‘Russia wonks’, as RFE/RL’s Brian Whitmore likes to call them, have been pondering for some time the political future of Vladislav Surkov.  Formerly a top strategist and one of Putin’s inner sanctum, credited as the gifted political technologist behind the iron-clad ‘power vertical’, he was famously referred to by Mikhail Prokhorov as the Kremlin’s ‘puppet master.’