Who is Russia's new Prime Minister, Viktor Zubkov? That's the question that Russia's media - and much of the country's bemused political elite - are asking tonight. Two interesting details emerge. One, Zubkov has been on "ty" terms - more intimate than the the German "du" or the French "tu" - with Putin ever since the two worked together in St Petersburg in the early 1990s. The other is that he is the father-in-law of the recently-appointed defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov. But the striking thing is that in almost any country other than Russia, it's inconceivable that the question of should even arise. An almost complete political unknown is elevated to head the government at the will of the President, to the apparently unfeigned surprise of even the best-connected political commentators and politicans. In the hours following former premier Mikhail Fradkov's sudden resignation, Radio Ekho Moskvy, Russia's top political radio station, was running a listeners' opinion poll on a list of eleven possible candidates. Zubkov wasn't on it. He's truly someone from the left field, completely outside the run of national politics, plucked from obscurity and planted in the limelight by Putin.

If that situation sounds familiar, its because it is exactly what happened to one Vladimir Putin, a low-key former KGB officer working as one of the deputy heads of the Presidential Administration, who was elevated to head the FSB (the KGB's successor), and then promoted in a matter of months to Prime Minister, and then to Yeltsin's hand-picked successor as President. Will Zubkov follow the same path? That would certainly be a surprise - if only because Russia's state-controlled media has been carefully presenting daily puff pieces on two deputy prime ministers, Gazprom head Dmitry Medvedev and former defense minister Sergei Ivanov, seen as Putin's likely successors. Will Putin pass them over and plump for the unknown Zubkov? That would certainly wrong-foot the powerful oligarchs and business elites who have been carefully and quietly jockeying for favor in the Medvedev and Ivanov camps - and also using their political leverage in the Kremlin to push the interests of their favored candidate. More likely, Putin is simply demonstrating that he is still boss, and not a lame duck, and underscoring the notion that in Russia, where opposition political parties and free media have been systematically eliminated, the ultimate source of power and patronage is the Tsar in the Kremlin.