organizing support for the work of the Council for Culture and the Arts, the Council for Interaction with Religious Associations, and the Commission for State Prizes in the Field of Literature and the Arts under the President of the Russian Federation; he also coordinated draft decisions on the awarding of state prizes and presidential prizes in the fields of education, culture, literature, and the arts.
In September 2004, Surkov was elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of the open joint-stock company "AK Transneftprodukt" (TNP). In February 2006, Surkov left this post in accordance with an order from Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov.
According to media reports, Surkov was directly involved in the formation of several youth movements in Russia. He was associated with the pro-presidential youth movement "Walking Together," established in 2000 (a number of media outlets also named political technologists Gleb Pavlovsky and Marat Gelman as "founding fathers" of "Walking Together"). The movement was headed by former Presidential Administration employee Vasily Yakemenko. The first high-profile action of "Walking Together" took place on November 7, 2000, in Moscow on Vasilyevsky Spusk, when around 6,000 people gathered to call on citizens to "not drink," "not smoke," "not use foul language," and to support Vladimir Putin. The media deemed "Walking Together" a "failed project": the movement became a disreputable organization that ultimately began to discredit Putin in the eyes of both domestic and international public opinion. The press reported that the activities of most "Walking Together" activists were driven purely by financial interest.
"Walking Together" was succeeded in 2005 by "Nashi." On February 21, 2005, Kommersant reported on a meeting that had taken place in Saint Petersburg between Surkov and young people — the "commissars" of the new youth movement. Yakemenko also took part in the meeting, which the organizers had tried to keep from journalists' attention. According to Kommersant, Surkov and Yakemenko promised their supporters that by 2008 a new "party of power" would be built on the foundation of "Nashi," with particular emphasis placed on the fact that the creation of the movement had been approved by Vladimir Putin. The movement's founding congress was held at the Senezh rest house in the Moscow Region, which belongs to the Presidential Property Management Directorate. On March 1, 2005, Yakemenko officially announced the creation of the "Nashi" youth movement, whose stated primary goal was "the struggle against fascism in all its manifestations" (in July, the goals and objectives on the "Nashi" website were reformulated as "preserving the sovereignty and integrity of Russia, carrying out the modernization of the country, and forming an active civil society"). In May 2005, Yakemenko took the helm of the new movement, voluntarily stepping down as leader of "Walking Together." In the summer of 2005, 3,000 activists from 45 regions of the country gathered at a camp on Lake Seliger. Pavlovsky, a senior adviser to the head of the presidential administration, arrived at the gathering and urged activists to be prepared to "physically resist attempts at an unconstitutional coup," while Surkov, speaking at the rally, said: "Come sooner — we will hand the country over to you. The main thing is for you to know: we are with you." At the same gathering, President Putin met with movement members. Movement activists met with Putin at his Zavidovo residence outside Moscow in 2005 and at his Bocharov Ruchei residence in Sochi in 2006. At the latter meeting, Putin acknowledged the significance of the "Nashi" movement in the intellectual training of young leaders and thanked its activists for the work they were doing. However, a number of publications subsequently noted that "Nashi" quickly acquired a bad reputation and, in effect, repeated all the mistakes of its predecessors in the "Walking Together" organization.
As soon as information about the formation of "Nashi" emerged, analysts suggested that Surkov's new project might have been his own initiative — one supported not by the administration as a whole, but only by the so-called "family" faction, at the expense of the "Petersburg Chekists." Had Surkov succeeded in turning "Nashi" into a full-fledged party of power, his chances of remaining "in the loop" could have increased significantly. In the view of experts, in his work with youth organizations Surkov was betting on "a right-wing, imperial ideology based on the search for an external enemy." Some politicians, however — for example Nikolai Tonkov, leader of the Yaroslavl branch of United Russia, senator and member of the Federation Council Commission on Youth and Sport — maintained that "Nashi" was the "initiative of the Yakemenko brothers."
In September 2006, information was published about the Forum of Young Leaders, which the media described as a Kremlin project for cultivating a young reserve of power. Several media outlets also named Surkov as the project's curator. Surkov's participation in the Moscow event, in the view of analysts, made it plain to "young leaders" that career advancement was guaranteed only through cooperation with the existing authorities. The forum's own delegates made no secret of the fact that they saw no path to career advancement other than cooperation with United Russia.
In June 2006, Surkov introduced the term "sovereign democracy" into Russian political discourse, contrasting it with "managed democracy" — a political regime managed from outside. (Though in fact the term "sovereign democracy" had first appeared in print when Vasily Yakemenko used it in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda in October 2005: "We stand for sovereign democracy, where the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the state are both necessary and of equal value.") In July 2006, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, in an interview with the magazine Expert, called Surkov's term "far from ideal." According to Medvedev, when qualifiers are attached to the word "democracy," "this prompts the thought that what is being discussed is, after all, some kind of different, non-traditional democracy." Expert's editor-in-chief Valery Fadeyev — Medvedev's interviewer, a member of the Public Chamber, director of the Institute for Social Design, and one of the authors of the document substantiating the need for an economic model of sovereign democracy — stated that he saw no fundamental disagreement between the positions of Surkov and Medvedev. He explained Medvedev's objection to the concept of "sovereign democracy" by saying that the term could be interpreted as a rejection of "certain aspects of democracy" and as a desire on Russia's part to isolate itself from the outside world. It was also suggested that Medvedev was arguing not so much with the term's author as with the triad of national values in which it appeared — "sovereign democracy — a strong economy — military power" — put forward by Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, Medvedev's potential rival in the 2008 presidential election. At the same time, media drew readers' attention to the fact that, in criticizing Surkov's term, Medvedev had offered nothing in its place. The long-distance debate between Surkov and Medvedev in the pages of Expert continued: in the issue of November 20, the magazine published an article by Surkov titled "The Nationalization of the Future: Paragraphs pro Sovereign Democracy." In this piece, Surkov wrote: "It is admissible to define sovereign democracy as a mode of political life in society in which the authorities, their organs, and their actions are chosen, formed, and directed exclusively by the Russian nation in all its diversity and integrity, for the sake of achieving material wellbeing, freedom, and justice for all citizens, social groups, and peoples that comprise it."
Following the round table held in Moscow on August 30, 2006, on the theme "The Sovereign State in the Context of Globalization: Globalization and National Identity," representatives of United Russia declared that the term "sovereign democracy" should form the basis of the party's programmatic documents. In October 2006, United Russia presented a draft party program. As Kommersant reported, United Russia had made "sovereign democracy" a strategic thesis. According to the publication, sixty percent of the final draft was drawn from a document previously developed by a group of experts at Surkov's initiative.
The media also published information about Surkov's links to the Rodina party. One of the party's leaders, Sergei Glazyev, mentioned Surkov's influence over the organization during his conflict with the other Rodina leader, Dmitry Rogozin, in February–March 2004 (Glazyev warned that if the "Surkov-Rogozin" group prevailed, the Duma faction "would no longer serve the interests of its voters, but would simply become a branch of the presidential administration"). Some analysts linked Rodina to the group of "Petersburg security men" (or "Petersburg Chekists") led by Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration and presidential aide Igor Sechin. In particular, Kommersant reported in February 2005 that Rogozin had "stopped reporting to Surkov" and was meeting far more frequently with the Kremlin's "security men." Also aired in the media were versions suggesting that two or more factions within the presidential administration simultaneously wielded influence over Rodina. Subsequently, Surkov, in the view of several media outlets, distanced himself from Rodina. In an interview with the German magazine Spiegel in May 2005, Surkov stated: "Take the Communists or take Rodina — with all due respect, I cannot imagine what would become of the country if they came to power." When asked whether another pro-Kremlin party might be created — this time a liberal one — Surkov replied that no such project existed. "Parties cannot be created artificially or engineered in the Kremlin," he said, adding that one could only look benevolently upon the emergence of parties. Surkov observed: "We do not want to decide for people how many parties the country needs — two or seven… The key thing is that parties need to be of sufficient scale that a possible transfer of power to them would not lead to an irreversible change of course."
