The Russian president's rhetoric has since softened. And in the months since Vice President Joe Biden first called for the two countries to "push the reset button," it has become clear that the Obama administration's hopes are pinned on Medvedev.
This week, Obama accused Putin of keeping "one foot in the old ways" of the Cold War. But in their own country, the two Russian politicians are regarded as functioning in tandem -- with Putin, not Medvedev, unmistakably the senior member of the duo.
When financial crisis gripped Russia last fall, Putin angrily blamed the United States, and Russian leaders held up their nation's follow-on unemployment and bank collapses as proof that too much power was centralized in the United States. When swine flu circled the globe, Russia banned American meat imports despite their irrelevance to the epidemic.
With the advent of the Obama administration, some in the Kremlin have become nervous about the prospect of eased relations, said Andrei Kortunov, head of the New Eurasia Foundation think tank in Moscow. They half-welcome any ills that can be handily blamed on the U.S., he said.
"They are concerned that their attempts to sustain this fortress mentality in Russia will be deflated," he said.
Almost two years ago, as Putin prepared to turn the presidency over to Medvedev in an election that cut out any serious opposition, loathing of Washington reached a new pitch of intensity in the Russian news media. The Kremlin was fretting, somewhat inexplicably, since Putin and his party enjoyed sincere popular support, that street demonstrations might erupt in the style of the government-toppling protests in Georgia and Ukraine.
In this atmosphere of heightened anxiety, a documentary called "Velvet.ru" appeared on state television to warn Russians of the threat at hand. This was the gist:
The U.S. State Department and the CIA, jealous of Russia's vast oil, gas, timber and diamond riches, were backing anti-Kremlin activists in a bid to overthrow the government and dismantle the country.
"They're already here on our threshold, agents and professional provocateurs, preparing for a coup in Moscow," the narrator warned. "In American perception, this state should disappear. Russia should break into pieces."
Sergei Markov, a ruling party lawmaker and political analyst who's known as one of the Kremlin's most prominent spin doctors, argues that Russia is not fundamentally anti-American. On the contrary, he says, Russian politicians are simply responding to hostile policies.
At the same time, he agreed that no Russian politician would dare to promote closer cooperation with the United States.
"It would be like somebody in the United States saying, 'Osama is great,' or somebody in Israel saying, 'Hamas is great.' "
As for the notion of resetting relations, he waved it away.
"The Kremlin doesn't think the U.S. will change," he said.
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megan.stack@latimes.com
