Even someone considered loyal like Ivanov might start getting ideas about a 2nd term come 2012, running to oppose Putin and creating a split within the Kremlin. It’s almost the only way I could see a 2nd viable political party forming.

Of course, the whole thing could go Hudsucker Proxy on Putin by 2012, even with a dark-horse candidate. People are fickle. To some degree, I think Putin is counting on an economic downturn in the next 4 years, if he is thinking of another term or set of terms after 2012.

Either way, Putin’s legacy will be in the ‘ex-’FSB Putinites he’s left in place so I expect Puting to probably play the role of the grey cardinal. Here’s an art from 1999 saying that the Kremlin naming Putin as the next President will be the kiss of death’:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1999/08/10/wyelt210.html

I think there is a more than reasonable possibility that it will be someone relatively unknown. Putin enjoys pulling rabbits out of hats and leaving certain groups perplexed:

I don’t know, I might put $10 on BAB at 500-to-1 or something – think of the payoff! – the guy seems to have a lot of tricks up his sleeve.

I saw this a day or 2 ago and was going to email them about one of the people I was surprised to see not on the list (it said one could email for odds on such dark horses). I was going to ask about Naryshkin – a couple of accounts I’ve seen have named him the dark-horse-of-the-moment – and figured that a $10 or $20 wager at 200 or 300 to 1 would pay off so well that it would be worth the risk.

I’m hoping one of the social scientists who reads SRB will weigh in with a more serious assessment, but I recall seeing in recent years a fair bit of serious scholarship about the power of markets (which is what this field of odds is) to predict outcomes. They only work when there are lots and lots of people involved (e.g., the Iowa Electronic Markets), and the absence of Naryshkin – indeed, of anyone who’s been talked about in the media as a possible candidate – as well as the 100-to-1 given impossible candidates like Anpilov and Yavlinsky (Abramovich and Mrs. Putin are unlikely candidates to be sure, but surely more likely than those two, and this line has them at 200-to-1) suggests the Unibet pool on the Russian presidential election is a thinner market than one needs to see the predictive power such markets supposedly have.

I wonder whether they pay out if the next president takes charge without an election (a la Yeltsin’s New Year’s Eve retirement)? The proposition being bet on is “Who will be the next Russian president?” so presumably it doesn’t matter how they get there. Maybe the people betting on Kasyanov are betting on a color revolution…not something I’d bet on, even at 14-to-1, but who knows.

And what happens if there is no “next President” of Russia in 2008 – if Mr. Putin yields to the will of the masses and sticks around. It seems he should be among the candidates on the list, but I’m not an expert in how such pools are set up.

Thanks for highlighting this, Sean, maybe if all of your readers go bet what we think, the market’s predictive power will grow!