In 2006, Surkov, in the view of several media outlets, played one of the leading roles in establishing a second "party of power" as an alternative to United Russia — "A Just Russia," created on the basis of a merger of the Rodina party, the Russian Party of Pensioners (RPP), and the Russian Party of Life (RPL). In March 2006, speaking to representatives of the RPL, Surkov said the country needed "a second major party." "Society has no 'second leg' to stand on when the first one goes numb," he said. At the end of June, Rodina and the RPL announced that they were prepared to become such a major party, and in August the RPP joined them. On October 28, 2006, at the 7th Congress of Rodina, the alliance participants adopted a "Manifesto" proclaiming the creation of the party "A Just Russia: Rodina/Pensioners/Life."
A number of analysts maintained that Surkov had had a direct hand in the unexpected pivot of the previously apolitical RPL toward left-wing ideology. The idea of the surprise merger of the Party of Life with Rodina was also attributed to him, according to the magazine Vlast. It was pointed out that the creation of a new party would bring the country's "party architecture" close to a two-party system — an idea that, according to the publication, had long been circulating within the Kremlin. Moreover, according to analysts' forecasts, the new system would be not only bipartisan but bicameral: in the lower house of parliament, should the new party succeed in the parliamentary elections, the number of its supporters would surge, while United Russia would dominate the upper house. Vedomosti cited analyst Dmitry Badovsky of the Research Institute of Social Systems, who maintained that at Surkov's insistence a key role in "A Just Russia" was assigned to the Party of Pensioners, which he controlled — enabling the Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration to exert influence over the new political structure. The media also reported that former Deputy Governor of Tula Region Igor Zotov was elected head of the Russian Party of Pensioners shortly after Surkov's visit to Tula, where he had met with the regional governor Vyacheslav Dudka. However, a number of experts interpreted the emergence of the new party as a declaration of war on United Russia by the "Petersburg security men." Andrei Ryabov, a member of the academic council of the Carnegie Moscow Center, argued that the merger of the left was in the interests of the "Petersburg security men," who were trying to move onto territory that until then had been entirely Surkov's domain. No one, however, doubted the Kremlin's authorship of the new party project. Commenting on the creation of the new party, the director general of the Institute of Political Technologies, Igor Bunin, noted that United Russia would certainly win the 2007 elections, "but the Kremlin is looking further ahead. Given any shifts in the system, United Russia could fracture — especially ahead of the presidential elections."
In late June 2006, the media mentioned Surkov in connection with the scandal surrounding the eviction by bailiffs of residents from the Yuzhnoye Butovo microdistrict. Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov accused the Muscovites who had refused to vacate their homes even after a court ruling to that effect of "churlishness," while local residents filed a collective lawsuit against Luzhkov for the protection of their honor and dignity. After this conflict became one of the main topics of the weekly wrap-up programs on three national television channels, some observers concluded that the "Butovo affair" had a political dimension. Surkov himself described the events in Yuzhnoye Butovo as "an indicator of society's health," since "civic engagement is gradually making itself felt, and no one is standing in its way — except for individual officials." Mark Sandomirsky, coordinator of the unregistered civic movement "Residents for Luzhkov," stated that the pressure on the mayor, who could have strong prospects in the 2008 presidential election, "is being organized by — well, you can figure out who — just read Vladislav Surkov." The president of the Institute for National Strategy, Stanislav Belkovsky, also indicated that the situation in Butovo was connected to the process of selecting the president's successor, and that in order to rule out Luzhkov as a candidate, "the Kremlin seized upon the convenient conflict between the city hall and residents." Kommersant cited a number of experts who claimed that Surkov's hand in the attack on Luzhkov could be inferred from the tools of public influence that were used (Surkov oversees both the state television channels and the Public Chamber).
In September 2006, the magazine Profil, in one of its articles, described Surkov as "an immovable fixture in the power system." The publication noted that should Surkov depart, "the political landscape would rapidly turn into… a muddle of unproductive, and at times simply talentless, politicians."
Surkov appeared in Mass Media not only as a politician. In October 2003, together with Vadim Samoylov, the lead of the rock band "Agata Kristi," he released the album "Poluostrova" ("Peninsulas"). The album was issued in a limited run and was never made available for wide sale. In 2005, Mass Media reported that Samoylov and Surkov were recording a new joint album.
Surkov is married. His wife, Yulia Vishnevskaya, the founder of Russia's only doll museum, and his son were, as of 2004, living in London. Other Mass Media sources reported that Surkov is divorced. There were also reports that since 1998 Surkov has been in a common-law marriage and has two more children.