MOSCOW: Question: who runs Russia President Dmitry Medvedev or Prime Minister Vladimir Putin? Answer: check the seating arrangements.

What sounds like a surreal joke is deadly serious as Kremlin watchers resort to Soviet-style guessing games in an attempt to understand an increasingly opaque political system.

In the Soviet era, news-starved analysts dubbed Kremlinologists scrutinised Politburo members at Red Square parades and scoured turgid newspapers like Pravda to divine who was up and who was down.

Today, the confusion over who’s in charge new president Medvedev or president-turned-premier Putin has Kremlinologists back in business.

They gasped last week at state television footage of the first meeting between the two men in the Kremlin: Putin was sitting on the left, Medvedev on the right exactly the arrangement during the years in which Putin daily berated hapless visiting ministers.

Was this a signal that he would truly retain power, with Medvedev a figurehead?

“Everyone noticed that detail,” said Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Centre.

“People were also watching the two presidents with their wives at the Easter church service earlier. Political junkies watched very carefully to see who was there, who was missing, compared to previous years.” Struggling to understand how presidents are selected in Russia, some have latched onto the fact that Medvedev is slightly shorter than his already diminutive predecessor Putin. There’s even the theory that Russia’s leaders alternate between bald and hirsute men.

And during the May 9 Victory Day parade, the chattering classes had a field day: not because of the nuclear missiles and tanks on Red Square, but the way state television framed Putin with Medvedev on the review stand.

“A perfect line up a reminder of the old triptychs of Marx, Engels and Lenin,” wrote Britain’s Economist magazine. “There they were: the father and the son, the founder and the follower, the great leader and his disciple.” The reason for all this tea leaf reading is that in the absence of a fully free media or competitive elections, there isn’t always a regular way to understand what’s going on, analysts say.

“The more closed the political elite, the more that indirect methods are needed,” said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, head of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Centre for Study of Elites.

“I’ve spent two years observing how everyone sits during Putin’s meetings with the cabinet on Monday and with the security services on Saturday,” she said.

“That lets me figure out who’s there both days, who has access to Putin, who comes to drink tea and who to take decisions. It’s useful. Kremlinology lies behind my most precise forecasts.” However minor they appear to non-specialists, the details of Putin’s body language and seating plans are never without meaning, says Yevgeny Volk, from the Moscow office of the US-based Heritage Foundation.

“For a person like that there’s no such thing as mere details. He’s very well prepared and nothing is left to chance.” But Lipman warned against the “inevitable and inescapable temptation” to read so much into so little.

“I think Putin takes special pleasure in fooling everyone who tries to get into his mind,” she said. “I wonder: are they just teasing us?”—AFP