Mary Dejevsky: Take heart from the city that shaped Medvedev

For the best part of two months it has been possible to forget that Vladimir Putin would shortly cease to be Russia's president - which is, in its way, a compliment. This first-ever period of transition between an outgoing and an incoming president could have been a time of Kremlin troubles, fraught with destabilising in-fighting. In the event, the weeks passed smoothly.

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This may derive in part from Putin's decision to nominate himself prime minister – a post he is expected to accept, once his successor, Dmitry Medvedev, is inaugurated today. In stepping forward, Putin filled what could otherwise have become a dangerous vacuum. How long he remains in his new office may reveal whether he took it for the power or the stabilising effect. It is too early to make that judgement today.

That Putin is staying on in the power structures at all, however, has allowed his gloomy band of foreign critics to forecast that there will be no such thing as post-Putin Russia, at least not for a very long time. The argument runs along familiar lines. Russia is no democracy; the presidential election was a farce, and power-hungry Putin has simply promoted himself to grand-puppeteer, to tug at little Dmitry's strings.

There are many reasons why such pessimism is probably misplaced, but the three most obvious are these. Putin's popularity is such that Russian voters would have elected anyone he backed by a landslide without the need for tricks. Russia's Constitution invests more power in the president than it does in the prime minister, and third, Medvedev's record shows him to be a far tougher political player than he might look.

But there is a fourth reason why the transfer of presidential power may well usher in a different era – and, for the outside world, an easier one, and it is perhaps the most significant and underrated reason of all. When Medvedev swears the oath of office today, this will complete St Petersburg's gradual reassertion of its cultural ascendancy. It will draw a line under the supremacy of Moscow reimposed in 1918 after the Bolshevik revolution.

Ah, you will object, but Putin was no less a native of St Petersburg than his successor. And it is true that he was also brought up in the city; true, too, that this is where he returned to work after leaving the foreign service of the KGB.

But Putin's native city was Leningrad, a city whose aristocratic and intellectual elite had been killed or exiled, a city that had been relegated to second-class status (and made to feel it); a city whose chief cultural boast was the revolution.

It has taken well over a decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union for the city, built as Russia's window on the West, to reassert itself. As president, Putin made his own contribution. But he inherited an apparatus from Boris Yeltsin that reflected the Muscovite strand of Russian culture. His own past as a KGB agent placed him culturally closer to the post-Soviet Slavophil strand of thinking than to the Westernisers, even though he brought many St Petersburgers into his administration.

At 42 to Putin's 55, Medvedev is of another generation. A Leningrader by birth, he was only in his mid-20s when the city's then mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, held a referendum on changing the city's name back to St Petersburg. More to the point, he had just joined the staff of the city council, where he and Putin were both members of Sobchak's close entourage.

Sobchak is an unjustly neglected figure. A man of democratic instincts, a law professor and impassioned St Petersburg patriot, Sobchak was a leading light of the democracy groups that sprang up in the late 1980s. Like Yeltsin, he defied the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, and left his mark as a reforming, if embattled, city mayor.

Narrowly defeated in 1996, he was subject to a politically-inspired investigation and secretly left for Paris – assisted, it is said, by Putin, who cashed in some of his KGB chips to arrange it. Returning to Russia in 1999, Sobchak died the next year.

Sobchak may have died prematurely, but he left behind a coterie of young technocrats who shared his outlook and progressively joined Putin in Moscow. If the former KGB was one network Putin drew on for recruits to his administration, Sobchak's "nursery" was another – and at least as important as the first. In this light, Medvedev's inauguration marks less the rise of a junior Putin, and more the ascent of Russia's Westernising tendency to power.

If you go to St Petersburg, take the Underground to Vasilevsky ostrov. On an anonymous street corner, you will find the city's one statue to Anatoly Sobchak. It bears a single inscription: "To Anatoly Alexandrovich, who gave the city back its name." If Medvedev remains true to his mentor, Sobchak's legacy will be not just to his city, but his nation.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk