Russian President Dmitry Medvedev submitted Dmitry Mezentsev to the Irkutsk regional legislature for appointment as governor, a surprise since he was not on earlier lists. The regional parliament has already backed him.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday submitted to the Legislative Assembly of the Irkutsk Region the candidacy of Dmitry Mezentsev to be vested with the powers of governor of the Irkutsk Region. Mezentsev currently serves as Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council.
The candidacy is quite unexpected, since it is known that Dmitry Fedorovich Mezentsev’s name did not appear on the list of candidates for the post of regional head proposed by the presidential plenipotentiary in the Siberian Federal District, Anatoly Kvashnin.
The presidential envoy in the Siberian Federal District, Anatoly Kvashnin, intends to propose to the president the candidacies of Oleg Budargin and Sergei Sokol, who had been acting governor. They were called the most likely contenders for the gubernatorial post. However, D. Medvedev decided otherwise.
This morning it became known that the parliament of the Irkutsk Region supports Dmitry Mezentsev’s candidacy for the post of governor of the region.
D. Mezentsev is a native of St. Petersburg, where he began his political career.
Anatoly Sobchak played a major role in that career. It was he who, after taking the post of mayor of St. Petersburg, brought Mezentsev onto his team. At that time, retired special services officers also appeared on the same team, in particular Vladimir Putin, Igor Sechin, and Viktor Ivanov. Mezentsev joined Sobchak’s team - from 1991 to 1996 - he headed the Committee for Press and Mass Media of the St. Petersburg mayor’s office. His counterpart in the St. Petersburg "cabinet of ministers" was, accordingly, the current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin - he headed the Committee for External Relations.
The future governor is still part of Putin’s inner circle today. At the very least, in communicating with Mezentsev, the prime minister allows himself to address him informally and call him "Dima".
After Sobchak lost the 1996 election, Mezentsev left St. Petersburg, but moved up. Mezentsev, incidentally, was accused by some hotheads of losing the information war during the St. Petersburg mayoral election. Until 1999, he worked as Deputy Chairman of the State Committee of the Russian Federation for Press (Goskompechat).
But in 1999 Vladimir Putin was appointed Prime Minister of the Russian government. This appointment gave a new impetus to D. Mezentsev’s career. The new prime minister and most likely successor Vladimir Putin had by then already almost assembled the team with which he would later work for nearly 8 years. German Gref was the head of the State Property Committee, and he was to develop the economic program of the future government (the so-called Gref Program). To develop it, the "Center for Strategic Research" foundation was brought in, from which many prominent economists later came - for example, Dmitry Medvedev’s aide on economic issues, Arkady Dvorkovich. Dmitry Mezentsev was president of the Center for Strategic Research from late 1999 to 2002. It was under his supervision (it is difficult to judge his involvement; according to the foundation’s employees, he was more of an administrator) that Putin’s economic program was developed. However, at that time almost all of Vladimir Putin’s St. Petersburg colleagues worked at the CSR - current Education Minister Andrei Fursenko, head of the Russia bank Yuri Kovalchuk, and many others.
However, in 2002 Mezentsev moved to Irkutsk to represent the region in the Federation Council. A strange decision, since up to that point the St. Petersburg liberal had had nothing to do with the Irkutsk Region, and the senator’s post was, to put it mildly, modest for him.
In 2005, when Governor Govorin was removed, Mezentsev was named among the candidates for the post of governor of the region - he had strong ties in the center and did not openly support anyone’s bureaucratic interests. But at that time he did not manage to become governor.
It is no secret that the Irkutsk Region has, since the early 2000s, been a battleground for a dozen federal-level financial-industrial groups at once. The region is home to "Russian Aluminum" of Oleg Deripaska and partners, "Renova" of Viktor Vekselberg (energy, utilities, until recently - gas business), Russian Railways, or rather the East Siberian Railway (president - Vladimir Yakunin), partly "Interros" of Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov (interested in the Sukhoi Log deposit), "Ilim-Pulp" (wood processing), a number of defense industry enterprises, and the nuclear industry. This is not counting local officials, businessmen, and organized criminal groups.
In 2005, the head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin, managed to "push through" his governor - Alexander Tishanin, who had previously headed the East Siberian Railway, became him. Mezentsev, however, retained his seat in the Federation Council. Tishanin managed in just six months to quarrel with almost the entire local elite. In early 2008, Tishanin was dismissed. The dismissal, it is believed, was the result of the interests of the state corporation "Rostekhnologii" that was then being created (CEO - Putin’s "friend" Sergei Chemezov). Mezentsev was again named at the time as a potential gubernatorial candidate.
However, Chemezov’s team turned out to be stronger. The post of governor was expected to go to the deputy chairman of the Samara government, Ivan Mironov (a native of Rosoboronexport), but it was taken by another "Chemezov man" - Igor Yesipovsky.
Mezentsev has not yet been noticed for any particular sympathy toward "Rostekhnologii"; however, the defense industry (the same "Irkut") will in one way or another fall within his sphere of attention. Mezentsev has every chance to stand above the struggle of influential business corporations - on the one hand, over the years of work he should have seriously understood the local specifics, and on the other, he really has good connections at the very top.