President Vladimir Putin keeps the surprises coming. Last month he suddenly promoted a grey apparatchik, Viktor Zubkov, to prime minister. Now he says he will head the parliamentary list of United Russia, the main pro-Kremlin party, in elections this December, and that he may even become prime minister himself after he leaves the presidency next March. He thereby gives every appearance of wanting to use the machinery of democracy to consolidate his near-total dominance of Russian politics. That will be a neat trick – if it works.

The Zubkov appointment wrongfooted neo-Kremlinologists, who then concluded Mr Putin must be lining up this former courtier from the Russian leader’s St Petersburg days as a temporary stand-in as president before Mr Putin himself returned to the top job. Apparently not. It is beginning to look as though the master of the Kremlin not only wants to observe the constitutional niceties preventing him from standing for a third term as president, but to change the structure of Russian power.