Eight years ago yesterday, the world took its first really good look at Vladimir Putin — at his bashful smile, his thin fair hair and his peculiar swagger; a white man's pimp roll that seems to be trying to compensate for shortness with intimations of surprising upper-body strength.

January 1, 2000, was Mr Putin's first day in charge of Russia. I remember it well. Boris Yeltsin had resigned on New Year's Eve, forcing me and hundreds of others to see out the millennium scribbling furiously about his legacy, and in particular his heir. We had nothing useful to say. Mr Putin was a cipher. Until then he had been merely Russia's fifth prime minister in five years, and the least experienced of the bunch. He had distinguished himself from the others by launching a war in Chechnya, but it was going badly. He had Yeltsin's backing, but Yeltsin was so unpopular that this could very easily have been political poison.

Eight years on, Mr Putin has crushed Chechnya, served two terms, reorganised Russia and anointed his own successor.

Dmitri Medvedev looks like someone who might sell you a flat-screen TV in John Lewis. He has no high-risk war on his hands, nor any need of one. On March 2 he will inherit Mr Putin's phenomenal popularity and win the presidency by a landslide. He will also inherit Mr Putin's human ring of steel — his powerful Kremlin placemen drawn from the security forces — and Mr Putin himself as Prime Minister.

The consensus inside and outside Moscow is that this will make Mr Medvedev a stooge, but it won't. Not necessarily. Mr Putin's legacy, much clearer than Yeltsin's, is to have created from the chaos of the 1990s a Soviet-style power structure in which the Duma is a rubber stamp and the “ruling” party is a massed cheerleading squad. The Cabinet exists to execute policy, not form it, and the 89 regional governors are all appointees. At the centre of this is the presidency, and Mr Medvedev, not Mr Putin, will be President.

This matters hugely. It is true that Mr Putin will lead the United Russia party, formed to promote his increasingly paranoid nationalism, but United Russia has nothing on the Soviet Communist Party as a potential locus of power separate from the Kremlin. It's also true that Mr Putin has made clear his intention to “continue our common efforts in the capacity of prime minister” (translation: “cling to as much power as I can”). But he has foresworn any constitutional tweaking to shift power formally from the Kremlin to the White House on the Moscow River to which Mr Putin will commute as Prime Minister. Without such tweaking, power would flow to the presidency even if its holder were a gerbil.

How much flows to Mr Medvedev remains to be seen, but this, at least, is clear: a real job is his for the taking. Contrary to the view that his anointing can only mean Putinism under new livery, real change in Russia's international role is entirely possible within the next two years.

I spent about an hour with Mr Medvedev in the Kremlin soon after he was summoned there by Mr Putin from St Petersburg as Deputy Prime Minister. He was cordial, on-message (no apologies for his boss's burning of Chechen villages or shutting down of independent TV stations) and largely unquotable. This is still his style. “It is necessary to transfer to fully fledged, complex decisions and actively use the accumulated experience for the modernisation of the corresponding sectors,” he told the Council for Priority National Projects and Demographic Policy last week, rivetingly.

He is a lawyer-bureaucrat by training, and, like many lawyer-bureaucrats, is not above indulging expensive tastes. The next time I tried to reach him I was told he was travelling and unavailable. He was indeed. That weekend I bumped into him and his wife at Heathrow. They were boarding an Aeroflot plane back to Moscow, laden with Harrods hat boxes.

All of which may seem scant evidence on which to forecast a sea change in the style and substance of Russian governance. But even if Mr Medvedev is the cipher that Mr Putin once seemed to be himself, the fact of swapping jobs will create tensions on at least three fronts. Mr Putin hopes to keep control of most areas of domestic economic management but, as an ex-chairman of Gazprom, Mr Medvedev will at least feel qualified to interfere. Foreign policy Mr Putin has indicated he will leave largely to Mr Medvedev — but as the architect of maverick positions on Iranian nuclear enrichment and Kosovan independence, Mr Putin is unlikely to stand by should his protégé try to steer back towards the land of reason.

Thirdly, Mr Medvedev will acquire instant and far-reaching powers of patronage. Most ministerial appointments are recommended by the prime minister, but the president has a veto over these and appoints the defence minister directly; likewise most senior security officials, the prosecutor-general and all regional governors, who in turn appoint half the members of the Upper House of parliament. Without their support, the Lower House (the Duma) could not rewrite the Constitution even if Mr Putin wanted it to.

The dance of the nervous appointees has started. Putin loyalists are manoeuvring for Cabinet posts in the White House and some governors are scurrying to be renewed in office by Mr Putin before their terms expire, on the basis that his successor may actually have a mind of his own.

Beneath the mask of obedience, which is all any outsider has seen of Mr Medvedev so far, I think he does. He was never a Chekist — never trained explicitly to lie — and may actually be embarrassed by the phoney elections and Soviet nostalgia of the Putin years, the ridiculous jailing of Garry Kasparov and other opposition figures, the mawkish Putin personality cult and the latter-day Khrushchev that has become Putin's persona abroad. If he isn't embarrassed, he should be.

But if he is, you read it here: in Mr Medvedev's first term Mr Putin and his retro nationalism will be edged out of mainstream politics to the world of sport, where they belong. If he's lucky, Mr Putin will be the Tessa Jowell of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

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