Popular apathy, control over the media and a lack of potent opposition will ensure that Moscow's ruling duo do not suffer seriously from disastrous summer fires as president George W. Bush did from his administration's slow response to catastrophe.
Although a record-breaking summer heatwave found Russia's authorities ill-prepared to fight the fires and slow to react to the smoke pollution that has crippled Moscow, analysts said Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev would ensure that others took the blame.
"People will blame local authorities or the incompetence of the fire service but not the top rulers of the country," said Lev Gudkov, head of the independent Levada Centre pollsters.
"The government's full monopoly on mass media … ensures that the opposition is cut off and cannot present its position."
State television channels have presented a reassuring picture of a strong government effort to fight an exceptional natural calamity, laced with plenty of references to other weather problems around the world.
Putin and Medvedev are portrayed as taking the lead, ordering officials to redouble efforts, punishing laggards and threatening to fire slackers.
In a typical comment, the NTV channel reported "significant progress" on Sunday against the blazes using "new technology", but gave no details on either.
LACK OF TRAINING AND EQUIPMENT
The reality, critics say, is that the government has only four fire-fighting planes for the entire country, and that only 10,000 of the 166,000 people fighting fires are properly trained.
Little has been said on television — the main source of news for most Russians — about the disastrous effects of the heat and smoke choking the capital on human health.
Internet and foreign press reports from Moscow of death tolls doubling and morgues overflowing with bodies have not been carried on air at all.
Maria Lipman, editor of the Pro et Contra journal at the Moscow Carnegie Centre, believes Putin's popularity may even increase as a result of his "Action Man" response to the fires — a useful boost ahead of parliamentary elections next year and a presidential vote early in 2012.
"Putin is the doer, the person who goes to the people, who talks to them, who reassures them and inspires trust," she said. "He is good at overturning the mood of anger and frustration."
Putin, the dominant partner in the ruling "tandem", has made numerous visits to fire-affected regions to meet residents and promise generous cash payouts. He has personally pledged to monitor rebuilding of charred homes via an internet video link.
Medvedev, by contrast, was at his summer residence by the Black Sea in Sochi while forests burned, then returned to Moscow to castigate officials at the Kremlin. He made his first trip to a fire-affected region on Tuesday, weeks after the blazes began.
Opinion pollsters have not yet gathered data reflecting the full effect of the fires on public opinion.
But Olga Kamenchuk, of state-funded pollster VTsIOM, said that any dip in Putin or Medvedev's popularity would not last.
"It would be a temporary effect based on an emotional reaction to the fires," she said. "It will be over quite soon and their ratings will then rise again as the government PR machine gets to work after the summer holiday."
"In Russia, there is no political alternative. There is nobody else to turn to."
GRADUAL DISILLUSIONMENT
Not everyone is convinced that Russia's ruling "tandem" will prove fire-proof over the long run.
Dmitry Oreshkin, head of the Mercator think-tank, believes that although the fires themselves will not make a big dent in Putin and Medvedev's image, they will deepen a slow but steady erosion of their standing with the Russian people.
"Putin's values are Soviet ones," he explained. "They may be summed up as: 'We may live badly but we live in a great, powerful state and we should be proud of it'."
"However, now, people are saying: 'We don't live well, nothing is improving and in fact our state is not so great either'… so the Putin values are proving to be false ones."
Gleb Pavlovsky, a close ally of Kremlin political chief Vladislav Surkov, agreed that the fires would not lead to a sudden change in the Kremlin bosses' ratings, but said he also detected a gradual change in the popular mood.
"There is a general discrediting of the political class who were not able to react adequately … and who, many think, live differently — in different houses, in air-conditioned rooms or abroad," he said.
"The middle class are less calm and more confident in themselves, they are getting angry. They want things to be properly organised. If they think the leadership is handling things badly, they will handle things themselves … but they are hardly likely to do this as a political protest."
